NEW YORK, NY.- The International Center of Photography announced the fall 2023 exhibition schedule, featuring three concurrent exhibitions that present diverse aspects of ICP’s exhibitions program: Muriel Hasbun: Tracing Terruño; Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan; and Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich will be on view through January 8, 2024.
“These three distinct exhibitions emphasize the diversity of imagemaking that ICP continues to champion, presenting in one season a wide range of artistic practices and forms of photography including experimental processes, documentary, commercial, editorial, and vernacular,” said ICP Executive Director David E. Little. “Together, they celebrate many strands of photography throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Muriel Hasbun: Tracing Terruño is the first survey in New York of the career of multidisciplinary artist Muriel Hasbun. The exhibition celebrates Hasbun’s dedication to exploring identity and memory, using her personal story to examine collective histories through photography, video, and installation from the late 1980s to the present. A descendent of Salvadoran and Palestinian Christians on her paternal side and Polish and French Jews on her maternal side, Hasbun grew up in El Salvador. Reckoning with a family history filled with exile, loss, and migration, Hasbun herself had to leave her home country in 1979 at the start of the Salvadoran Civil War. She moved to France and then the United States to study, settling in Washington, DC, where she has since worked as an artist and professor of photography.
Muriel Hasbun: Tracing Terruño presents a selection of Hasbun’s series, from her earliest photographic explorations in 1988 to recent experiments with chemigrams and expired photographic papers. The exhibition includes Santos y sombras / Saints and Shadows (1990–97), a series in which Hasbun layers negatives of archival family documents and new images to create photographs that collapse receding memories with their impact on the present. In the series X post facto (équis anónimo) (2009–13), Hasbun re-presents a selection of X-rays from her father’s dental practice, decontextualizing medical records and turning the images into landscapes and abstractions, thereby unlocking their metaphoric potential. Selections from her most recent series, Pulse: New Cultural Registers / Pulso: Nuevos registros culturales (2020–ongoing), maps El Salvador by combining art history with seismic records.
Immersion: Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan
Immersion features projects created by three individual artists during their respective residencies: Gregory Halpern’s in Guadeloupe, Vasantha Yogananthan’s in New Orleans, and Raymond Meeks’s in France, first near the Spanish border and then along the coast of the English Channel. The projects are part of Immersion, a French-American Photography Commission created by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès and presented in collaboration with ICP and the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. Each laureate of the Immersion program creates a photographic series to be shared through exhibitions and publications. This exhibition is curated by David Campany, Curator-at-Large at ICP.
Halpern’s Let the Sun Beheaded Be, from a 2019 residency, is guided by the Caribbean’s rich diversity and its vernacular culture. Slow and intimate, Halpern’s photographs pick out small details in which the tremors of history can be felt. His book Let the Sun Beheaded Be (2020) is published by Aperture. Yogananthan made Mystery Street in New Orleans during the spring and summer of 2022. Following a group of children as they play and explore together, Yogananthan’s images are alert to the subtleties of place, friendship, and growth. The book Mystery Street (2023) is published by Chose Commune. Meeks spent much of 2022 in two regions of France—the southern border with Spain and the northern coast along the English Channel—that are important crossings for asylum seekers making their way to the United Kingdom. This debut presentation of The Inhabitants looks to the traces and pathways of the land itself as a silent witness to uncertain futures. The book The Inhabitants (2023) is published by MACK.
Featuring more than 150 photographs taken from 1906 to 1978, Play the Part: Marlene Dietrich examines the multifaceted evolution of Dietrich’s (1901–1992) public persona. The exhibition features photographs by well-known artists such as Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Edward Steichen as well as photographers with whom Dietrich collaborated repeatedly throughout her life, including the noted Hollywood photographer George Hurrell, Eugene Robert Richee, and William Walling Jr. Previously unpublished images, snapshots, and other works complement the formal portraits and studio images that have come to represent Dietrich, illustrating the true complexity of her life. Assembled by collector Pierre Passebon, this exhibition marks the first time his noted collection is being shown in the United States.
Dietrich is best known for her starring roles in films including The Blue Angel (1930), the first feature-length German talkie, and for her long collaboration with the filmmaker Josef von Sternberg. Born in Berlin, she emigrated to the United States in 1930, vocally opposing the rising Nazi regime, and ultimately renounced her German citizenship. She became an active supporter of US troops in World War II, raising funds for refugees, and toured with the USO. For her efforts, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1947. On-screen and off, she challenged the gender and sexual norms of her time, making her a core figure in feminist and queer film history.
The International Center of Photography
MURIEL HASBUN: TRACING TERRUÑO
IMMERSION: GREGORY HALPERN, RAYMOND MEEKS, AND VASANTHA YOGANANTHAN
PLAY THE PART: MARLENE DIETRICH
September 29, 2023– January 8, 2024
