South African photographer Jenny Altschuler has been one of the international artists exhibiting in the inaugural Dutch Art show, ‘Symbiose 2011’, in Breda, Netherlands, over the past six weeks. ‘Symbiose’ is a new annual Art Festival which will invite artists to showcase particular bodies of work under a chosen theme. The projects chosen for this first edition are all created around concepts related to life shared and the manner in which humankind and other life forms live together and in relation to one another. The...

South African photographer Jenny Altschuler has been one of the international artists exhibiting in the inaugural Dutch Art show, ‘Symbiose 2011’, in Breda, Netherlands, over the past six weeks. ‘Symbiose’ is a new annual Art Festival which will invite artists to showcase particular bodies of work under a chosen theme. The projects chosen for this first edition are all created around concepts related to life shared and the manner in which humankind and other life forms live together and in relation to one another. The range of interpretations of the title is vast, as is the variety of media used by the artists to convey their concepts.

Altschuler, the single representative from South Africa, presented ten photography-based artworks titled 'Inside Out: A Family Album'. These form part of a larger ongoing body of work begun in 2010, and is made up of a combination of earlier works exhibited at the Centre for African Studies Gallery at the University of Cape Town in 2010, as well as newer works created in 2011. 'Inside Out: A Family Album' presents composited digital photographs from Altschuler’s own archive photographed over the past 25 years. She describes the series as her attempt to transparently combine the layers of material and non-material history, conscious and sublimated experience and known and hidden feelings.

She speculates that history is an entity in flux: 'As we continue living, we continue changing, even our past. We remember other things, forget some, forgive and let go, and change our interpretations. It is harder to hold on to the present. As a photographic image maker, I am always living in the past, making sense of every backwards, through what I connect with in my growing archive. This is the way I make sense of the world, my history. This is not a scientific account with metered quotients, however the metering is definitely there, psychologically, deductively and emotionally… but there is no doubt that I am the recorder of my intuited view, and not the partaker of nor the objective bystander at the first hand event. It is always an incomplete history as the whole 360 degree account can never be relayed'.

Thus this body of work in progress deals with issues that are not necessarily consciously familiar but are intimately related to the self and to close members of family. The work presents layered realities intertwining through different members of the same household and family unit. Pain and mortality are consciously raised as tender yet real issues, often absent in the traditional family album. The work is a self-portrait, a rendition of her own intimate family circle. The imagery combines elements of female role iconography in combinations of self, mother, wife, daughter and fairy tale characters such as the sleeping beauty.

Altschuler says: 'Close relatives often embody many elements that influence and add to one’s own make up of self, whether in the reflection of self within them or vice versa. The symbiotic nature of domestic relationships such as nurturing, dependence, and feeding off each other, is pronounced within the family yet rarely present in the albums that represent it. I am bringing cognizance of these elements and that of the inevitable cycling of life, back into the representation of the family unit'.

News item courtesy of Gert-Jan van den Bemd, curator of 'Symbiose' and director of Grand Foulard