Co-curator Hannah Pr\u00f6bsting was quick to clarify: \u201cI certainly do not want to claim that you can come in and understand the generation with this exhibition. That is definitely not the case. But we do feel that the people who don\u2019t expect to be moved are moved. And I think if there\u2019s one thing that I want people to take away, from a photography point of view, it\u2019s that this generation has complete agency over telling their own story.\u201d<\/p>\n
The show opens with an image by American artist Sara Messinger<\/a>, in which a trio of girls are crowding a mirror to apply eye makeup while Messinger snaps them and herself with an analogue camera. The visitor then walks through a barrage of images by Noyan<\/a>, who used a point-and-shoot to chronicle his life as a teenager in Zurich. \u201cIt\u2019s not a documentary exhibition,\u201d co-curator Julie Dayer noted. \u201cYou\u2019ve got Gen Z looking at themselves. They\u2019re taking pictures of their histories and their communities.\u201d She rephrased it this way: \u201cWe really wanted to make an exhibition with Gen Z, and not about Gen Z.\u201d<\/strong> The exhibition\u2019s purpose is an examination of their creative talent and output.<\/p>\n To make their selection, Dayer and Pr\u00f6bsting consulted other curators, book publishers, teachers, gallerists, directors, and older artists, and of course scoured Instagram. They focused on works created by photographers born between 1995 and 2010, but \u201cit\u2019s not that you\u2019re born on the first of January of 1995 and suddenly you change your photography practice,\u201d Dayer reasoned. (The oldest photographer here was born in 1992). Despite the diversity of the photographers, Pr\u00f6bsting revealed an easily identifiable common thread: \u201cOne thing that we noticed whenever we were reading the artist biographies, compared to maybe ten years ago, is the importance of intersectionality \u2013 and not just as a base for discrimination, but as a base for joy and for celebration.\u201d<\/p>\n Who \u2018gets\u2019 to speak about a subject can be a sensitive subject, but there\u2019s an unequivocal legitimacy in speaking about one\u2019s own experience, rather than documenting other communities as a stranger. \u201cThey\u2019re speaking about themselves and they\u2019re showing themselves to the world in the way they want to,\u201d Dayer affirmed. As for criticism of selfishness for only looking at oneself? \u201cNo, actually\u2026 they speak about themselves because they have the right to do so,\u201d Dayer countered. She contextualised that these photographers were mostly teenagers during the pandemic, and were in their rooms, and so their body or face was what they had available to tell a story. Pr\u00f6bsting cited Marvel Harris<\/a>\u2019 project as an effective example of a project about selfhood transcending the particularities of one experience. In Marvel<\/a>, Harris chronicles their gender transition, and Pr\u00f6bsting noted: \u201cWhenever they talk about their work, they say, \u2018OK, statistically, maybe it\u2019s very few people who will undergo a gender transition. But my work is also about emotions, and I want to make sure that my work has the capacity to touch everyone, because everyone has emotions\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Almost all of the works in the exhibition are unframed (they\u2019re either mounted on wood or aluminium, or presented as wallpaper), and all the exhibition texts explaining the projects in the show are direct quotes from the creators themselves, rather than curatorial analyses. Many of the photographers have shot campaigns, while others followed the art school path and focus on fine art photography. For some, this exhibition shows a side of them that is less publicly known. Haitian American Daveed Baptiste<\/a>\u00a0is someone whose work as a fashion designer has overshadowed his photographic output, which nonetheless remains his other meaningful creative practice. Salom\u00e9 Gomis-Trezise<\/a>\u00a0creates video clips for Travis Scott<\/a> and advertising for Nike, while her personal project is experimental AI work to correct the fact that, growing up, she did not see images of Black people the way she wanted to see them represented.<\/p>\n The image chosen for the exhibition poster is from Beautiful Resistance by Nigerian photographer Daniel Obasi<\/a>, who created his project in the wake of police violence used against protesters in the streets of Lagos. Although the aestheticism of his images is only obliquely political, he flaunts an emblematic and provocative version of the Nigerian flag with a red sun, once considered a bad omen. German duo Florian Gatzweiler<\/a>\u00a0and Sascha Levin<\/a> met at school in Berlin, and then met Ukrainian-born Anton in the Polish town S\u0142ubice at the border near Germany. Their photo reportage project addresses the Ukrainian youth, in limbo after the full-scale invasion. After Anton returned to fight in Ukraine, the German duo took screenshots of their FaceTime exchanges and his Instagram stories. \u201cIt\u2019s preserving an archive that talks a lot about war and the relationship that the new generation has with images of war,\u201d Dayer remarked of their project. <\/p>\n Chinese photographer Ziyu Wang<\/a>\u00a0uses image-making to wrestle with the feeling that he\u2019s at the bottom of the hierarchy of masculinity, thereby rendered completely invisible. Colombian photographer Isabella Madrid<\/a>, whose image covers the exhibition catalogue, addresses the conflicting and contradictory expectations that are placed on women in South America (and beyond), to be somehow maternal but also extremely sexy. Both Wang and Madrid use prosthetics: exaggerated breasts and shoulder pads, depicting the violence of the way we expect bodies to perform a gendered ideal.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pr\u00f6bsting concluded: \u201cWe\u2019re not saying [these concerns are] not important to millennials, to boomers, Generation X. Far from it, because I feel like almost all of the projects have some point of connection to almost everyone.\u201d Dayer added: \u201cIt\u2019s fun how you can scale it differently, comparing it to your story.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>
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Noah Noyan Wenzinger, de la se\u0301rie NOYAN 2015-2022\u00a9 NOYAN<\/p>\n<\/a>
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Sara Messinger, Self-portrait of me photographing Avril and friends doing makeup at Avril’s seventeenth birthday party. This image is part of my on-going work documenting a group of Gen-Z youth growing up in New York City, 2022\u00a9 Sara Messinger<\/p>\n