Meet the Artists: Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer, Silvana Trevale, Asafe Ghalib, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq - ART3.io

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Meet the Artists: Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer, Silvana Trevale, Asafe Ghalib, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq

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Meet the Artists: Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer, Silvana Trevale, Asafe Ghalib, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq

Blown away Bangkok

Source: On the first page of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’ the narrator talks about an image of a snake he had drawn that adults could simply not understand. Contrary people saw a simple hat. He had to explain that it was a snake that had eaten an elephant. During my travels through Asia I created this series with this idea in my mind. I wanted to question what I see and look behind the veils and facades of the many places that inspired this series. Through collaboration with local artists and models I was able to put together a series that shows new perspectives of familiar places.
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Meet the Artists: Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer, Silvana Trevale, Asafe Ghalib, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq

Source: Since 2017 I have returned to my home country of Venezuela every year, exploring the lives of the youth and their daily struggles. Traveling outside Caracas, the capital, I met a number of subjects and families who I shared time with in order to gain a more intimate insight into their realities. Apart from being intrigued by the children’s constant shifts from a state of playful naivety, hardening into a more rigid, stoic attitude to their lived realities. I would often be drawn to the connection the subjects I photographed shared between one and other. The love and companionship many of the young share with their brothers, sisters, families and friends is what often makes their realities liveable. They are not only confronting the extreme food and medicine shortages that have caused the death of many around them, but also the lack of opportunities, leaving little room for hope, except for the possibility of leaving the country. With the images, I intended to create an abstract calming state. I imagine the young feel between their innocence and a seemingly inevitable premature maturation.
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Meet the Artists: Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer, Silvana Trevale, Asafe Ghalib, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq

Source: I want my subject to feel elevated, to show that they can be who they want to be. Bringing to light a historically misrepresented community, an eclipsed point of view.
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Meet the Artists: Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer, Silvana Trevale, Asafe Ghalib, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq

Dark Garden

Source: The place is gloomy yet beautiful, and here fireflies roam in the dark, the river flows through the mountains, and narrow roads run through these mountains. The places sometimes feel like the world of magic reality, as opposed to, the hand of worker who was crippled in an accident while working on a machine in a tea factory, brought us back to a complex reality. In 1854 when tea production started in Sylhet by setting up tea gardens, a large part was occupied by British merchants. It was laborious to work the garden as it was enormous and ran miles after miles long. People from different parts of India, including Bihar, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, were brought to the tea garden areas with the promise of work. The tea workers lived in a small mud house in the middle of the tea garden. Time has passed by, but the tea garden workers’ fates have had nothing but subtle changes. There are 167 tea gardens in Bangladesh. About one lakh tea workers are working in the tea gardens of the country. These workers have different lifestyles, language and culture. They do not have the right to own land. No one can save money and buy land and start living in mainstream society because their lives are tied in a cycle of earning daily wages equal to 1.42 dollar (120 BDT), Which is the minimum in the world. The story of this dark garden is not only poetic but complex, where we see the faces of the workers, their culture and believe and as well as the melancholic landscape.
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Featured in our first drop, these emerging talents – part of British Journal of Photography’s Ones to Watch 2021 – are shaping the landscape of contemporary photography. Now, exclusively via OpenSea, their work is available to buy as unique NFT editions of one

Each year, British Journal of Photography presents its Ones to Watch: a cohort of emerging photographers making outstanding work, selected from a list of over 450 nominations by the world’s leading artists, curators, gallerists, and academics. 

Over the last decade, many of BJP’s Ones to Watch have gone on to lead distinguished careers. Some of fashion photography’s most sought-after names – Nadine Ijiwere, Rafael Pavarotti, and Micaiah Carter, for example – as well as artists revered by the world’s leading galleries, including Jun Ahn, Daisuke Yokota and Charlie Engman. In the eyes of the industry’s leading figures, these are the emerging talents who are shaping the landscape of contemporary photography. 

This week, exclusively via OpenSea, 16 of this year’s talents are each selling a series of five images as unique NFT editions of one. Here, we speak to four of the photographers – Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer, Silvana Trevale, Asafe Ghalib, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq – about their work, and why they have decided to branch into the world of NFTs.

Fee-Gloria Grönemeyer (Germany)

“Fee-Gloria has a rare, innate instinct for photographing fashion,” she comments. “She remains true to the issues she cares about, using her voice and images to raise awareness and ask questions.”

Chiara Bardelli Nonino, photo editor of Vogue Italia

Fee-Gloria Grönemeyer has not always been a photographer. In 2015, she studied finance at New York University, before deciding to pursue her passion of photography. “Finance actually broke me mentally,” Grönemeyer recalled, in an interview with BJP. “I felt like I couldn’t be as creative as I wanted to be. Photography opened up a lot in terms of meeting and collaborating with other creators.“

Six years on, the German photographer, now based in Paris, blurs the boundaries between fashion, portraiture and art. Grönemeyer first heard about NFTs through a politician she had once worked with. They were working on digitisation for the German government. “The concept is quite revolutionary for the art market, and it’s great that artists aren’t just paid for the first purchase, but with each sale we receive a certain percentage of the resale,” she says. “It’s a beautiful way of distributing artwork to a new digital audience.”

The five pieces Grönemeyer has chosen for auction are from a trip to Asia in 2019. “It was a very special trip that opened my eyes to many cultures… I gained a whole new perspective of the world,” she says. “These are some of the images that are closest to my heart.”

Read more about Grönemeyer’s work here.

Silvana Trevale (Venezuela)

“Silvana’s seamless merging of documentary and fashion is conscious photography, debunking the belief that ethics and aesthetics are not compatible.”

Chiara Bardelli Nonino, photo editor at Vogue Italia

“I consider my work to be a fusion between documentary and fashion, and I seek to celebrate the intrinsic beauty of the human body, my Latin American roots, youth, womanhood and the realities of people around me,” says London-based, Venezuelan artist Silvana Trevale. The 27-year-old photographer has already had notable success in both the fine art and commercial spheres, with commissions from Adidas, Dior and Vogue.

The images Trevale is auctioning are from a series titled Venezuelan Youth, a collection of poignant portraits exploring how the economic, social and political crisis in her home country is impacting young people. Trevale hopes that the auction will raise awareness for these issues. “It is an opportunity to collect funds to continue this project in Venezuela, and raise money for the families I work with,” she says. 

“I am intrigued by this new ‘world’ or place for art to be sold… and how this new audience will react to my work,” Travale continues, explaining that she first heard about NFTs last year. “It is a completely different environment to any other place where my work has been shared. In a way, it is more accessible, as it is digital and on a platform where lots of people can have access to it.” 

Read more about Trevale’s work here.

Asafe Ghalib (Brazil)

“The power and intensity of Asafe’s work are recognisable from the first instance of setting eyes on his images. The activism that underpins it makes for an even more impactful aesthetic. Although he is self-taught, Asafe handles his lens with confidence – a stance that he also teases out of his incredible subjects.”

Izabela Radwanska Zhang, editorial director of British Journal of Photography

Raised in Wakefield and now based in London, Tayo Adekunle’s Reclamation of the Exposition recreates 19th century photographs of sensationalised Black bodies – images that highlight the blurred line between racialised pornography and ‘scientific’ ethnography. 

“Reclamation of the Exposition is very important to me as it talks about the sexualisation of Black women through a discussion on colonialism and colonial photography,” explains Adekunle, who has selected five images to auction from the series. “I chose these images so that more people could learn about the history discussed in the work.”

Adekunle uses her body as a tool, complicating the understood notions of artist, subject, viewer and maker. In these images, everything is subjective. “I think [NFTs are a] great way to be able to showcase your work internationally without the limitations of thinking how your pieces will fit into a certain space,” says Adekunle.

Find out more about Adekunle’s work here.

Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq (Bangladesh)

 “In the wake of a global pandemic, Fatiq turned his lens on his home. He photographs the kitchen table, inside the refrigerator, from the bathroom to the balcony, producing a series of vivid photographs, which study still lifes rich in form and colour.”

Sarker Protick, lecturer at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute

In early 2020, during his final year of photography school, Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq found himself confined at home in Comilla, Bangladesh. Countless projects emerged from lockdown, and although Fatiq responds to his immediate surroundings, as so many others did, his aesthetic is distinct: a playful vibrancy undercut by the glutinous, bloody forms.

Fatiq selected five images from this series to be minted as NFTs: ones he felt were most “visually striking”, as well those that illustrated his story. The mundane markers of everyday experiences – anaemic chicken legs, glowing egg yolks, and a veiny fish skin – all feature in the series of close-up photographs, collectively titled Home. 

Read more about Fatiq’s work here.