Entendue, new work of Charlotte Dumas with FLAT / / LAND at Paris Photo
November 2, 2023
For the second time FLAT // LAND shows the new work of Charlotte Dumas at Paris Photo, the art fair dedicated to the photographic medium Paris Photo. This year the gallery will show work of Charlotte Dumas’ new series, entitled Entendue – That what is heard and what is remembered – and, to celebrate her new publication A Terra, Flatland Gallery will have a selection of these straydogs from the city streets of Palermo.
When in 2016 Charlotte Dumas saw a gentle drawing of an elephant in the exhibition In the Company of animals at the Piermont Morgan Library in New York City, it was a drawing of the elephant Hansken by Rembrandt van Rijn made around 1637. Hansken was the first elephant that was brought to the Netherlands in 1633 and Rembrandt drew her often. Drawings by European artists drawn from life at that time were of (Asian) Elephants in captivity. Like Hansken, elephants were taken to Europe from their natural habitat to be exhibited in (moving) menageries over- seas. The travel by ship from countries they were native to, like Sri Lanka and Vietnam, was an incredibly tedious one. It’s hard to imagine that an elephant could endure such a trying voyage.
Interested in our relationship with animals, Charlotte decided to look at the different aspects of the complicated and often exploitative history related to the use of elephants and their ivory.