PETER SPAANS 
PHOTOGRAPHS of HOLLAND 
OPENING: Oktober 28, 3 PM
Oktober 28-December 31 2006
and by appointment
cream: contemporary art in culture, Phaidon Press, London, 1998, ISBN: 0714838012
text by Okwui Enwezor, New York, pages 372-376
Peter Spaans’ photographs are postcards dispatched from the frayed edges of the modern world. A world of commerce, decaying industrial buildings and machinery.
In these works, the vanquished relics of modern aspiration declare themselves like haunting monuments to man’s desire to imagine a future unencumbered by the past. Where history is retained, it appears in the form of erased presences, such as abandoned, empty lots or gentrified ghettos.
These silent works turn the city into catacombs. But while there are recognizable, common elements in Spaans’ work, it still cannot be summarized.
Though it has a documentary quality, a casual artlessness belies the tough investigative stance that asks us to look again at the surroundings of the city we thought we knew.
From the thousands of photographs Spaans has taken, it becomes apparent that major cities such as New York, Berlin and his native Amsterdam serve as character studies for his work.
Like a flaneur he trawls abandoned landscapes in these exhausted industrial worlds, treating the built structures like examples of nature. Instead of cornfields, however, we find concrete pavements, the rusting hulks of bridges, fading advertising signs, barricaded storefronts, shiny, phallic skyscrapers that are almost a condensation of power and ruthless aspiration, aerial views of the city, impersonal hotel rooms, paint peeling from the facade of buildings.
Or one may view these photographs as extended essays, in which the artist seeks to define his own personal relationship with a world that defamiliarizes itself with every encounter. In this sense, rather than looking at each photograph as an individual, autonomous work, it is best to see them as one great work in progress. Each single image is part of a discontinuous narrative providing different interpretations of the various aspects of the cities he visits.
Spaans’ work is a rumination on the question of individual memory and identity within the complex processes of the modern city’s transformation from a place of utopian desire to an alienating and anonymous entity. It raises such questions as: what can possibly be the identity of a city in the global moment of fast disappearing boundaries? Who are cities for? What is the meaning of place in defining a sense of community and identity? With the increasing loss of faith in the utopian ideals of modernity and the virtualization of space through digital dystopia, time and place are becoming not only irrelevant, but increasingly displaced and fragmented.
In this context, Spaans’ silent photographs might seem quaint in their obsessive exactitude, which pinpoints the banality of our urban, built environments. But by fixing on those structures that monumentalize modernity and its triumph of reason and industry, Spaans’ work stands as a measure of the way in which we encounter the spatial and temporal dynamics that define the global metropolis.
Okwui Enwezor.
See PETER SPAANS website here
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On ARCADIA REDESIGNED by Herman van den Boom
in EUROPEAN PHOTOGRAPHY.
Publisher: Andreas Muhler-Pohle, Berlin.
November 2006
Picturing the Landscape:
Of The Earth, Violence, and Approaches to Landscape Photography
FotoFest 2006 FotoFest 2006
"If the adaptation of modern materials to traditional designs is part of human experience, so is the adaptation of nature to human design in its broadest, even most ridiculous, creation. Images by Herman van den Boom from Belgium and the American Keith Johnson look at the extent to which Man has sought to control xb3Naturexb2 while retaining aspects its very naturalness. In his xb3Landscapes of the Imaginationxb2 Van den Boom takes a look at the everyday surrealism of suburban Belgium.
Here, new housing developments are situated in a false xb3Arcadiaxb2 of topiary constructions that point up Manxb9s manipulation of xb3Naturexb2 as the xb3Otherxb2 by reducing it to play toy proportions controlled and contorted by architects and designers who fancy themselves xb3Masters of the Universe.xb2
This landscape of bitter fruit, sculpted hedges, and manicured lawns, becomes mere design elements in a completely artificial environment, denaturalized through the manipulation of Nature.
Bill Kouwenhoven
New York/Berlin
NEWS ON WOLFGANG ZURBORN
Ausser Haus
September 24th – October 22th 2006 September 24th, 3 p.m
Wed, Sat 2 p.m.- 6 p.m. Son 11 a.m. – 6 p.m
Schloss Burgau
Von-Aue-Str. 1, 5
2355 Dxfcren
More NEWS on WOLFGANG ZURBORN
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images against war
Peace Museum, Chicago
September/October 2006
An exhibition organized by Gallery Lichtblick with statements of more than 600 artists from all over the world.
Curated by Tina Schelhorn
IMAGES AGAINST WAR
PARISPHOTO 2006
PARIS PHOTO 2006: 10th edition of
the leading international photography fair
Paris Photo celebrates its tenth anniversary with a sparkling selection of Nordic talent
Guests of honour: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway & Sweden
From November 16-19, 2006, Paris Photo celebrates its first decade with an outstanding panorama of 19th century, modern and contemporary photography at the Carrousel du Louvre.
Curator of Spotlight on Nordic countries:
Andrea Holzherr, art critic and freelance curator
Spotlight on Nordic countries
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are the guests of honour for 2006. During the 1990s, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Reykjavik, Oslo and Stockholm contributed to a rebirth of contemporary photography with an explosion of creativity that has been described as the x93Nordic miracle.x94 Three events to highlight the best of Nordic photography:
The Statement section will host eight selected galleries from the honoured countries, presenting solo exhibitions by emerging contemporary artists: Trine Sxf8ndergaard & Nivolai Howalt (Martin Asbaek Projects Copenhagen), Per Bak Jensen (Bo Bjerggaard Copenhagen), Heli Rekula (Anhava Helsinki), Axel Antas (Heino Helsinki), Hrafnkell Sigurdsson (i8 Reykjavik), Eline Mugaas (Riis xad Oslo), Annee Olofsson (Mia Sundberg Stockholm) and Maria Hedlund (FlachGeiger Stockholm).
