For the 6th consecutive year, Carte Blanche Étudiants supports 4 students from European photography and visual arts schools. This year, experimentation and perception are at the heart of the work of the four winners, who use their images to explore and question racism and the feeling of not belonging, the subjectivity of the imaginary, the ambiguity of so-called photographic reality and non-binarity.
Discover below the award-winning, bold and unique works of Sumi Anjiman, Jérémie Danon, Alessandra Leta and Philip Tsetinis. This programme, jointly organised by Paris Photo, Picto Foundation and SNCF Gares & Connexions, offers the winners an opportunity to exhibit their work in a Parisian railway station and to present their portfolios at Paris Photo in the Grand Palais Ephémère.
Sumi Anjiman (Royal Academy of Art – The Hague, Netherlands)
Somewhere Else Than Here envisions the passage of social and religious transitioning of the LGBTQI+ individuals of Bangladesh. Simultaneously, this trajectory explores their love, hope, and fantasy; fanatical angst, homophobic isolation, and their struggle to be perceived as what they are: human.
Sumi Anjuman is a visual artist, from the northern region of Bangladesh. She experiences the oppression as a woman in an Islamic orthodox society, that her work tackles forthrightly. Despite her socially-focused subject matter, her work is not straightforward-documentary; rather it feels more poetic and abstract. Her collaborative process echoes the ideas of inclusivity while her photographs often invite the viewer to be curious about what they see.
https://www.instagram.com/sumi_anjuman/?hl=fr
Jérémie Danon (Academy of Fine Arts – France)
Plein air features individuals in rehabilitation. Having left prison, they now find themselves in a different kind of freedom than the one they knew before their detention. Transformed by the experience of captivity, they take a new look at this newfound world, where they come up against the harshness of a system that is ill-suited to their situations and the limited employment opportunities it has to offer. After spending time with them, I invited former prisoners to speak on a green background; this device allows me to present their testimonies while decontextualizing them from reality, through imaginary spaces. From the mythopoetic world of Falkreath The Elder Scrolls to the action-adventure game GTA V, these computer-generated settings from video games were chosen based on their responses to the question, “Where would you like to be now? Their lush, virtual natures contrast with both their past captivity and the new hostility of the reclaimed, concrete city.
Jérémie Danon approaches hybrid forms, dialoguing between fiction and documentary, questioning reality and its potential for narratives. He is interested in the relationships between bodies and spaces, in the imaginary, in the notions of territory and intimacy.
Alessandra Leta (University of Basel – Swiss)
The Unmovable Mover is a visual investigation into the power dynamics within the infrastructure – social and physical – of the factory. The project attempts to combine visual references directly adopted from archeology and museography, as well as overlapping reflections related to the image as a document, as truth, and as fiction.
The work’s aesthetic and conceptual starting point was the finding of a photograph in a Swiss antiquarian, which was later reworked and modified. The year is 1972, and at the desk of a very modest office sits an unidentified director of a local factory of spare parts and specialized machinery, which no longer exists today. Trying to exhume the private past of this small reality, the project tries to reconstruct a hypothetical hierarchical structure, through openly staged photographs taken in 2022.
Alessandra Leta (b. 1997, IT) is a visual researcher and photographer. Her practice lies at the intersection between archival archeology and the speculative narrative as a tool to re-think the past into the present. She holds a BFA in New Technologies for the Arts from Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera and is currently finishing a MA in Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel.
https://www.instagram.com/alessandra__leta/
Philip Tsetinis (University of Applied Arts – Vienna)
Unknown Polyphenism
“Polyphenism describes the visually perceptible change of a living being through the adaptation to changed environmental conditions like food, temperature, population density a.s.o.
The actual future is always hidden, and we can only approach it through ideas. Pragmatically, only a few future events can be predicted, but the majority is more in the realm of the Unpredictable, therefore I use the word “unknown” in my title.
The series, composed of sixteen photographic staging’s, hypothetically provide fragmentary insights into how a subsequent generation would adapt to future developments.”
My name is Philip Tsetinis and I am studying at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna at the Institute for Applied Photography and Time-Based Media. In my work, I concentrate on the individual staging of photographic images. Starting from specifically selected locations, I first determine the aesthetic mood that is later fundamental for the finished photo. Afterwards I create a suspenseful moment with the help of protagonists and self-made props. The depicted moment is intended to captivate the viewer emotionally and at the same time to refuse definitive answers or interpretations. In fact, the photographic staging in my works is characterized by the possible variety of associations.
