Jenia Fridlyand, Limits of control, 2017-2019
EN ⭢ FR
Fine Arts Museum, Mulhouse
June 5 - September 20
Every day except Tuesday, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Opening on friday June 5
Curator : Nigel Baldacchino
When Moscow-born American photographer Jenia Fridlyand traveled to Cuba for the first time in 2012, she was struck by a peculiar sense of recognition. The tropical island bore little visual resemblance to the mostly grim setting of her childhood in the Soviet Union, yet the visit had a distinct flavor of an uncanny homecoming. Fridlyand’s curiosity about the origin of this sentiment planted a seed for a project that germinated in 2017, when she started making regular trips to Cuba with her view camera.
BPM presents Limits of control, a selection of images from the resulting body of work and first exhibition in France of Jenia Fridlyand . The aleatory nature of the Cuban experience, predicated by a political system that imagines itself on the way to utopia, was brought to bear on Fridlyand’s artistic practice rooted in the American tradition. The confluence of these strata created a rich terrain for exploring the role of serendipity in the photographic process, and how various degrees of conceding to chance come to affect the essence of an image.
Jenia Fridlyand (Moscow, 1975) is a photographer and educator based in New York City and the Hudson Valley, USA. Her photographs and books have been exhibited in the United States and abroad. Fridlyand’s artist’s book Entrance to Our Valley was shortlisted for the Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award 2017, and the trade edition (TIS Books, USA) is now in its 3rd printing. Her subsequent body of work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Fototeca de Cuba in 2023 and is forthcoming as a monograph, Mango Season (Steidl). She is represented by Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Amsterdam.
Fridlyand is a co-founder of Image Threads, a non-profit educational collective, and is the founding chair of the Long Term Photobook Program at Penumbra Foundation in New York. She studied photography at Centre Iris and Université Paris VIII, and holds an MFA from the University of Hartford’s International Limited-Residency program.
Jenia Fridlyand, Limits of control, 2017-2019