The Syltfoundation develops and supports interdisciplinary art projects with artists from all over the world. Many projects are initiated as a collaboration of local artists and those, who are invited to Johannesburg and Sylt as part of the foundation's residency programme.
Photography exhibition
at The Shack
Orlando West / Soweto
27th June to 13th July 2014
The Sylt Foundation and the Finnish Embassy presented the exhibition “SoWeTo“ by Finnish photographer Tuomo Manninen (b. 1962). In this series Manninen depicts the life of Soweto.
Soweto has a certain chilling ring in its name: one immediately tends to think of the uprisings, the necklacing and running demonstrators. The runners in the SoWeTo series have just finished a marathon; three gentlemen tee off at the Golf Country Club and a happy family poses at their Sunday picnic. The photos of Tuomo Manninen play with our perceptions and prejudices of this most famous South African township and reveal both: the familiar and the unexpected.
In his long career as a photographer, Tuomo Maninnen has previously investigated the lives of cities such as Helsinki, Kathmandu, Havana, Saigon and St. Petersburg in his series of group portraits called Me/We. His images display the codependency among individuals, but at the same time they move in between the contradictory relationship of documentation and dramatization. The Me/We series has been showcased e.g. at the Venice Biennale and the Arles Photography Festival in France.
The exhibition will also include works from his Helsinki series.
www.tuomomanninen.com
SoWeTo installation view on youtube
SoWeTo is sponsored by:
Frame Finland
Design Capital of the World Helsinki 2012
Patricia Seppälä Foundation
Tuomo Manninen will continue his series of group portraits in Phnom Penh/Cambodia and Yangon/Myanmar in 2015 and 2016.
