Yann Mingard: photographic diagnosis of contemporaneity

The project Everything is up in the air, thus our vertigo was conceived by the Swiss photographer Yann Mingard between 2015 and 2018. It marks a new evolution of the artist's interest in creating a "photographic diagnosis of contemporaneity", in relation to natural, technological, and social phenomena and their impact on our current state of mind and that of the world in general. The exhibition reflects Photo Elysée's ongoing commitment and support for emerging Swiss artists or those further advanced in their careers, as was the case with Nicolas Savary and Matthias Bruggmann. It is also a first in Europe.

Yann Mingard, who lives in Colombier and is trained as a horticulturist, draws inspiration from notions and methods borrowed from geology, such as sedimentation and stratification. It generates metaphors resembling paradoxes or dystopias, similar to situations that manage to combine phenomena with different temporalities, teleporting the observer from the present moment to our prehistoric past. This is illustrated, for example, in a sub-chapter where the artist explores the current media landscape and art history, juxtaposing images taken by webcam of Chinese metropolitan skies with pieces of skies painted by William Turner in the 19th century. These dual movements, both in time and space, were inspired by the work of a climatologist who studied long-term climate change through visual evidence provided by a significant number of historical paintings.

By combining a somewhat dark photographic style in his still lifes and landscapes with documents and recordings from a variety of sources, Yann Mingard creates a synoptic visual itinerary in eight chapters. Side by side are scenarios of almost nuclear accidents, attempts to resurrect the woolly mammoth, and the evolution, or more precisely, the inversion, of a Catholic prayer dating back to 1678 and used in the Aletsch region to preserve its glacier.

The global context and geological timeframes in which climate change and the Anthropocene – also known as the Great Acceleration – occur, where human activity has taken on a planetary scale, are staged here as sometimes absurd secondary chapters, specific to a particular place and historical moment. In the end, the exhibition invites us to reflect on our own role and positions as citizens and consumers in a world that seems increasingly adrift and dizzy in the face of the destiny that will be ours as a planetary network of human and non-human actors.

The exhibition Yann Mingard. Everything is up in the air, thus our vertigo was presented at Photo Elysée from May 29 to August 25, 2019.