HRAUN: Yogan Muller
The exhibition "Hraun" by Yogan Muller, now on show at the Reykjavík Museum of Photography, shares the same title as photographic series - an exploration of the fringes of the Greater Reykjavík area and of some places on the Reykjanes peninsula, where a rigorous urban planning meets "nature" often quite brutally.
"In the wake of the Anthropocene, the canonical ontologies we've been long using in the Western world are slowly rendered mute. Nature/culture, human/non-human and somehow subject/object are becoming heavily challenged: we are far from being detached. On the contrary, we are getting more and more entangled with non-human beings and agencies.
Affected by the typical urban sprawl and the silent yet dramatic geological pressure at the same time, the Reykjanes peninsula seems often torn apart between an avid modernization and the careful listening of the Earth tremors or the whispers of the elves. There, humans and non-humans seemed to rely on each other more than ever.
I tried to photograph that mutual support (i.e. that “earthian” or "terrestrial" bond), bringing the two entities together in the frame, in a sense of fraternity."
-Yogan Muller
Yogan Muller is practice-led PhD candidate in landscape photography and epistemology based in Brussels, Belgium.
He considers the Anthropocene as a tremendous challenge for the Western civilization and for the arts, mostly because our aesthetics deviated from the most fundamental sense of the word: being sensible to.
His latest solo show was set up at Institut Supérieur de l'Étude du Langage Plastique (ISELP) in Brussels (Belgium) in November and December 2015. He is currently finishing his PhD and is working toward several publications.
