Founded in 2013 by independent curators and designers Anna Planas and Pierre Hourquet, Temple ran at first as an experimental gallery space in Paris, presenting a new generation of French and international artists.
Temple is now a studio focused on curating exhibitions and designing books related to photography and mixed media, collaborating with a variety of international institutions and artists.
Recent projects include the exhibitions "The Hobbyist" at Fotomuseum Winterthur (2017) ; "Blank Paper, Stories of the Immediate Present" at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2017, the exhibition catalogue "Magnum Analog Recovery" (Le Bal, 2017) or the book, "Provoke" (Steidl, 2016).
Hobbies, Photography and the Hobby of Photography
Curated by Pierre Hourquet, Anna Planas & Thomas Seelig.
What happens when photographers and artists incorporate hobbies into their work as a means of challenging artistic practices and hierarchies? How do hobbyists describe their passions photographically, not least today in our era of digital communication and online blogs? The Hobbyist is the first major exhibition to explore the relationship between photography and hobby culture, both in connection to photography of hobbies and also photography as a hobby practice. The exhibition examines, in five chapters, what a hobby might be in an age when our notions of private and social spheres have shifted due to the impact of the Internet.
From the hippie and avantgarde cultures of the 1960s to the DIY craze of the 1980s and today’s maker movement, The Hobbyist reflects on the variety of implications of both the hobby and the hobbyist. The exhibition explores the specific places in which hobbies are pursued, and considers aspects of their commercialization in terms of consumer and lifestyle aspirations.
By way of documents from the early 1970s, the exhibition looks back on the countercultures of that era, the hippiedom and the nascent computer community, which produced the prototypical tools for the future. Within the space of just two generations, the groundbreaking innovations have become an integral part of the individual and collective daily life. The fact that hobbies embody a passionate and ritualized form of enthusiasm is amply illustrated by the content and scope of the photographic works whose creators often operate on the boundary between documentarian and hobbyist, expert and amateur, probing the ways in which photography relates to some very quirky, offbeat and eagerly pursued hobbies.
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With works of Kenneth Anger, Diane Arbus, Benedikt Bock, Mohamed Bourouissa, Chris Burden, Ricardo Cases, Bruce Davidson, David De Beyter, Jeremy Deller/Alan Kane, Glen Denny, Jeff Divine, Craig Fineman, Robert Frank, Fuzi, Alberto García-Alix, William Gedney, Kirill Golovchenko, Caro Goodden/Gordon Matta-Clark/Tina Girouard/Suzanne Harris/ Rachel Lew, Volker Heinze, Stephanie Kiwitt, Les Krims, Mike Mandel, Ari Marcopo ulos, Eva & Franco Mattes, Hana Miletić, Neozoon, Simone Nieweg, Jenny Odell, Bill Owens, Lotte Reimann, Alexander Remnev, Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone, Eckhard Schaar, Joachim Schmid, Oliver Sieber, Alec Soth and Xiaoxiao Xu.