to be published in May 2021
European Month of Photography Luxembourg 2021

25 exhibitions
Participating institutions, museums and galleries:
Archives nationales du Luxembourg, Arendt House , Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg, Casino Luxembourg ­– Forum d’art contemporain, Cercle Cité – Espace d’exposition – Ratskeller, Galerie Fellner contemporary, Galerie MobArt, Galerie Nosbaum & Reding, Galerie Valerius, Instituto Camões, Centre culturel portugais, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand­-Duc Jean (Mudam), Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg (MNHA)
Neimënster ( Abbaye de Neumunster ), Villa Vauban – Musée, d’Art de la Ville de Luxembourg, Clervaux – cité de l’image a.s.b.l., Centre National de l’Audiovisuel (CNA) – Château de Clervaux, Centre National de l’Audiovisuel (CNA) – Dudelange, Centre d’Art Nei Liicht, Centre d’Art Dominique Lang, Konschthal -Esch

Artists:
Arbugaeva Evgenia, Auerbacher Dominique, Baltzer Bruno, Benjaminsen Eline, Bisagno Leonora, Blau Justine, Bučan Vanja, Capesius Marie, Costenoble Anne-Sophie, Dias de Magalhães Cristina, Elshan Rozafa, Erickson Keven, Floc’h Nicolas, Frith Francis, Galbats Patrick, Glaubitz Florian, Goudal Noémie, Hartmann Jana, Hofman Jeroen , Huber Frauke, Ianchis Maria-Magdalena, Inka & Niclas (Lindergård), Kahilaniemi Jaakko, Kantanen Sandra, Kohl Lisa, Kolber Véronique, Lambert Yvan, Lanier Marine, Le Sergent Daphné, Mandry Douglas, Martin Uwe H., Melchior Carole, Mityukova, Anastasia, Tito Mouraz, Oesch John, Päiväläinen Riitta, Peiffer Séverine, Pinnel Martine,, Poitevin Eric, Quetsch Armand, Reuter Daniel, Seidel Thilo, Sommer Marie, Tkachenko Danila, Tripp Caecilia, Trülzsch Holger, Tuori Santeri, Verzone Paolo , Vialet Émilie, Wylie Donovan

The European Month of Photography Luxembourg is scheduled as usual. Nevertheless, due to the Covid situation, the openings of the exhibitions scheduled end of April will most probably open with restricted access only or no public venue should the restrictions still prevail. Official opening is now postponed beginning of June for our guests and participating artists. We do expect travelling restrictions to be lifted in summer so that the portfolio review and other events can be scheduled as we expect.

 Our association has successfully closed the seventh edition of the photo festival this year featuring about twenty venues. The festival’s topic – Bodyfiction (s) – was meant to be a reflection on the representation of the body in contemporary photography by artists who question traditional models.

A majority of the exhibitions took place in the capital, notably at the MnHA, Villa Vauban, Cercle-Cité, Mudam, Casino Forum for Contemporary Art, Neumunster Abbey and Luca Center. We welcomed an old partner again – the French Institute – which occupied a space at the Neumunster Abbey and the participation of the Camoes Institute for the Portuguese Embassy. The cities of Dudelange (CNA) and Clervaux (Cité de l’Image) were among the usual participants.
Participating private galleries were regulars like the Clairefontaine Gallery and the Nosbaum & amp; Reding Gallery next to a newcomer, the MobArt Gallery.
We would like to thank our loyal partner, the Arendt Law Firm, which over the years has proved to be an essential support. The law firm provides important support for our initiatives, in particular by creating the Arendt Award for the European Month of Photography.
On the partners’ side, we thank the City of Berlin and the photo institutions of Budapest, Bratislava and Vienna who supported the project of a book on the body in photography, published at the opening of the festival in Vienna in March this year.

Artists of the Bodyfiction(s) exhibitions :
Yuri Ancarani, Mike Bourscheid, Carina Brandes, Arvida Byström, Juno Calypso, Maisy Cousins, Katrin Freisager, Weronika Gęsicka, Caroline Heider, Claudia Huidobro, Alix Marie, Karolina Markiewicz et Pascal Piron, Izumi Miyazaki, Mira Loew, ORLAN, Eva Schlegel, SMITH, Eva Stenram, Annelie Vandendael.

Topic related exhibitions :
Elina Brotherus, Pierre Coulibeuf, Cristina Dias de Magalhães, Florence Iff, Corinne Mariaud, Manon Moret.

All other exhibitions :
Ezio d’Agostino, Susan Barnett, Bernd et Hilla Becher, Valérie Belin, Peter Bialobrzeski, Sophie Calle, Eric Chenal, Sébastien Cuvelier, Denis Dailleux, Serge Ecker, Sylvie Felgueiras, Roland Fischer, Charles Fréger, Florian Glaubitz, Nan Goldin, Isabelle Graeff, Andrés Lejona, Boris Loder, Jorge Molder, Shirin Neshat, Martin Parr, Pasha Rafiy, Raoul Ries, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Thilo Seidel, David Spero, Ruth Stoltenberg, Mitra Tabrizian, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Daniel Wagener.

The Casino’s BlackBox is programming videos by three artists of very different character who dedicate their artistic work to post-human society by questioning the contemporary body and its possible mutations. As a natural complement to the photographic works of this 2019 edition of the European Month of Photography, the videos by Yuri Ancarani, ORLAN and SMITH express each in their own way their vision of overcoming reality, be it augmented, hybrid or ritualized.

Our Vienna partner Kunst Haus Wien, will present the Bodyfiction(s) project during its festival in March 2019. This collaboration results not only in an exhibition, but also in a book covering near forty European artists on this topic and a symposium with the participating cities. The book about the project Bodyfiction will be available in the FOTO WIEN Pop-up Shop in the main banking hall of the Postsparkasse, the exhibition location.
The five nominees (Carina Brandes, Matthieu Gafsou, Weronika Gęsicka, Alix Marie, SMITH. ) for the European Month of Photography Arendt Award 2019 in Luxembourg, will be presented in Vienna
The award comes with a 6.000 Euros prize money, donated by Arendt, our Luxembourg sponsor. The winner will be announced May 15, 2019 at the opening ceremony of emoplux 2019, at Arendt House.
The jury consisted of five members of the European Month of Photography curatorial staff: Paul di Felice (Kunstverein Café-Crème asbl, Luxemburg), Verena Kaspar-Eisert (KUNST HAUS WIEN, Wien), Jean-Luc Soret (Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris), Branislav Štepánek (Central European House of Photography, Bratislava), Balázs Zoltán Tóth (Ungarisches Museum für Fotografie, Kecskemét).

Café-Crème asbl was sitting among the jury members selecting the participating institutions and galleries for the Europäischer Monat der Fotografie Berlin, on invitation by our partner Kulturprojekte Berlin.Since 2004, Germany’s largest photo festival shows the entire spectrum of historical and contemporary photography in Berlin every two years. Numerous museums, cultural institutions, galleries, project spaces, embassies, and photo schools in Berlin and Potsdam present exhibitions and events which have been selected by a panel of experts. The formats range from outdoor exhibitions and large museum shows to individual and group presentations in galleries and project spaces, and impressive contributions from various international cultural institutions and embassies as well as municipal offices for art and culture.
In 2016 and 2018, the EMOP Opening Days were held in cooperation with the C/O Berlin Foundation at Amerika Haus, attracting more than 10,000 visitors over three days.

Like photography and sculpture, photography has a long tradition of representing the body of man or woman. Over the last decades, criticism of the representation of the body – particularly that of women – has taken a central position in critical debate, particularly at the instigation of women artists in the wake of feminism.
In the 60s and 70s, this challenge in the artistic community had a very strong political component.
Some fifty years later – while challenging models and clichés continues to be present in artistic production – the means of doing so have changed completely.
Object of fantasy and blue-print of social and individual desires, the body has become a projection surface mirroring the expectations of the individual. Hence the title of “Body Fictions” (Bodyfictions) given to this exhibition.
An artist like Alix Marie operates at the crossroads of photography and sculpture. Her work displays a real three-dimensionality and implies photography as well as sculptural elements. Her way of representing the intimacy of the body, requires the artist to scrutinize every detail of the skin, lips, mouth and to penetrate so to speak the very fabric of the body. “There is,” she writes, “in my work, a relation to the body that, in a way, engages the mouth more than the eye.The work here is an investigation of how to represent intimacy, those moments when the body is blown-up by the camera’s eye, where proximity reveals every detail of the skin.
The world of Carina Brandes is pure enchantment and is haunted in a particular way. There are some naked fairies in her magic world, but there are also distorted body parts, nightmarish figures. One enters above all a world of spooky and creepy figures. Naked women are pursued by monsters or change themselves into wolves or other bizarre animals straight out of the world of Greek mythology. Strange rituals are performed in front of the camera’s eye with animals, weird accessories and other objects! Women are exploring and imploring the sky above and space around. This reminds us of the magical worlds of our childhood haunted by curious beings indulging in playful but strange rituals like Alice in Wonderland.
The photography of Katrin Freisager conveys, in comparison, a much lighter, delicate vision of the female universe which nevertheless harbours undertones of a not so innocent sensuality.In the sensual, sometimes wild, entanglement of arms and legs of the exhibited pictures, the balanced pastel colours seem to slow down the wilder dynamics of the body contortions and the erotic rubbing of bodies. Tights, leggings or bandages imprison arms and legs and seem to provide some kind of protection against possible aggression.
A public figure in the art world since the 80s, after having shaken up all the canons of beauty, ORLAN is part of that first generation of women who saw in the body only an envelope or jacket humans were able to modify at will in order to match their desires, sometimes radically changing the shell. The work presented here is part of the ongoing series on hybridization, in which, through a digital trick, the artist blends the features of her face with those of a pre-Columbian or African head, for example.It is an attempt to re-build myself, to carve myself and to find one of the possible figures of oneself.
Each wave of feminism and each generation sets new priorities and the new media have provided new topics for debate. The Internet and social media have driven the debate on sexuality and identity and female artists have responded to this with a hyper-feminine aesthetics ranging from aggressive denunciation to cute styling.
Star of Instagram, Arvida Byström is the master of this game and stages herself as a beauty queen predominantly in pink while caricaturing some erotic clichés that accompany this type of behaviour and the criteria that define femininity and seduction. This new generation of artists uses strategies of self-representation with great talent while remaining aware of its underlying principles and effects.

The human body (male or female) in the arts – most often portrait or nude – in painting, sculpture or photography is a common subject and as such present in the works of most artists.
Not only have women photographers today radically moved away from the traditional criteria that characterize the genre, but they have occupied the field by redrawing it – so to speak. The body was transformed under the eye of photographers, becoming an object of quasi-surgical exploration, the mirror of sometimes delirious fantasies.
The art of the photographer becomes a play on appearances and gazes, in which works of art reflect in a sometimes pleasant, sometimes critical and ironic way, the conventions and clichés of our time as if in a distorting mirror.
Image making develops into personal fiction, built around the artist’s own status, his or her perception of attitudes, patterns and roles frequently corresponding to sex or gender, which define femininity or virility. Hence the title “Bodyfiction(s)” which covers a wide range of aspects to be found in contemporary photography.

Maisie Cousins ​​is particularly interested in female beauty, in the context of today’s social and cultural environment – predominantly erotic or consumerist – where the usual clichés about femininity and seduction are a matter of dispute. While recognizing that one easily becomes a “fashion victim”, she is able to play both parts, that of seduction and that of repulsion.
The works of Juno Calypso are in line with those of Cousins. The settings of her photographs are those of crime or horror movies although the dominant colour is not black but pink. Artifice is everywhere and the body of the woman caught in a multitude of mirrors or her face hidden under a beauty mask makes us think of the psychopath in the movie The Silence of the Lambs.
The Japanese Izumi Miyazaki, torn between the icy humour of a filmmaker like Alfred Hitchcock or the more bizarre perversion of a David Lynch, offers us images of young girls both cute and cruel in dangerous situations where they risk losing their heads literally and figuratively.
On a different level – but always in a disturbing and strange world only counterbalanced by criticism of the usual clichés of advertising conveying models of perfect and happy womanhood – the images of Weronika Gęsicka re-contextualize photographs from the 50s and 60s. These often show picturesque family scenes whose total harmony is almost unbearable. Originally from the United States, these stereotypical images of an ideal world describe women as perfect mothers and housewives and men as reassuring husbands.
Eva Schlegel often finds ideas for her works in the images of fashion magazines or newspapers. She enlarges, copies, re-photographs or blurs the original and leaves us only with the elegant shadings of an evanescent memory.The image can be seen as a kind of analytical and critical stance towards the representation of women in the media.
Caroline Heider puts our relationship to images under scrutiny as well. By manually folding photographs from magazines, she changes their form, content and message. The fold eats up some of the information from the image – body parts such as the head, torso or legs disappear into the crack. As a result, major works in the history of photography are reviewed and modified (Edward Steichen’s or Dora Kallmus’s fashion photos), whose representation of the female body may seem conventional in terms of current standards.
With a clear desire to distance herself from the erotic image, Sweden’s Eva Stenram takes up the theme of seduction and desire by restyling the images of magazines from the 50s or 60s. The Pin-Up magazines of those days exposed to the eyes of men what, in principle, was supposed to remain unseen or prudishly covered. Through digital or analogue modification, the artist re-works the images to hide again the object of desire : it becomes a playful game with the spectrum of seduction but based not on exposure but on absence.
Although Annelie Vandendael is a fashion photographer and her work appears in magazines like Elle, her approach to women is tinged with an amused distancing. The image remains beautiful and the woman attractive, but the configuration of the scenery, the locations, and the point of view creates a sometimes comical, sometimes disturbing shift of perception.
In “Faceless Dark and Bright”, the Austrian Mira Loew represents young women whose hair has replaced the face. Her way of picturing a woman negates the traditional portrait; these females seem to play a part in a bad dream because the artist eliminates face, mouth, the eyes; all disappears that allows us to identify a person – the eyes in particular – and we are left with only the secondary identification elements.
Claudia Huidobro also comes from fashion – she was a model – and stages a series called “Tout contre” (a title suggesting multiple meanings) without showing her head and giving the floor exclusively to her body, legs, hands, which occupy a bare and abandoned space. The body explores the limits of space by adding an erotic and choreographic component that contrasts with the austerity of the place.
With Smith we enter a very different world. Here, the erotic self is confronted with a world of dreamlike emotions or harsh reality. The underlying characteristic of this subject is ambiguity or the binary state of mind and body, the hesitation between masculine and feminine aspects of love.
Mike Bourscheid is not a photographer. A man of all trades and techniques like a Renaissance artist, his photographs illustrate his performances; they are the expression of character that lends its body to all kinds of expressions in different settings, he is the crazy inventor or the burlesque anti-hero on the stage of his own fictional theater.

Artists of the “Looking for the Clouds” theme: David Birkin, James Bridle, Tanja Boukal, Paolo Cirio, Balazs Deim, Dillenkofer Sinje, Richard Drew, Omer Fast, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Patrick Galbats, Marco Godinho, Samuel Gratacap, Ibro Hasanovic, Hamzehian Anush & Mortarotti Vittorio, Sven Johne, Jure Kastelic, Martin Kollar, Krecké sisters, Aude Moreau, Dimitris Michalakis, Tami Notsani & Laurent Mareschal, Daniel Mayrit, Florian Rainer, Swen Renault, Julian Röder, Wolfgang Reichmann, Aida Silvestri, Panos Tsagaris, Jules Spinatsch, Tsagaris Panos, Valhonrat Valentín.

all other exhibitions:
Augusto Alves da Silva, Baltzer Bruno & Bisagno Leonora, Birkin David, Bixhain Laurianne, Blau Justine, Chenal Eric, Cuvelier Sébastien, Delsaux Cédric, Dezso Tamas, Doretti Duccio, Ecker Serge, Fournier Vincent, Gaffney Paul, Gattinoni Christian, Gratacap Samuel, Hovers Esther
Janssens Edouard, Krieps Anna, Lehtinen Janne, Lindström Ann Sophie, Mercadier Corinne, Mevis Dirk,Tagliavini Christian, Taira Ryuji.

Opava Université (Czech Republic) contribution:
Lenka Bláhová, Jan Brykczyński, Marta Cieślikowska, Krystyna Dul, Jana Habalová, Zuzanna Halanova, Arkadiusz Gola, Krzysztof Gołuch, Anna Grzelewska, Renata Mia Köhlerová, Jan Langer, Oldřich Malachta, Konstancja, Nowina-Konopka, Dita Pepe, Daniel Poláček, Marcin Płonka, Kama Rokicka, Aleksandra Śmigielska, Petr Toman, Tomasz Tyndyk, Tereza Vlčková.

Portfolio review 2015 suppl. : Parrini Stefano, Quetsch Armand, Reinhard Bärbel, Remera Olivier, Ries Raoul, Rorandelli Rocco, Scholtus Neckel.

Street art photographers Luxembourg:
Bintner Paul, Burlacu Catalin, Fixmer Véronique, Lobo Paulo, Mevis Dirk, Mouton Jeff, Phillips David, Remera Olivier, Thinnes Giulia, Van Biesen Christophe, Weis Tom.