Beat Streuli New Street
Beat Streuli New Street
Beat Streuli New Street
Beat Streuli New Street
Beat Streuli New Street
Beat Streuli New Street
Beat Streuli New Street
Beat Streuli New Street
fromJanuary 25 toApril 28, 2013Beat Streuli New Street
Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló presents New Street, an exhibition project by the Swiss artist Beat Streuli coproduced with IKON Gallery, Birmingham.
New Street features recent work created by the artist after spending some time in Castellón photographing life on its streets, portraying anonymous passersby. While his work documents human presence in public spaces, Streuli maintains a distance with the people portrayed without infringing on their personal space or intimacy. Instead, his action limits itself to looking through the camera lens like a person looking directly through his own eyes. The public is unaware of the artist’s presence as he portrays their faces and movements in the midst of diverse abstract details present in the city itself, in passing holding up a reflection of our lives and our society. He neither prepares nor modifies the spaces where he works, although he deliberately chooses urban public spaces; preferably busy streets or squares where the movement of people generates multiple possibilities. His camera captures the cultural diversity of a globalised society where the people portrayed are shown in their varied attire, women with hiyabs, teenagers in t-shirts and jeans, talking on mobiles, waiting at traffic lights, taking photos…
Streuli’s work is an antidote to didacticism. It could not be less ideologically driven, but then equally it is not an artistic platform of meaninglessness. On the contrary, Streuli is alert to the nuances of human gestures acted out and traced within our built environments and he conveys them with a refreshing sympathy. His knowingness is understated, not overburdened with symbolic or loaded motifs, but comprises reflections of real life with all the complexity that can then be brought to bear on them.
The EACC exhibition hall is papered with large format photos which are rounded off by the video screening of synchronised sequences of images taken by the artist on the streets of Castellón and Birmingham. Totally surrounded by portraits of individuals, the spectator is asked to rethink our identity as human beings.
An artist’s book featuring Streuli’s work in Castellón and Birmingham, the cities the artist has taken as his subjects, has been published to coincide with the exhibition. The hundreds of images contained in this book are just a fraction of those he took on the ground. Streuli’s easygoing style belies an exacting kind of photography. There is composition and editing, cropping and sequencing in this book that is very much in keeping with the careful preparation and camerawork involved. There is no digital manipulation of the imagery itself, and so the result overall is as objective as it is personal.New Street Tram / Beat Streuli
New Street Tram is a public art project whose goal is to create a dialogue between contemporary art and the community by visually transforming various stops on the new Tram line in Castellón.
The images in this work are a selection made by the artist Beat Streuli following an open call to the general public, inviting them to take part in the photographic project undertaken in EACC at the beginning of January 2013. The production process involved an initial participative dialogue between these volunteers, the artist and the institution hosting the project.
The Tram in itself is a radical urban transformation project if you bear in mind that, to date, the city lacked any such service. Once the project is completed the image of the city centre will be totally transformed because, for the first time, there will be a direct connection between the north and south of the city. This will be a crucial step in the ongoing plan to create a city less dependent on cars and more attuned to the use of public transport.
Streuli’s intention to appropriate these spaces is a staunch defence of the role of the citizen, the sole protagonist of everyday reality.
Each one of the artist’s images is a form of mutual recognition inasmuch as there is a mirror effect between these images of anonymous people and the users of the tram who can recognise reality in those same faces.
Finally, the piece also possesses a theoretical and exhibition quality that dovetails with the EACC’s continuing programme over the last few years and its endeavour to take the various expressions of contemporary art out of the exhibition space per se.
New Street features recent work created by the artist after spending some time in Castellón photographing life on its streets, portraying anonymous passersby. While his work documents human presence in public spaces, Streuli maintains a distance with the people portrayed without infringing on their personal space or intimacy. Instead, his action limits itself to looking through the camera lens like a person looking directly through his own eyes. The public is unaware of the artist’s presence as he portrays their faces and movements in the midst of diverse abstract details present in the city itself, in passing holding up a reflection of our lives and our society. He neither prepares nor modifies the spaces where he works, although he deliberately chooses urban public spaces; preferably busy streets or squares where the movement of people generates multiple possibilities. His camera captures the cultural diversity of a globalised society where the people portrayed are shown in their varied attire, women with hiyabs, teenagers in t-shirts and jeans, talking on mobiles, waiting at traffic lights, taking photos…
Streuli’s work is an antidote to didacticism. It could not be less ideologically driven, but then equally it is not an artistic platform of meaninglessness. On the contrary, Streuli is alert to the nuances of human gestures acted out and traced within our built environments and he conveys them with a refreshing sympathy. His knowingness is understated, not overburdened with symbolic or loaded motifs, but comprises reflections of real life with all the complexity that can then be brought to bear on them.
The EACC exhibition hall is papered with large format photos which are rounded off by the video screening of synchronised sequences of images taken by the artist on the streets of Castellón and Birmingham. Totally surrounded by portraits of individuals, the spectator is asked to rethink our identity as human beings.
An artist’s book featuring Streuli’s work in Castellón and Birmingham, the cities the artist has taken as his subjects, has been published to coincide with the exhibition. The hundreds of images contained in this book are just a fraction of those he took on the ground. Streuli’s easygoing style belies an exacting kind of photography. There is composition and editing, cropping and sequencing in this book that is very much in keeping with the careful preparation and camerawork involved. There is no digital manipulation of the imagery itself, and so the result overall is as objective as it is personal.
New Street Tram is a public art project whose goal is to create a dialogue between contemporary art and the community by visually transforming various stops on the new Tram line in Castellón.
The images in this work are a selection made by the artist Beat Streuli following an open call to the general public, inviting them to take part in the photographic project undertaken in EACC at the beginning of January 2013. The production process involved an initial participative dialogue between these volunteers, the artist and the institution hosting the project.
The Tram in itself is a radical urban transformation project if you bear in mind that, to date, the city lacked any such service. Once the project is completed the image of the city centre will be totally transformed because, for the first time, there will be a direct connection between the north and south of the city. This will be a crucial step in the ongoing plan to create a city less dependent on cars and more attuned to the use of public transport.
Streuli’s intention to appropriate these spaces is a staunch defence of the role of the citizen, the sole protagonist of everyday reality.
Each one of the artist’s images is a form of mutual recognition inasmuch as there is a mirror effect between these images of anonymous people and the users of the tram who can recognise reality in those same faces.
Finally, the piece also possesses a theoretical and exhibition quality that dovetails with the EACC’s continuing programme over the last few years and its endeavour to take the various expressions of contemporary art out of the exhibition space per se.
© Institut Valencià de Cultura
Plaça de l'Ajuntament, 17
46002 València