Stay at Schafhof: July 2022

Detail from photograph "tenerife"

Valérie Leray

Valérie Leray is a visual artist - photographer, researcher and director of the artist run alliance la mire. She began her career as a "reportage photographer" on subjects related to people "on the margins" of society, then questioned this approach with documentary and "conceptual" photography around the material: History - when it is attached to the concept of "places of memory" - as defined by the historian Pierre Nora. Photography explores the tension created between the traces of History, its own capacity to make itself visible in a place where it has taken place, and the intrinsic mnemonic character, ambivalence and different temporal levels of the image. The revisited sites is the place of the artistic gesture where the objects have the value of traces in order to make present what was but remains invisible. Reanimate a double reading of the image and open to new paradigms and alternative histories.  This approach is similar to the discipline of archaeogeography.*

Her series are exhibited in several countries, accompagnied by artist talks, lectures, and recently at the 58th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Venice as part of the official exhibition FUTUROMA. At the same time, she is undertaking a research project on the fabrication of stereotypes through the image of Europe's Roma minority, for which she is a laureate of the European mobility grant I-Portunus in 2019. She shares her practice by setting up workshops on old and new photographic processes, the last of which was on the research of the photosensitivity of plants: the Anthotype.

* Archaeogeography is a discipline that deals with the dynamics of space over time and contributes to the study of other dimensions of geohistorical objects than those that have been done, until now, by the disciplines of historical geography, geohistory and landscape archaeology or environmental archaeology (see Wikipedia).

Dates in Freising

17.02.2023
19:00 Uhr bis 21:00 Uhr

Opening: Fragmented World

Kurzbeschreibung überspringen

Opening of the exhibition Fragmented World | Focus Europe IV with participants of the European Art Fellowship of the District Council of Upper Bavaria (Bezirk Oberbayern) ... >>>

18.02.2023 - 10.04.2023

Fragmented World | Focus > Europe IV

Kurzbeschreibung überspringen

The exhibition presents the works of 10 artists who participated in the previous year's European Art Fellowship artist exchange of the District of Upper Bavaria. ... >>>