Chloe Dewe Mathews: Caspian: The Elements

Description

Caspian: The Elements is Chloe Dewe Mathews's record of five years spent roaming the borderlands of the Caspian Sea. In a resource-rich region roiled by contested geopolitics, Dewe Mathews found that elemental materials like oil, rock, and uranium are central to the mystical, practical, artistic, religious, and therapeutic aspects of daily life. With essays by Morad Montazami, Sean O'Hagan, and Arnold van Bruggen, Caspian: The Elements offers a series of powerful visual narratives that explore the deep links between the peoples of the Caspian and their enigmatic and coveted landscapes. Copublished by Aperture and Peabody Museum Press

Chloe Dewe Mathews (born in London, 1982) is an artist, photographer, and video maker, whose work includes Shot at Dawn, a series depicting the locations at which "cowards" and "deserters" were executed during World War I; In Search of Frankenstein, a project created in the Swiss Alps, where Mary Shelley conceived her novel Frankenstein, using themes from the book to consider environmental and social issues of our time; and Thames Log, an investigation of the symbolic use of water and contemporary ritual in the British landscape. Dewe Mathews is the winner of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography from Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and her work has been exhibited at Impressions Gallery, Bradford, UK; 3-D Foundation, Verbier, Switzerland; and the British Library, London. Morad Montazami is adjunct research curator at Tate Modern, London, for the Middle East and North Africa. He has published essays on Farid Belkahia, Bahman Mohassess, Behjat Sadr, Hamed Abdalla, and Jordi Colomer, among others. Montazami is the author of Latif Al Ani (2017), a monograph on the Iranian photographer, and is the director of Zaman Books, which is focused on publishing books about Middle Eastern studies, visual culture, and contemporary art.

"In Caspian British documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Matthews delves deep into the landscapes and people of the Caspian Sea. Using the region's rich natural resources - oil, rock, uranium - she explores the religious traditions and communal practices, including bathing in crude oil, that endure in an area more often defined by its contested geopolitics."-Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian, Best Books of 2018, Photography category