Nooderlicht : Summer of Love

(via Noorderlicht.com)

NOORDERLICHT PHOTOGALLERY
Summer of Love
11 July through 23 August
Opening Friday 10 July, at 5:00 in the Noorderlicht Photogallery. Yevgeny Kondakov will be present.

This summer the Noorderlicht Photogallery brings you Summer of Love, a blistering exhibition in which four photographers take up sexual freedom and illusions.

Emmanuel Guillaud (France, b. 1970) roamed through Tokyo at night. Until the Sun Rises is his new installation about loneliness, about men who wander through parking lots and and school yards: public places which by night change into a temporary ghetto. They hope for chance encounters, are ‘in search of a kick without obligations’, or actually of intimacy… When the sun comes up they leave again, preferring to forget what has happened. The installation Until the Sun Rises is being shown for the first time by Noorderlicht.

Katharina Hesse (Germany, b. 1966) in Human Negotiations, gives us a different picture of the prostitution industry in Bangkok, Thailand. She followed a number of women and interviewed them extensively about their lives and their background, their choices and their motives. It appeared very much the question whether our Western image – women as powerless victims of the Eastern sex industry – can be maintained. Hesse dares to oppose the stereotype of sexual slavery with an intimate, and at the very least ambiguous picture of ordinary women who make a better life possible for themselves and their children by selling dreams.

Yevgeny Kondakov (Russia, b. 1961) asked himself the question: what happens when the most repressed country in the world is exposed to mass-market consumerism and a government that does not care what ordinary people do? In Russian Sexual Revolution he demonstrates that not only an economic and political revolution took place in the former Soviet Union, but also a sexual revolution: in all its wildness, its strangeness, its vulgarity, and its innocence.

Amy Touchette (USA, b. 1970), in The World Famous *BOB*, documents the life of a ‘burlesque dancer’ in New York. ‘Bob’, the male drag queen whose identity she assumes, lived an eccentric but destructive life in San Francisco. Awakening from the nightmare that her existence was, she gave herself a second chance in New York. There she could finally indulge in her fantasy: being a star.

Summer of Love is curated by Wim Melis.

Noorderlicht Photogallery: Akerkhof 12 in Groningen, The Netherlands
Contact: Olaf Veenstra - olaf@noorderlicht.com / +31 (0)50 318 22 27
Opening hours: Wednesday through Sunday, Noon - 6:00 p.m.
Free admittance
Wed thru Sun 12-6pm
admission free