Cristina de Middel: This is What Hatred Did at Dillon Gallery by Helena Calmfors
Amos Tutuola wrote My Life In the Bush of Ghosts in 1964, a book that forced him to flee the country due to the violent reactions to the work, but that today is considered an important piece of contemporary African literature. The book is written from the perspective of a 5-year-old boy. De Middel describes how she was captured by one of the last lines in the book: “this is what hatred did,” which gives an entirely new perspective to the 5-year-old’s fantastic adventures.
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Madonna’s Sex remains the most wanted out of print book by Ian Horswill
Books are often forgotten in the digital revolution.Yet the demand remains and many out-of-print books have become collectors’ items and very valuable.What are the most sought-after out-of-print books? Bookfinder.com has released its latest list.
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Cristina de Middel's Madcap New Site Turns Her Portfolio into an Absurd Tabloid by Alex Hawkins
Cristina De Middel’s photographs tend to mix fact and fiction. Doubling as photojournalist and artist, she often reimagines documentary-based projects with humour and an offbeat sensibility. A shining example of this is her series The Afronauts, which tells the peculiar story of the Zambian space programme in the 60s, and was nominated for the 2013 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.
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Intervenciones Fluz
Convocatoria de inscripción para participar en una experiencia creativa con Cristina de Middel del 15 al 22 de julio de 2015. Cristina de Middel es una artista española que está revolucionando los cimientos de la narrativa visual tradicional. Sus proyectos tienen un marcado interés social y reformulan los límites entre la ficción y la documentación desde una planteamiento narrativo más vinculado al guión cinematográfico que a la fotografía tradicional.
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Lagos, Entre Terre et Rêve by Jean-Phillppe Rémy
Guidée par un livre de l'écrivain nigérian Amos Tutuola, la photographe espagnole Cristina de Middel a découvert le quartier lacustre de Makoko. Et y a réalisé une série recréant le monde onirique de la brousse, peuplé de mystérieux personnages.
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Cristina de Middel: el ARTE de la empatía by Ianko Lopez
Cristina de Middel (Alicante, 1975) es, por así decirlo, un ovni plantado en mitad de la escena artística nacional. Para empezar, aunque se formó en Bellas Artes, profesionalmente proviene del fotoperiodismo. Y ha incorporado este bagaje a su actividad artística: sus proyectos conjugan elementos políticos, poéticos, testimoniales, visuales y narrativos sin disonancias aparentes.
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Photographers give classic fairy tales a modern twist in four shots by Sarah Deen
Photographers have given fairy tales a modern twist for a stunning photo series ‘A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words’. Three photographers were enlisted by Nikon to update classic fairy tales. Not only that, but they had to do it in just four shots. In the #PicWorth1000Words series, award-winning photographers from the UK, Spain and Italy take a fresh approach to the stories of The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White.
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Shine Ur Eye: Cristina de Middel
Shine Ur Eye (a Nigerian expression for “to be vigilant”), is a new photography exhibition at London’s TJ Boulting Gallery that gives a fine insight into the much-stereotyped and misconceived Nigerian capital city Lagos. Three photographers, Robin Maddock, Benedicte Kurzen and Cristina de Middel each explore a different aspect, area or viewpoint on the city and describe both their own personal relationships with the city and its own deep history.
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Designing Futures, Cristina De Middel 2015 Curator
The sixth edition of LagosPhoto Festival Designing Futures positions the relationships between African design, the design of Africa and our understanding of how we may design Africa, as the platform to discuss our past, present and future intentions. With history, circumstance and fantasy as significant pointers of the lens-based projects exhibited, Designing Futures highlights crucial aspects of ‘making’ that come into play in African signs and design dialogues.
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Here's what it might look like if your spam emails came to life by Hollis Johnson
For Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel, spam emails are more than just a nuisance filtered out of your email inbox every day; they're inspiration. She began saving her spam emails and soon amassed a collection of over 1,000 of them. Mining outlandish stories of Russian widows and Nigerian lawyers, she imagined how these characters in distress appeared and set about creating for her “Poly Spam” series.
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VIDEO: Cristina de Middel, Benedicte Kurzen and Robin Maddock show different sides of Nigeria by Tom Seymour and Jon Max Spatz
Shine Ur Eye, a photography collaboration between Cristina de Middel, Benedicte Kurzen and Robin Maddock, brings together and explores their recent response to living in Lagos, Nigeria, while contrasting each photographers' dramatically different photographic process.
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Barbies, Punks, and Astronauts: 7 Must-See Booths as Paris Photo Los Angeles by Anneliese Cooper
If you could distill a photograph’s dual nature — that ever-unsteady interplay between documentary and artistry — and turn it into a theme park, it would probably look something like Paramount Pictures’ New York Street backlot. Clumps of brownstones face off against a faux Washington Square before dead-ending into bland gray warehouses, while behind the facades, white walls quickly give way to rusty scaffolding, just enough to cover the view from the street.
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Paris Photo Los Angeles is Fun, Brilliant and Very Weird by Dean Kissick
Set inside the cavernous sound stages and around the outdoors backlot of Paramount Studios, this weekend's Paris Photo Los Angeles is a very unusual art fair indeed. A Hollywood factory of movies has been hired out for the world's leading fair of photography, with visitors strolling round a historic film set from gallery to gallery under the wide blue sky.
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Latino talent in Paris Photo LA Vogue Editorial
In its third edition, the renowned art fair created in 1996 dedicated to historic and contemporary photography, will present more than 70 galleries in a unique space that will allow thousands of visitors to experience and discover contemporary art in a dynamic way. This time of 1 to May 3 , originating from 17 countries meet to explore the use of photography and the moving image.
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FORMAT photography festival: images going beyond evidence by Tim Clark
Taking the idea of evidence as its central theme, the 2015 edition of FORMAT International Photography Festival features the work of over 300 photographers in various venues across Derby, from churches to disused school buildings. But it’s the main exhibition at QUAD arts centre that has really stuck with Tim Clark.
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Evidence by Inès Lion
After the weary corridors of the Pearson Building, the modernity of the Quad gallery was a bit of a contrast! It is here, and amongst many others, that Cristina De Middel’s work is exhibited. I already knew this photographer from her series The Afronauts, a sort of poetic saga of the first and uncompleted Zambian space mission, which has been having a lot of success in the UK.
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“Photography Has Become a Word in a Sentence” by Rajni George
How do you take the tired notion of otherness and turn it on its head? By owning it. Exhibited at Panjim’s Kala Academy as part of the first Goa Photo festival—the state’s first international curated photo festival held in outdoor locations around its capital—rising star Cristina de Middel’s What Hatred Did to Them (2014, out as a photo book this June) hits at all our received ideas of Africa, while playing with the theatre of the macabre.
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Cristina de Middel: This is What Hatred Did by Jessica Saxby
Photography began as a tool to prop up her practice as a fine artist, when her focus was on drawing, but Cristina De Middel soon made the shift to the dark room. She tells me that after graduating she realized that “fine art, artistic language, I didn’t get it, I didn’t understand half the time what artists meant.”
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8 Must-See Works at Zona MACO by Julia Colavita
Mexico City, a densely populated urban hub—where ancient art and architecture exist alongside a blossoming contemporary art scene—is where Zona MACO will invite international exhibitors and collectors for its 14th edition.
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Cristina de Middel - Afronauts by Fabio
Zambia 1964, the rather eccentric school teacher Edward Makuka Nkoloso single-handedly started a space program to put the first African on the moon, thereby joining the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. Due to a lack of funding, both by the Zambian Government and the United Nations, and because one of the astronauts, a teenage girl, became pregnant, the short-lived program came to an early end.
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Cristina de Middel by Pradeep Dalal
The Afronauts was one of seven photo/text works on view in de Middel’s small survey exhibition titled Seven Stories, recently at Dillon Gallery. The show included Poly-Spam, an earlier series of staged portraits of people who send out spam emails. A disarming photograph of an earnest Nigerian attorney looking to perpetrate a scam by using a fake next of kin highlights our inability as viewers to fully decode or verify the story.
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Photographer Cristina de Middel's Intoxicating Blend of Truth and Fiction
Cristina de Middel trained as a photojournalist but chose to drop the profession in order to—as she says—seek reality through fiction. In 2013, the International Center of Photography in New York gave Cristina the Infinity Award for her book The Afronauts, which was based on the 1960s Zambian space program, which aimed to put the first African man in space.
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Paris Photo Lands at Paramount Studios by Larissa Archer
This week, the international photography world is descending upon Paramount Studios for the third annual Los Angeles edition of the Paris Photo fair. 79 galleries from 17 countries will take over the sound stages and New York Street backlot to showcase both legends and emerging talent in the medium. Dillon Gallery will present work from one of the buzziest photo series in recent years, Cristina de Middel's "The Afronauts."
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Celebrating Sisterhood at the Hong Kong Arts Festival:The Amahs and Pride and Prejudice by Carla Escoda
Ballet to the People celebrated International Women's Day this year at back-to-back performances of two plays stamped with their own distinctive brands of feminism at the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Dublin's Gate Theatre brought its classic production ofPride and Prejudice to Hong Kong, while the Festival commissioned The Amahs from filmmaker Roger Lee Yan-lam and playwright Wong Wing-sze.
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Final Frontier: The Photographs of Cristina de Middel by Lucy Davies
De Middel, 38, is half-Belgian, half-Spanish, and has lived in France, America, Spain and Belgium. Her work as a photojournalist has taken her to Haiti, India, Bangladesh and Senegal, but for now she is settled in London. She studied fine art at university in Valencia, moving towards photojournalism as a means of making a living.
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What's Hot in Mexico City- 10 Trending Young Artists
As galleries, collectors, artists, and curators make the rounds through Zona MACO, discover which artists under age 40 have been the most popular during Artsy's fair preview.
Interview with Cristina de Middel
Cristina de Middel is a Spanish photographer whose work investigates photography’s ambiguous relationship to truth. Blending documentary and conceptual photographic practices, her work asks the audience to question the language and veracity of photography as a document and plays with reconstructions and archetypes that blur the border between reality and fiction. In this interview she told us a little bit of her career, the series “This is What Hatred Did”, she will be presenting on Goa Photo 2015, and her future plans in India.
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Photography is art and always will be by Sean O'Hagan
Do Jane Bown, William Eggleston and Diane Arbus not sing on a gallery wall? Photography critic Sean O’Hagan hits back at Jonathan Jones’s damning claim that photographs cannot be considered fine art
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Stranger than Fiction: Should Documentary Photographers Add Fiction to Reality? by Olivier Laurent
Cristina de Middel used to work for a Spanish newspaper as a photojournalist until early 2011, when she had had enough. “I was disappointed with photojournalism. I’m very passionate about everything I do and when I don’t get the feedback that I expect, I’m disappointed,” she says.
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What the World's Worst Email Spammers Might Look Like by Jenna Garrett
Mrs. Alesia Atolevna Markina is a Russian widow who wants to leave a suitcase full of cash on your doorstep. Grace Smith is a 24-year-old orphan who needs a husband so she can receive her inheritance. And Fagbemi Lateef is an attorney with $3.5 million he is required to get rid of fast.You are their only hope. All you must do is follow the simple steps outlined in the email, and you’ll be a hero well paid for your kindness.
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The Camera as an Afterthought: Defining Post-Photography by Allison Meier
Photography as medium is not dead, but you can argue it is in a contemporary state of flux. In his new book Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera, released last month by Laurence King Publishing, Robert Shore amasses 300 works by artists who are using photography in an altered state, whether it’s staged, found imagery, or claiming the digital as their own.
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ArtReview October 2014
Cristina De Middel's series "This Is What Hatred Did" is highlighted in the first installment of Art Review's yearlong survey in which artists, curators and cultural commentators explore the question of what African art (of the contemporary flavour) does or can do within various local contexts across the continent.
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A Truth Beyond Photo Journalism: Cristina de Middel's Nigerian Journey by Olivier Laurent
Until 2013, Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel had never been to Africa, despite producing the critically acclaimed book, The Afronauts, a work of photographic fiction based on the true story of Zambia’s 1960s failed space program. “I was talking about Africa without having ever been,” she tells TIME. So, when the Lagos Photo Festival offered to show her work in Nigeria, she jumped at the opportunity. “
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Cristina de Middel: 7 Stories at Dillon Gallery
Dillon Gallery is pleased to announce “Seven Stories,” a survey of the last 6 years of Cristina De Middel’s conceptual approach towards visual storytelling. Though recognized as a rising figure in photography, her approach to the medium is more aligned to filmmaking than documentary or classic fine art photography.
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Poly-Spam: photographer turns junk mail into striking visuals Interview with Stephen Quinn
Critically lauded photographer Cristina deMiddel joins guest host Stephen Quinn to talk about Poly-Spam -- a photography project that visualizes spam emails as if they were from real people.
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Photographer Brings Spam Emails to Life by Colin Gorenstein
One person's spam email is another person's art.When those pesky emails began piling up in photojournalist Cristina De Middel's inbox, she did something that most would consider unthinkable — she read them.
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A Fantasy based on Zambian Space Programme - Interview with Cristina De Middel
An interview with Cristina De Middel on her series The Afronauts in the March 2015 issue of Art World Magazine.
Spotlight on Art Miami and CONTEXT 2013 by Natalie Cenci
Art Miami stands out as one of the highlights of the fall art fair season. What sets it apart is its longstanding commitment to providing access to the best of the Contemporary art market, spanning both the 20th and 21st centuries. As the oldest art fair hosted in the Miami region, Art Miami doesn't disappoint. Celebrating its 24th anniversary, it will run from December 3 through 8, and expects to welcome over 60,000 visitors.
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Cristina de Middel: "The Afronauts" by Martha Schwendener
In 1964 the newly independent nation of Zambia began a space program with the intention of putting the first African on the Moon. The program was short-lived, but it reflected the excitement and ambitions of a young country. Starting with that story, the Spanish artist Cristina de Middel created “The Afronauts,” a body of photographs, drawings and related sculptures. Fictional in most respects, “The Afronauts” nonetheless opens with an enlarged reprint of an actual letter from one Zambian minister to another, saying that “America and Russia may lose the race to the Moon, according to Edward Mukaka Nkoloso, Director of the Zambia National Academy of Space Research.”
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