Blog

Group show

A View From Above, featuring Blue Sky Days at the EXPOSED Festival in Turin

My Blue Sky Days series is featured in the group exhibition A View From Above at the Exposed Torino Foto Festival in Italy.

Open from 2 May to 2 June, 2024

OGR Torino
Corso Castelfidardo 22,
10128 Turin
Italy

Group exhibition curated by Domenico Quaranta, Salvatore Vitale and Samuele Piazza

Featured artists: James Bridle, Laura Cinti, Mario Giacomelli, Mishka Henner, Hiwa K, Tabita Rezaire, Evan Roth, Susan Schuppli, Tomas Van Houtryve

About Blue Sky Days

Starting in 2013, I traveled across America to aerially photograph the kind of gatherings that have become habitual targets for drone strikes abroad — including weddings, funerals, and groups of people praying or exercising. I also flew my camera over settings where government surveillance drones have been used domestically.

In October 2012, a drone strike in northeast Pakistan killed a 67-year-old woman picking okra outside her home. At a U.S. Congressional hearing held in Washington in October 2013, the woman’s 13-year-old grandson, Zubair Rehman, spoke to a group of lawmakers. “I no longer love blue skies,” said Rehman, who was injured by shrapnel in the attack. “In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”

The images captured from the drone’s perspective engage with the changing nature of surveillance, personal privacy, and war.

About A View From Above

In recent years the view from above, a once exceptional point of view reserved to people in power and inhuman agents like birds, angels and gods, has become widespread and accessible. In 2011, artist and writer Hito Steyerl introduced the concept of ‘vertical perspective’ to address the “departure of a stable paradigm of orientation,” and to describe what can be seen, to all effects, as the emergence of a new scopic regime.

By replacing the stable horizon and the role played by linear perspective along modernity, vertical perspective established ‘a new visual normality’, firmly rooted in the tools of surveillance and warfare. First perceived as a liberation and a new way of seeing, vertical perspective loses its romantic grip to become identified with the point of view of the power that kills and controls when satellites and drones enter the equation. Always the outcome of a constructed, machine-aided experience of the world, the view from above delocalizes and ultimately dehumanizes the gaze, allowing a God’s eye view on reality not only in terms of position, but also in the way it captures additional information and data; it looks through reality instead of sticking to its surface, and generates ‘total images’ that are both and neither images and maps, representations and visualizations blurring the difference between place and space.

By adopting vertical perspective as its main point of view, the exhibition explores the way in which our look on landscapes through the camera eye has changed along the last decades, and how this shift in scopic regimes affected the way we control, design and shape the environment we live in.

May 6, 2024

Group show

MONUMENTAL: The Dome of the Rock by Ziyah Gafić and Notre-Dame de Paris by Tomas van Houtryve

MONUMENTAL: The Dome of the Rock by Ziyah Gafić and Notre-Dame de Paris by Tomas van Houtryve at the National Museum of BiH, in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Production & Curation: Yonola Viguerie / Gary Knight / James B. Wellford

Opens on April 26, 2024

Visiting hours:
Tuesday to Friday: 10:00 am – 7:00 pm
Weekends: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
The museum is closed on Mondays

National Museum of BiH
Zmaja od Bosne 3
71000 Sarajevo
Bosnia and Herzegovina

A project of The VII Foundation, MONUMENTAL is an exhibition that fosters discussions on faith, national identity, power politics, social cohesion, colonization, division, and political violence through the symbolism of two of the world’s most important and iconic religious buildings: The Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem, and Notre-Dame de Paris.

Tomas van Houtryve and Ziyah Gafić had unprecedented access to these iconic religious structures between 2019 and 2023.

The Dome of the Rock was completed in 691 and is the world’s oldest surviving example of Islamic architecture. Today, it is a political lightning rod between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Muslim world.

Since its completion in 1260, Notre Dame has been the stage for grand political statements and expressions of divine-human authority. The cathedral has a presence in French cultural and political life that reaches far beyond faith and exceeds that of any other architectural structure in the country.

This exhibition will also be part of this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles Arles Associé program, opening on July 1, 2024. Further information about The VII Foundation events during the festival’s opening week is upcoming.

Text by: Gary Knight

April 26, 2024

Solo show

Lines and Lineage at PhEST in Italy

The FESTIVAL INTERNAZIONALE DI FOTOGRAFIA E ARTE (PhEST) in Monopoli, Italy is exhibiting my Lines and Lineage prints.

1 September to 1 November 2023

Lines and Lineage solo exhibition
PhEST
Stalle di Casa Santa
70043 Monopoli BA
Italy

About the work

Lines and Lineage takes aim at America’s collective amnesia of history. The work addresses the missing photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what we now know as the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, I chose to photograph the region with glass plates and a 19th-century wooden camera. Portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—are paired with photographs of landscapes inside the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. Lines and Lineage lifts the pervasive fog of dominant Western mythology and makes us question the role that photographs—both present and missing—have played in shaping the identity of the West. The work will be published as a monograph by Radius Books in Autumn 2019.

Reviews and praise for Lines and Lineage

“…Using a North American map from 1839 (the same year that photography is thought to have made its debut in Europe), Mr. van Houtryve traveled along Mexico’s old northern border to meet families who have lived in the region for centuries.

His equipment in the Instagram age? A 19th-century camera he found in a Paris antique shop. He stocked up on the glass plates and pungent potions needed for the wet-collodion process, a technique invented in 1851. Doing so, Mr. van Houtryve conjures what the West may have looked like in the Mexican era…”

— Simon Romero in The New York Times

“His portraits are carefully researched and historically relevant – all of his subjects are descendants of the area’s original Mexican inhabitants. Quiet and dignified, the images pay tribute to Nadar, whose powerful portraits Van Houtryve admires. He focuses on his subjects’ eyes, conveying a sense of their interior life. He presents the work in diptychs that juxtapose portraits with romantic landscapes, reflecting an intimate connection between humans and nature…”

— Elisabeth Biondi in Photograph Magazine

“…Photographing the descendants of families who live on the once-Mexican territory, Van Houtryve proves their existence within a dominant narrative that often ignores them. Using traditional nineteenth century photographic techniques, like wet plate glass negatives, the artist taps into the aesthetic of the 1800s…”

— Zachary Small in Hyperallergic

Artist interview video

August 6, 2023