Summer of Love
This summer the Noorderlicht Photogallery brings you Summer of Love. A blistering exhibition in which four photographers take up sexual freedom and illusions, curated by Noorderlicht curator Wim Melis.
Emmanuel Guillaud roamed through Tokyo at night. Until the sun rises is his new installation about loneliness, about men who wander through parking lots and and school yards: public places which by night change into a temporary ghetto. They hope for chance encounters, are ‘in search of a kick without obligations’, or actually of intimacy. When the sun comes up they leave again, preferring to forget what has happened. The installationUntil the sun risesis being shown for the first time by Noorderlicht.
Katharina Hesse, inHuman Negotiations, gives us a different picture of the prostitution industry in Bangkok, Thailand. She followed a number of women outside working hours and interviewed then extensively about their lives and their background, their choices and their motives. It appeared very much the question whether our Western image – women as powerless victims of the Eastern sex industry – can be maintained. Hesse dares to oppose the stereotype of sexual slavery with an intimate, and at the very least ambiguous picture of ordinary women who make a better life possible for themselves and their children by selling dreams.
Yevgeny Kondakov asked himself the question: what happens when the most repressed country in the world is exposed to mass-market consumerism and a government that does not care what ordinary people do? InRussian Sexual Revolutionhe demonstrates that not only an economic and political revolution took place in the former Soviet Union, but also a sexual revolution: in all its wildness, its strangeness, its vulgarity, and its innocence.
Amy Touchette in The World Famous *BOB*, documents the life of a female burlesque dancer living in New York. Raised in California, *BOB*’s eccentricity as an adolescent eventually led her to a life of alienation and destructiveness. Waking up from the nightmare, she viewed moving to New York as her second chance and an opportunity to finally live out her fantasy of being a star. Amy Touchette followed *BOB* for four years and was able to get a look inside her life, without restrictions, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.