"By the river of Kings" Jacob Aue Sobol

BY THE RIVER OF KINGS

Jacob Aue Sobol

From 17th FEBRUARY to 30th MARCH 2018

OPENING Saturday 17th February 20hs

"The Chao Phraya River is the lifeblood of Thailand. It is born as the Ping and Nan rivers become one. From there its waters flow south to Bangkok. These pictures are a recording of what I saw and the people I met along The River of Kings in Bangkok." J.A.S

MONDO GALERIA presents for the first time in Spain "BY THE RIVER OF KINGS" an exhibition of the Danish photographer member of the MAGNUM PHOTOS agency: Jacob Aue Sobol (Copenhagen, 1976). This work compiled in a book of the same name presents “the” city of Bangkok found by the photographer. Its streets, its people, its lights sifted by the black and white contrast so particular of Sobol´s work. His approach to people is very special, his search for beauty in unique compositions that poke around in between the grotesque and the unbridled at times and between the perverse and the childish others, but always in the search for love.

The author will be present on the opening to sign books and a portfolio review will be organized for photographers who like to Exchange with the photographer.

“By the river of Kings”. 2016. Jacob Aue Sobol.

Bangkok, Nueva York, Singapur, Madrid ...

Black and White photography has challenged the world of truth; it has defined a parallel reality beyond comprehension. We have absorbed information coming from a medium presumed to be close to real life but certainly seriously far from it, much closer to a hallucinatory realm. When have our dreams or imagination been deprived of color? When have our collective unconscious been on black and white?
Photography has been from its beginning, somewhere in the middle of 19th century, a tool to help socioeconomic development to grow on a controlled direction, taking us to what we understand today as “common… ordinary”.
“Ordinary” or “common” did not exist before we could print a presence or personality on film or paper. (not even think of image in motion). Everybody was, as a matter of being, not focused on the looks of others; of “The other”.

Nowadays we concentrate on an individuality pushed and pampered by fashion, image and aesthetics, leaving aside humanity, sensibility and love. There is where evolution from personal disappearance has brought us, pressed by technocracy and scientology (not religiously). Religion is far from it, its abandon, left behind. No rules of control or order, just business. As always has been but in a macro way (wave. Tsunami). An endless desperation for selling what nobody wants. An invented market empty of goods, empty of content.

We travel far, and we do not see the human. We travel far trying to find a difference to pumper us, that makes us feel comfortable on our shit. That creates an “Other” where it’s just light; silver and paper. Humanity is there, on the streets that are different from our streets but deeply inside are the same ones. On rivers that carry an energy that its somewhere in our veins but we don’t want to see it. In an order, that because it seems different to ours, makes us feel it as distant, but it’s really there, just next to our day by day things on the deep core of family life. Can we change that? Can we move from our convention and accept a different stream, a different source, a different river?

That’s the challenge, the purpose, the quest that we face on this work. A vision, of a world that is there, waiting for us to accept it and to acknowledge it as a part of our life.

“By the river of Kings”. 2016. Jacob Aue Sobol.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Jacob Aue Sobol
(Copenhague, 1976)

Jacob Aue Sobol was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1976. He lived in Canada from 1994-95 and Greenland from 2000-2002. In Spring 2006 he moved to Tokyo, living there 18 months before returning to Denmark in August 2008. After studying at the European Film College, Jacob was admitted to Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Documentary and Art Photography in 1998. There he developed a unique, expressive style of black-and-white photography, which he has since refined and further developed.In the autumn of 1999, he went to live in the settlement Tiniteqilaaq on the East Coast of Greenland. Over the next three years, he lived mainly in this township with his Greenlandic girlfriend Sabine and her family, living the life of a fisherman and hunter but also photographing. The resultant bookSabine was published in 2004, and the work was nominated for the 2005 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.

In the summer of 2005, Jacob traveled with a film crew to Guatemala to make a documentary about a young Mayan girl’s first journey to the ocean. The following year he returned by himself to the mountains of Guatemala where he met the indigenous family Gomez-Brito. He stayed with them for a month to tell the story of their everyday life. The series won the First Prize Award, Daily Life Stories, World Press Photo 2006.

In 2006 he moved to Tokyo and during the next two years, he created the images from the book I, Tokyo. The book was awarded the Leica European Publishers Award 2008 and published by Actes Sud (France), Apeiron (Greece), Dewi Lewis Publishing (Great Britain), Edition Braus (Germany), Lunwerg Editores (Spain) and Peliti Associati (Italy).

In 2008, Jacob started working in Bangkok and Copenhagen.

In 2011 his work is presented at MOMA San Francisco and from that on published a series of remarcable and prized works, all with his distinctive and unique style.

“By the river of Kings”. 2016. Jacob Aue Sobol.

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