Exhibition: A Journey Back in Time on the Silk Road

Turkchem 25 Jan 2022 54 2 dk okuma

TURKCHEM

Journey Through the Silk Road and Back in Time Exhibition

The exhibition "Journey Through the Silk Road and Back in Time" by photographer Renate Graf is on display at Ankara CerModern in collaboration with Institut français Ankara, the Embassies of France and Austria in Turkey, and CerModern. The exhibition will be open to visitors at CerModern's main hall between 29 January – 27 March. The talent of Francophone photographer Renate Graf, who spent many years living in Paris, lies in taking us on a journey that questions the unchanging through time, space, inhabited places and landscapes. Whether historical or spatial, photographs of yesterday's journey are familiar to us; the natural and spiritual landscapes of Central Asia extend to today's Anatolia. Yet this permanence is equally fragile. Renate Graf attempts to draw attention by confronting us with climate struggle and environmental change, breaking the serene assurance regarding the sustainability of the journey.

''This Exhibition is the Artist's Call to Action to the Governments and Citizens of Turkey, France and All Other Nations''

Hervé Magro, Ambassador of France to Turkey

Austrian Francophone photographer Renate Graf has gained wide appreciation for her powerful work, which can be described as a poetic form of documentation where image hovers at the edge of language. Indeed, what drove Renate Graf to dedicate herself to photography was a passion for literature and poetry. Readings by authors such as Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tagore, T. S. Eliot, Edmond Jabès, Paul Valéry and Hermann Broch generated in her mind images she sought to capture through photography. Additionally, cinema plays an important role in the artist's work. Film directors such as Wim Wenders, Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Visconti and Tarkovsky are important references in how Renate Graf transforms those images into entities through her own distinctive vision and unique style. The camera began accompanying the artist on her travels from an early age. Every journey she undertook - South India, Morocco, China, Alaska, Russia, Yemen, Cambodia, Italy, Germany, or Austria, her native land - she documents with her own distinctive geographies through her camera. She began creating travel journals from photographs that she associated with handwritten excerpts from selected texts. These are testimonies by artists to the wonder of travel, resembling the sketched notebooks of Delacroix in Morocco or the diaries of Frieda Kahlo - a mixture of narrative and art. This process gained momentum and led to larger format books bound by the artist herself. Over time, she felt the need to create larger format images developed using traditional techniques in the darkroom. Today, Renate Graf's photography is recognized for its distinctive chimeric quality combined with the formal simplicity of pictorial composition that characterizes her works, and her works are part of prestigious private and public collections worldwide. In 2019, Rui Freire Gallery–Fine Arts undertook to organize Renate Graf's first solo exhibition in Portugal. The exhibition's title, "The Photographer's Diaries: Thoughts Become Images–1992" retrospective, displayed the extraordinary richness of photographic language and its nuanced black and white palette. In 2021, "Journey Through the Silk Road and Back in Time" opened at the House of Photography in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, presenting the universal accessibility of these images. Renate Graf expresses the following about her work: "I am not a photographer in the classical sense of the word; my photographs exist to serve a different purpose than those of a true photographer; they are not complete or definitive. They are also not perfect photographs. The pursuit of technical perfection is not what matters. They function not merely as images, but as a language, as signs that point to meaning... They do not define, they bear witness and are in themselves a language within the cultural diversity of a universe, a language to describe what I have seen."