FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 2024
Steven Seidenberg exhibits The Architecture of Silence at Unseen Amsterdam with Albumen Gallery
Untitled Vanity, The Architecture of Silence
Amsterdam, NL – Lens-based artist and writer Steven Seidenberg exhibits photographs from his series and book, The Architecture of Silence: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South (published by Contrasto Books), with Albumen Gallery for Unseen Amsterdam, on view September 19 – 22, 2024.
In The Architecture of Silence, Seidenberg examines the failed post-war land reform movement known as the Riforma Fondiaria to which these imaged structures and landscapes belong. Between 1952 and 1972, the Italian government implemented this land reform policy in a few key agrarian centers of the countryside. Funded by the Marshall Plan, the program placed land in the possession of impoverished families, but did so without the infrastructure necessary to make the small holdings sustainable. This failure brought about a mass migration into the developing industrial North, leaving dozens upon dozens of post-war, often cast-concrete structures abandoned in the now machine-cultivated fields.
In 2017, Seidenberg began exploring the landscapes, material culture, and remaining structures of this failed program in the vast agricultural areas of Basilicata and Puglia. The resultant series of images is not simply documentary, but presents the imperiled remnants of these absent lives in the form of hauntingly beautiful, painterly compositions. Again and again, these photographs reveal a poetic fragility that compels a primordial empathy in the viewer, drawing our attention to the lives destroyed through the Riforma, and thereby evoking the elemental complexity of loss and its aftermath the world over.
As part of Albumen’s exhibition alongside artists Robert Conrad, Robert Kemnitz and Edmund Sumner, Seidenberg’s work is situated within the exhibition’s “documentation and celebration of architecture, in particular, an exploration of abandoned buildings and their silent, often ghostly, deserted urban decay and rural abandonment.”
In addition to the exhibition for Unseen Amsterdam, Albumen Gallery will be offering books from their publishing branch Albumen Publishing.
Viewing Schedule
THURSDAY 19 SEPTEMBER
14:00 – 17:00 VIP Preview
17:00 – 22:00 Official Opening
FRIDAY 20 SEPTEMBER
11:00 – 18:00 Regular Opening hours
SATURDAY 21 SEPTEMBER
11:00 – 19:00 Regular Opening hours
SUNDAY 22 SEPTEMBER
11:00 – 19:00 Regular Opening hours
Untitled Blue Room with Fig, The Architecture of Silence
About Steven Seidenberg
Photographer and writer Steven Seidenberg’s collections of photographs include The Architecture of Silence (Contrasto, 2023) and Pipevalve: Berlin (Lodima Press, 2017), and he has had solo exhibitions of his work in Japan, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and the United States. He is the author of numerous collections of lyric, philosophical prose and poetry, most recently Anon (Omnidawn, 2022), plain sight (Roof Books, 2020), and Situ (Black Sun Lit, 2018). His books have appeared in Swedish, Italian, and Portuguese translation.
Website: www.stevenseidenberg.com
Instagram: @steven.seidenberg
About Albumen Gallery
Albumen Gallery was set up in London in 2013. Specializing in 20th century and contemporary photography Albumen Gallery responds to shifting trends in how photographic art is experienced and purchased by collectors. In a world where online immediacy and global availability become accepted and expected Albumen Gallery eschews a permanent brick and mortar gallery space targeting through its online exhibition programme a wider international audience. The gallery’s online presence is firmly coupled with a dedicated personalised customer and advisory service.
The breadth of our portfolio reflects diversity and tastes of the collector base we cater to. Albumen Gallery clients range from public and private museums, corporate collections and experienced collectors to those who are embarking upon their first photographic purchase. Discovering and nurturing new talent is an important aspect of our work. We introduce our collector base to emerging artists, who – in the footsteps of the great masters of photography and in a creative dialogue with the history of the medium – create exciting new contemporary art making use of the rich and wide-ranging possibilities the medium offers. Pioneering the online gallery without walls concept, Albumen Gallery is continuously developing the format and potential of online exhibitions as an accepted platform for exhibiting art photography. The Albumen Gallery Publishing series accompanies each exhibition with a dedicated photo book.
Website: www.albumen-gallery.com
Instagram: @albumen_gallery