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Untitled,
from the series Fixing shadows; Julius and I, 2018 © Eric Gyamfi
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| Winner
Foam Paul Huf Award 2019
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| 13
December 2019 – 11 March 2020
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Eric
Gyamfi (1990, Ghana) is the winner of the 13th Foam Paul Huf
Award, which is awarded annually by an international jury to
talented photographers under the age of 35. Gyamfi uses a wide
array of visual techniques to create visual narratives that
hover somewhere in between autobiography and fiction. His work
comprises collages, texts, audio and photographs developed
according to various methods, including cyanotype and silk
screen printing. His portraits and diaristic installations are
highly personal, yet transcend the artist’s individual
experience.
Foam invited Gyamfi to apply his
scrapbook aesthetic to the walls of the museum. The resulting
installations are opaque and multi-layered, blurring the
boundaries between storytelling and documentary photography.
The photographic image is presented as a powerful yet ambiguous
means of telling a story, be it fact or fiction. The exhibition
consists of two of Gyamfi’s most recent series. A Certain Bed
is a semi-autobiographical visual narrative about the artist’s
meanderings, following his departure from the home he knew.
During this period of moving from place to place he created
photo collages that form an introspective report of his nomadic
experience, and that question what it means to have a home –
or to lose it.
Fixing Shadows; Julius and I is a
study into the photographic portrait. In an act of
identification, the photographer blends his own image with a
portrait of composer Julius Eastman, producing thousands of
photographic composites in the form of cyanotypes and silk
screen prints. The work plays on Eastman’s experimental
compositions, in which each new score contains elements from
all anterior scores. Likewise, Gyamfi produces an endless
number of unique variations on the same two images,
experimenting with the effects of climatological and other
circumstantial conditions on the outcome of the print. The work
is scored by Whatsapp voice messages the artist accumulated
that provide as many readings of the works as there are
individuals.
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 Eric
Gyamfi
Gyamfi was born in Ghana in 1990. He obtained a BA in
Economics and Information Studies at the University of Ghana in
2014. He is currently pursuing an MFA at the Department of
Painting and Sculpture of the Kwame Nkrumah University of
Science and Technology. He was a fellow at the Photographers’
Master Class in Khartoum, Sudan (2016); Nairobi, Kenya (2017);
and Johannesburg, South Africa (2018). He was an invited
participant to the Nuku Studio Photography Workshops in 2016,
and the World Press Photo West African Masterclass in 2017. He
is a recipient of the 2016 Magnum Foundation Fund and a member
of the Nuku studio in Ghana; a collective of visual
storytellers dedicated reporting on issues around Africa and
beyond. Gyamfi lives and works in Accra, Ghana.
Opening
and press preview
The exhibition will be opened on Thursday 12 December
2019 from 20.00 hrs onwards.
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Foam
Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
© 10 Dec 2019 photo-index UG
(haftungsbeschränkt)
Ziegelstr. 29 . D–10117 Berlin
Editor:
Claudia Stein & Michael Steinke
contact@photo-index.art
