For over two decades, Juliette Agnel has travelled the world documenting remote landscapes. Her interest in anthropology and archeology alongside a life-long passion for the histories of fallen kingdoms, explorers, and ancient mythologies, has led Agnel to pursue ambitious site-specific projects abroad. Most recently, she has photographed in Greenland, Morocco, Sudan, and the Alps.
This exhibition features Agnel’s ongoing project, Les Nocturnes, a series she began in 2017. Using composite images, she creates ethereal landscapes surrounded by expansive starry skies. By combining photographs taken at different times of day, she conveys every detail of the terrestrial and cosmic elements in her subjects.
Agnel’s latest body of work, Taharqa et la nuit, captures the mysterious beauty of the ruins of Meroe in Sudan, home of the ancient kingdom of Kush and the Pharaoh Taharqa. She was entranced by the power and poetic beauty of the vestiges of the once-mighty empire emerging from the desert sands. Her approach to photographing her nocturnal landscapes lends a surreal quality to the work that transports us to another time.
In all my subjects, there is the presence of terrestrial and cosmic forces. In Meroe, all the sites were built according to the position of the stars, in particular the tombs. The cosmos had a sacred significance. What drives this series is the desire to show the forces that are there, invisible forces, that speak of our origins and the relationship to the sacred and to nature - and to ask myself the question of how to show these forces that animate this place.
– Juliette Agnel
