Mirzapur, Uttarh Pradesh

Item

Title
Mirzapur, Uttarh Pradesh
Creator
Deidi von Schaewen
Artist ID
190
Description
Photograph of a sacred tree of India, decorated with textile flags, orange flowers, and stone figures at the base of the trunk.
Category of Media
Photograph
Media
inkjet photograph
Accession Number
2014.013
Location
0449a - sonotube
Acquisition Method
Donation, unrestricted
Dimensions of Work
52" x 44"
Donor ID
190
Condition Statement
10/2022: Moderate curling top edge and bottom edge.
Artist Bio
Living and working in Paris, the German photographer and artist Deidi von Schaewen began directing films, such as the short film Roland Roure (1982), before devoting herself to photography, which she discovered at the Academy of Arts in Berlin and which fascinated her with its “magical emergence of images born in the dark”. Attached to the notion of the ephemeral, she began a work of cataloguing, aiming to identify traces of reality. Her objective, frontal photographs consist of scaffolding, walls, gutters, footpaths and some silhouettes. Distancing herself from her early research, the artist now exhibits elements of architecture, landscape and cities from around the world with a constant concern for objectivity. She photographs buildings of contemporary architects such as Tadao Ando and Jean Nouvel. To reveal what she perceives, D. von Schaewen returned to the approach of minimal art and to the frontal and industrial aesthetics of Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Always inspired by her environment, her works composed in series reveal yet another of her obsessions, that of ephemeral traces that find themselves in modern cities in various forms. They bear witness to that which appears to be the new everyday aesthetics: walls beginning in 1961, scaffolding in 1966 and footpaths from 1977, to the more recent covered cars and Indian towers became the very object of her visual research. For her work Inside Africa (2003), the artist created a link between her interest in architecture and in the ephemeral by looking at other forms of habitat. Her series shows the precariousness of urban housing and shacks in certain regions of Africa, built like a colourful patchwork of everyday elements.

by Maïa Kantor, Translated from French by Katia Porro.
Source: https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/deidi-von-schaewen/


Paris-based photographer and filmmaker Deidi von Schaewen usually works for several years on series of motifs from which she develops “unexpected typologies that reveal the unlimited creativity of human beings”. Many of these series have been and are still being made in India, a country she has travelled through for over thirty years, fascinated by everyday life in the countryside and the cities: huts in the slums of Bombay, murals of the women of Hazaribagh, interiors of noble houses and, above all, places of worship dedicated to the gods of nature: groves and sacred trees.

India’s sacred trees are widespread in the subcontinent and belong to different cultures and religions, especially Hinduism, Buddhism and the animistic views of indigenous peoples, each with their own significance. The sites are found in the most diverse locations, but hard to find for those looking for them.
Source: https://loeildelaphotographie.com/en/domaine-de-boisbuchet-deidi-von-schaewen-sacred-trees-of-india-dv/