Meet the Artists: Matthieu Croizier, Masha Svyatogor, Rehab Eldalil, Muhammad Salah - ART3.io

Photography in the Metaverse

Photography in the Metaverse

Join Us

Meet the Artists: Matthieu Croizier, Masha Svyatogor, Rehab Eldalil, Muhammad Salah

View Gallery 4 Photos
ART3.io
1
2
3
4
Meet the Artists: Matthieu Croizier, Masha Svyatogor, Rehab Eldalil, Muhammad Salah

Everything Goes Dark A Little Further Down

Source: Everything goes dark a little further down, 2020 This project investigates the concept of ordinary monstrosity, unravelling the boundaries between what is thought of as normal and abnormal, using the body as a primary material. As a starting point, I examined the construction of monstrosity throughout history, from the invention of hysteria in the 19th century to the role of freak shows, where staging was essential and images were manipulated to play a vital role in reinforcing the norm. We hold on to binary ideas of beauty, actively distinguishing between what is beautiful and ugly. I wanted to blur these ideas with this work, to show that monstrosity exists within us all and that it is a concept that has been shaped and constructed over time. Through self-representation, I seek to fabricate monstrosity out of simple things surrounding me, to embrace it rather than to reject it. I have always identified with freaks, feeling othered by my queerness, and this idea of claiming my own monstrosity really helped me become who I am. This project represents for me the materialization of a long inner journey that I have had to go through since I was a teenager. It is a love letter to the abnormal, a renunciation of being normal. In reference to medical or anatomical iconography, I try to deconstruct normative representations of the body. To what extent is a body a body, and how can it free itself from the norms that constrain it? The photographs depict an extraordinary act of metamorphosis, where fragments are melded together to create something new. Despite the spectacular aesthetics of the images, it is just a show of banalities and the monstrosity, which seems disturbing at first, ends up revealing its own construction.
ART3.io
Meet the Artists: Matthieu Croizier, Masha Svyatogor, Rehab Eldalil, Muhammad Salah

Girl and swans

Source: “Masks Show” series explores the continuity in the history of arts. Traditions and modern trends constantly endorse and reject each other. Such a strained relationship is provoked mostly by attempts to comprehend today's customs and mores. This work depicts naked bodies of modern girls, with their faces covered by ''masks''. These ''masks'' are pieces of reproductions of works by famous artists, like Sandro Botticelli, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Holbein the Younger and other painters, the majority of whom lived in the 15th-17th centuries. In classical art, a female figure usually embodied sanctity or eroticism sometimes these two notions were intricately intertwined in the images of Christian martyrs. Depicted women were denied the right to their corporeity – their image was in the hands of a male artist, and later, of a male viewer. Such paintings were subject to a number of visual conventions making female images as comfortable as possible for shameless contemplation (for example, a nude model could not meet the gaze of the viewer). Young girls in the works of Svyatogor seem to be in a totally different position: their bodies are free, poses are natural, and they own the decision to pose naked. Yet, the reason why this series was created was the desire of some models to take back/usurp/destroy the original photos that were made a long time ago. Probably, this desire can be explained by the changes in the worldview and perception of one's own body and the social frameworks this body needs to fit in. In this situation, the victim is not a model but the author of the photos who is made to choose between ethics and copyright. The consent to give away the photos could be compared to a painful gesture of abandoning your work for the “good” of your neighbor. Hence, using a mask seems to be the best option here. A woman tells a story about another woman by covering her face with a mask of a woman from the past epoch. Masking the face is like an attempt to protect the witness. It plays with the modern girls’ perception of their own physicality, which, in common sense, still has an ambivalent meaning of something being too forbidden on one side and something being used exclusively as an object of admiration and desire on the other. It may look paradoxical but refusing to identify themselves with the bodies in the photos, the models may also end up losing control over their representation, thereby joining the cohort of “inspirers” and “muses” of the past centuries. Text by Vera Zalutskaya
ART3.io
Meet the Artists: Matthieu Croizier, Masha Svyatogor, Rehab Eldalil, Muhammad Salah

Keepers Of The Land

Source: This collection is part of a long term personal project called The Longing Of The Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken. In this project I reconnect to my roots and explore the process of finding and seeking the meaning of belonging cited through the Bedouin community of St. Catherine in South Sinai, Egypt. This is a journey to attempt to understand the layers of an identity and the interconnectedness between people and land which defines the notion of belonging.
ART3.io
Meet the Artists: Matthieu Croizier, Masha Svyatogor, Rehab Eldalil, Muhammad Salah

Source: Homecoming is my therapy, my refuge. A safe space for me to explore ‘home’ as a philosophical, spiritual, emotional, and physical construct. To find meaning beyond the linear and the formulaic, and delve into the beyond.
Reading Time: 4 minutes

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 – Matthieu Croizier, Masha Svyatogor, Rehab Eldalil, and Muhammad Salah  – about their work, and why they have decided to branch into the world of NFTs. 

Matthieu Croizier (Switzerland)

“Croizier’s photographs destabilise a sense of perception. They are orientated in the physicality of the body, where he often creates tension and ambiguity, to reflect the complex and sensate experience of being human”

Gem Fletcher, writer and podcaster

Taking visual cues from an array of cultural sources, Matthieu Croizier lets his imagination guide his images. Inspired by everything from 19th century medical archives and freak shows to the writings of Virginie Despentes and cult classic horror like David Lynch’s Eraserhead, the 26-year-old ECAL graduate sees his work as a “love letter to the abnormal”, pushing back against vilification of the queer community.

“All of these images are part of my latest personal work Everything goes dark a little further down, which is very important for me,” says Croizier, who started the project in 2019, during the final year of his photography BA. “I have chosen them as I thought this could be a good opportunity to make them travel digitally, and to reach people that would not necessarily have encountered them in another context.”

Read more about Croizier’s work here.

Masha Svyatogor (Belarus)

“Masha is intelligent in how she uses the language that is open to her. While she uses archival pictures, it’s not an archive project. Her work is political; it’s about the totalitarian regime but also about art and the role of art under such a regime.”

Andrei Liankevich, managing director and founder of Month of Photography in Minsk

Masha Svyatogor reflects on Soviet imagery and contemporary life in Minsk, Belarus, where she resides, through the use of collage.”It’s unsafe to live there now, in addition to the lack of financial security and prospects,” she says. Indeed, Belarus is authoritarian, and its leader, Alexander Lukashenko, has been described as “Europe’s last dictator”.

Living under such a regime is like “some kind of nightmare,” she says. The “endless repression by the authorities against civilians, striving for absolute control of everyone and everything” means it is difficult to make critical work. Nevertheless, Svyatogor does so, through the use of photomontage. For the Ones to Watch drop, Svyatogor has selected “works that raise questions about continuity in art history, the issues of representation of women in art history.”

Read more about Svyatogor’s work here.

Rehab Eldalil (Egypt)

“A whole new level of interaction. Eldalil assists in building a legacy for the Bedouin people – her multidimensional approach touches both viewers and subjects in unforgettable ways.”

Peggy Sue Amison, the artistic director of East Wing gallery in Doha

During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Rehab Eldalil saw first-hand the impact of visual storytelling. At the time, the artist was studying for a BA in photography at Helwan University in Greater Cairo. “After that I began using photography to dig into my ancestry – trying to make a connection,” she says. For Eldalil, to document has become an act of remembering.

Eldalil has selected five images from her long-term project, The Longing of The Stranger Whose Path Has Been Broken, which traces her own Bedouin ancestry by documenting the daily lives of Egypt’s nomad community. “Each image represents a different perspective on the Bedouin community than what is spread in the media,” he explains. “As an indigenous community, the Bedouins of Sinai have largely been misrepresented. In this project the community is part of the creative process and I wanted to take this auction opportunity to bring their voice to light.” 

Read more about Eldalil’s work here.

Muhammad Salah (Sudan)

“Muhammad Salah makes work about the politics of space. Fragments assembled denote on a deeper level. A poem.”

Emma Bowkett, Director of Photography at the Financial Times Weekend Magazine

Born in 1993 in Sennar, Sudan, Muhammad Salah lives between Berlin and Khartoum. His work explores identity, masculinity, memory, time, space, healing, and the expanse between birth and death. “I explore the medium of photography as a form of visual poetry,” he said, in an interview with British Journal of Photography. 

Salah’s images are from a series titled Homecoming. In it, he looks back at his life but also explores the idea of ‘home’. “Homecoming is my therapy, my refuge. A safe space for me to explore ‘home’ as a philosophical, spiritual, emotional, and physical construct. To find meaning beyond the linear and the formulaic, and delve into the beyond,” he says.

Read more about Salah’s work here.

Access the sale via OpenSea here.