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Elena Rendina

Awarded

Elena Rendina

Photo researches 'untitled' (diploma work) and 'Eva'

Photography

Jury report

A Haunting Fairytale World
A young woman sits at a round, dark-stained wooden table, her eyes closed. She is wear­ing a white blouse, a ruf­fled white apron and white stock­ings. On the back of her left hand, two eyes have been drawn in black, topped by a dark-haired, doll-sized wig. The pho­to­graph is both fas­ci­nat­ing and un­set­tling.
With her sub­tly staged pho­tographs, Elena Ren­d­ina lures the viewer into a haunt­ing and dreamy fairy­tale world that still some­how seems to be con­nected to re­al­ity. Pro­fes­sion­ally, she works both as a pho­tog­ra­pher and as a styl­ist. And it shows in her works, which tes­tify not only to her pho­to­graphic skills but also to her tal­ent for all the pre­lim­i­nar­ies such as se­lect­ing ma­te­ri­als, stag­ing and styling. She painstak­ingly com­poses rooms, cos­tumes, mod­els and their poses to cre­ate a tableau where no de­tail is left to chance. She draws upon a wealth of his­tor­i­cally charged ma­te­ri­als, rare and cu­ri­ous ob­jects, old fur­ni­ture and ta­pes­tries, ob­scure ex­hibits, strange house­hold items and pieces of cloth­ing rem­i­nis­cent of the the­atre. Some pieces are wrenched out of con­text and freighted with new mean­ing. They help to kin­dle as­so­ci­a­tions with­out im­pos­ing fixed in­ter­pre­ta­tions. The ma­te­ri­als and ob­jects tell mys­te­ri­ous tales, as do the young women and girls in their ruf­fles and frills. What we see here is a sen­sual, fem­i­nine play in­volv­ing the strangely enig­matic ges­ture and the quiet gaze.
'I just imag­ine some­thing and try to find a form for it,' says Elena Ren­d­ina. The se­ries was cre­ated as part of her de­gree port­fo­lio, which the artist in­tends to de­velop fur­ther. While these at­mos­pheric pho­tographs work to­gether as a co­her­ent se­ries, each in­di­vid­ual image can also stand alone on its own mer­its. Seen as a whole, they tell a story of mys­ti­fy­ing rap­ture, whose power lies in the sense of enigma it evokes. The mys­ter­ies that un­fold be­fore our eyes re­main un­re­solved. With her po­tent vi­sual im­agery, this young pho­tog­ra­pher has suc­ceeded in cre­at­ing a com­pact, fairy­tale world that is all her own.
Au­re­lia Müller

Biography

Elena Rendina
Born in
1985
Education
Photographer

Web

www.elenarendina.com

also in

2007

2015

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