Take a closer look into the practice of nominated artist Anton Kusters

In this final talk in the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize series, learn more about the artist’s practice, which explores the conceptualisation and representation of trauma. His nominated work, The Blue Skies Project, is an installation containing 1078 polaroid images of an upward view of a blue sky at the last known location of every former Nazi run concentration or extermination camp across Europe during WWII. The installation is accompanied by a 13-year real time tracking audio piece by musician Ruben Samama.

Through such artistic abstraction, Kusters offers audiences space to contemplate their own position in history and engage with the ongoing discourse around human rights, trauma and genocide.

This online conversation will feature contributions by both Anton Kusters and Ruben Samama, and will be chaired by curator and writer Ella Finer.

Details on how to access the talk will be confirmed upon registration. 

Biographies

Ella Finer’s work in sound and performance spans writing, composing and curating with a particular interest in how women’s voices take up space; how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge or change the order of who is allowed to occupy – command – space. Her research continuously queries the ownership of cultural expression through sound, informing lectures, performances and events at cultural institutions such as The British Library, Whitechapel Gallery, ICA and Tate Modern & Liverpool. She is currently working on a project about the politics of the heard and the under-heard, premiering at Onassis Stegi, Athens, in June 2020 alongside her first book Acoustic Commons and the Wild Life of Sound (Errant Bodies, Berlin in 2020). She is consultant professor of Performance Studies at Syracuse London and a trustee of Longplayer.

Questioning the act of commemoration and the loss of the experience of place in our contemporary culture, Anton Kusters (b. 1974 in Belgium) proposes alternative ways of seeing and activating audiences to continue the process of memory. He works across photography to explore the limits of understanding and the act of commemoration. 

Ruben Samama (1985) is an award-winning sound artist, composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer currently dividing his time between Amsterdam and New York.