LONDON.- Fourteen artists have been announced for the 2019 edition of Photo50 at London Art Fair 2019 16-20 January (Preview 15 January). The annual guest-curated exhibition provides a critical forum for examining some of the most distinctive elements of current photographic practice.

Who’s looking at the family, now? is an exhibition curated by Tim Clark that will engage with some fundamental questions about family life, its dynamics and complexity, as represented by a group of contemporary photographers and artists working in the UK and internationally. 2019 will also mark twenty-five years since British curator Val Williams’ seminal exhibition, Who’s looking at the family? which opened at the Barbican in 1994, offering the opportunity to consider the multifarious changes, both to notions of the family and photography, that have taken place during this time. The exhibition will feature acclaimed British and Irish artists David Moore, Trish Morrissey and Léonie Hampton alongside artists on display for the first time in London, including Mexico City-based Mariela Sancari, as well as Thai-born artist Alba Zari, Iranian Amak Mahmoodian and Lebohang Kganye from South Africa.

Ranging from documentary modes and found photography to conceptual approaches to the medium, and bringing together forms of construction or performative acts as well as sculptural interventions, the exhibited works meditate on what might constitute, or in some cases deconstruct, a family photograph. Many demonstrate the way images embark on a journey from a point of origin in the private sphere to enter the public gaze. Furthermore, boundaries between internal and external worlds become blurred to create part-spectacle, part socio-historical testimonies that provide windows onto issues of class, race and identity.

Typically, these visual representations depict family members or domestic environments, characterised by an idiosyncratic sense of scene and a focus on keenly-observed behaviour. For nearly thirty years, Matt Finn collaborated with his mother, Jean, on the series simply titled Mother. Black and white portraits depict everyday rituals set within her home in Leeds through to the time she spent in residential care at the end of her life. In the parallel project, Uncle—exhibited together for the very first time at London Art Fair—the camera follows Finn’s uncle, Des, recording the mundane habits and quirks that we recognise in ourselves and the way we utilise our space. Léonie Hampton’s project In The Shadow of Things explores her family’s attempts to clear her mother’s cluttered house, documenting the process of unpacking and sorting an avalanche of objects loaded with personal significance and memories. The work exposes the emotional toll that obsessive compulsive disorder can have, not only on the sufferer, but also on the immediate family, and offers a personal study of the fraught but tender relationship between mother and daughter, and between a mother and her possessions.

Louis Quail’s body of work, entitled Big Brother, is an intimate photographic portrayal of Justin, Quail’s big brother, and his daily struggle with schizophrenia. Through showing his hobbies, interests and loves, Quail hopes to reveal the person beyond the illness, challenging stigma head on. Another intimate universe is portrayed in Mar Sáez’s Vera Y Victoria, a visual diary centring on a love story in which one of the individuals confessed she was transsexual, bringing to light new facets of a relationship and cohabitation. For Trish Morrissey’s Front, the artist travelled to beaches across the UK and Melbourne, Australia, asking if she could temporarily become part of their family, often assuming the role and the position of the mother figure by standing in and borrowing their clothes. These highly-theatrical photographs perform memory and identity, shaped by chance encounters with strangers.

Who’s looking at the family, now? also brings together works that reflect on issues of loss and absence as a means to examine personal, cultural and collective memory. Erik Kessels’ My Sister is a stretched and repeated replay of a Super 8 film from 1970s, showing Kessels playing ping-pong with his younger sister. As the film unfolds, we are slowly confronted with the reality that his sister was killed shortly afterwards in a hit-and-run accident.

Mariela Sancari’s project Moises offers a meditation on her father who committed suicide when she and her twin sister were fourteen years old, and how he might look and behave if he was still alive. In the local press, she advertised for men that would have been the same age and appearance as her father, who then became her models for studio re-enactment.

Alba Zari’s The Y is an investigation-turned-visual study into the identity and whereabouts of her missing father. The puzzle comes together through attempts, failures and discoveries explored via photographic languages including scientific reports, archival images, film negatives, personal artefacts, mugshots and 3D facial construction. Elsewhere, in ISIS Mothers, Poulomi Basu portrays the lives, stories and environments of a number of women across Europe, whose children have embraced extreme versions of Islam and travelled to Syria to join ISIS, in many cases never to return.

Another key theme is the importance of context and the remediation of photography through archives in relation to how the family is perceived and how we connect to the past. Unveiling new works for Photo50, Jonny Briggs’ interdisciplinary practice, formed of photo-sculptures, collage and staged photography, embarks on journeys into lost parts of his childhood through adult eyes. Re-photographed images, often cut, reconstructed and combined with objects from the home, seek to examine his relationship with deception and the constructed reality of the family in an attempt to question the boundaries between Briggs and his parents, but also between child and adult, self and other, nature and culture, reality and fantasy. Thom Bridge’s One Ear & Both Eyes (2 of 2), T. Bridge (Theo & Thom Bridge) is a pair of photographs exhibited so that they cannot be seen simultaneously, a restaging of the time he and his twin brother had their photographs taken in the UK for Swedish passports in 2002, aged fourteen.

Lebohang Kganye’s film Ke sale teng frames an important point: that family photographs are more than just documentation of an event that has occurred, and are also a space for us to project what we can recall, or even to reinvent histories and newly-negotiated meanings. Through the use of silhouette cutouts of family members and other props in a diorama, the film confronts the conflicting stories that are told in multiple ways, even by the same person. Amak Mahmoodian’s Neghab series draws on her Iranian heritage. Using historical photographs taken during the Qajar period, which she sourced from Golestan Archives in central Tehran, she creates masks for her relatives to pose with, concealing identities and mystifying the push and pull of absence and presence of individuals close to her that she misses now that she lives in exile. Visitors to Photo50 will also be able to see two scale maquettes from David Moore’s Lisa and John, offering a three dimensional response and observing the ‘photographer at the scene’ while he made the famed Pictures from the Real World series on a Derby housing estate during the 1980s.

Curator Tim Clark said: “I’m delighted to have been invited to curate the annual Photo50 exhibition at London Art Fair 2019. Family is both a great leveller amongst people and as a theme offers a very rich terrain for intellectual exploration within photographic practice and visual culture today. Through the framework of this exhibition I’m excited to synergise a number of projects that have interested me over a sustained period of time. The artists presented here all demonstrate exciting and inventive approaches to storytelling, offering narrative portals through which we might reflect on the contours of familial experience; what the photographer Jo Spence explained as subject to external pressures and its own internal dynamics.”

Sarah Monk, Director London Art Fair, said: “As a medium that London Art Fair has been proud to support throughout its history, particularly through Photo50, I am pleased that this exhibition brings to light, through such an enduring theme, how photography has evolved over the last twenty five years. I’m incredibly grateful to Tim Clark for having brought together this exceptional group of artists from around the world to explore the many diverse experiences and interpretations of the family.”