“turn around, turn around, turn around" (Cécile Monnier) / "Antarctic Archive" (Janis Polar)

The Photoforum is delighted to kick off 2025 with two special exhibitions. “Arctic Archives” by Janis Polar and “turn around, turn around, turn around” by Cécile Monnier invite us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world. While Polar critically questions the colonial and geopolitical narratives surrounding Antarctica, Monnier sheds light on the ambivalence of human practices such as fly fishing and reflects on her personal roots and their influence on her relationship with nature in a new work.

The projects by the two artists are part of a thematic dialogue, complemented by a research library and a thematic text by the author Ann Mbuti. Together, they open up new perspectives on the question: How do we as humans position ourselves in relation to the natural world?

This question is a fitting prelude to our theme for 2025, which, under the title “Reclaim the Narrative”, explores the transformative power of photography and its ability to initiate social debates, question personal narratives and open up new perspectives on the key challenges of our time.

Cécile Monnier’s work questions the ways in which human practices and personal memories shape our relationship with ‘nature’.  By combining photography and installation, she is looking for new ways of learning to see living things* and rethinking our relationship with them.

The exhibition presents two works that explore Cécile Monnier’s personal and artistic reflections on the relationship between man and nature. In ‘Tout est fichu comme un sandwich à la soupe’, she looks at the practice of fly fishing – a symbolic interface between humans and their environment. She is interested in the way in which anglers care for the habitat that is the river, while at the same time disturbing it. Photographs of hand-made artificial flies, combined with a video installation, question the aesthetics and ambivalence of an activity that connects humans to a habitat and an ecosystem, but also reveals the power relationships and dependencies that are established between them.

In ‘turn around, turn around, turn around’, Cécile turns to her own past. The photographic installation, in which images are suspended from the ceiling in the form of continuous strips, is not only a visual tribute to her childhood in the countryside, but also a reflection on the way in which our experience shapes our relationship with nature. Here again, the interdependence between man and what he observes, cultivates or nurtures is complex. Cécile sees in the memories of rural life a link between individual responsibility and the urgent and universal need to re-consider our relationship with the world. This work serves as a prologue to her artistic approach, emphasising the dialogue between past and present, and between man and other living things.

In Antarctic Archives, Janis Polar examines how Antarctica is constructed as the “last untouched natural frontier” – only to break with this image. His work questions the violence of discovery and the geopolitical, ecological and colonial narratives that characterise this continent. In doing so, he sheds light on the role of technological and cultural constructions and the power of images in the perception of natural spaces. Antarctic Archives experiments artistically with entangled interstices, gaps and ambivalences in the writing of history, the present and the future and asks: What are we still measuring the world for?

The work deals intensively with the multiple roles of Antarctica in cultural studies and audiovisually: as an object of research, as a political space, as the basis of life for the non-human and human. Janis Polar reflects on how scientific technologies have been used to make the world under the ice visible to humans – and how these discoveries often remain ambivalent or can simultaneously arouse colonial and geopolitical interests. In doing so, he also addresses how people and nations not only map ‘nature’ through their technical achievements, but also manipulate and instrumentalise it.

At the same time, Janis Polar explores the question of how the narrative of Antarctica as an “untouched” terrain, as a frozen desert, can also conceal the actual power struggles over this region. His work reveals how ideas and images of ownership, control and discovery shape perceptions of Antarctica and thus influence our relationship to the natural world in different ways.

The exhibition combines Janis Polar’s own film footage, scientific images and archival material, as well as immersive soundscapes created in collaboration with Taonga Puoro Māori composer Jerome Kavanagh Poutama. This auditory layer gives Antarctica another “voice” and invites the audience to perceive the region not just as an empty landscape, but as an active player in global narratives.