Lianzhou Foto Festival: The Wind of Time
Strong focus will be given to Swiss artists at this year’s Lianzhou Foto Festival, an established landmark event in the Chinese photography scene. Each year since 2005 and now at its fourth edition, Lianzhou Foto Festival celebrates photography with over 60 international shows and a thematic exhibition. This year’s theme “The Wind of Time” will question today’s representation of the world and gather over 30 international artists including Swiss-based photographers Yann Mingard (“Seven Sunsets”) and Salvatore Vitale (“How to Secure a Country”). Yann Mingard will also be featured in a large solo exhibition for Lianzhou Museum of Photography’s program opening simultaneously.
Works from those two artists will be presented in the main exhibition resonating the theme, touching upon our relation to how modernization and technology have affected geography, politics, our economy and our ecosystem. An opening week rich in events is in prospect: guided tours, lectures, and portfolio review session.
Yann Mingard, “Seven Sunsets”
This series compares studies of a number of 19th Century paintings by William Turner which recorded the effects of pollution in our stratosphere caused by several significant volcanic eruptions. Mingard contrasts these with appropriated images of present day air pollution in Chinese cities photographed from 2013 – 2016.
Yann Mingard (born 1973, Switzerland) studied photography at Ecole Supérieur d’Arts Visuels, Vevey (CH). He previously trained and worked as a horticulturist and for the past ten years, Mingard has been mainly working on long-term projects that explore the politics of modern identity formation contained in human interactions with nature and the built environment. Having exhibited throughout Europe and in the United States, Yann’s work has been published widely in major magazines and newspapers globally.
Salvatore Vitale, “How to Secure a Country”
When in 2014, Swiss citizens voted in favour of a federal popular initiative “against massive immigration”. The artist, as an immigrant living in that country, felt the need to research this phenomenon in order to comprehend where the motives for this “constant need for security” originate and how they became a part of Swiss culture. For the past three years, Salvatore has been actively engaged with a varied and complex system that, though hard to perceive, rules our everyday life. By photographing visible traces of security he exploits the actual invisibility, fluidity and abstractness of Swiss national security measures.
Salvatore Vitale is a Swiss-based photographer and editor. In 2014 he attended the International Center of Photography. In 2015 he was named among Die Besten 2014 at Swiss Photo Awards. In 2015-2016 he is in the recipient of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia’s grant for his long-term research on the production of security in Switzerland. In 2017 he has been awarded with the PHMuseum Award. He is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of YET, a Swiss-based international photography magazine. In 2017 and 2018, he participated in the group exhibition “Follow_Me: New narratives in contemporary photography, China – Switzerland” at OCAT Shanghai and Shenzhen, co-curated by Peter Pfrunder and Shi Hantao.
