Vanités Modernes - Nos Territories

DURATION: 2025-06-24 ~ 2025-11-02
VENUE: National Center of Photography and Images, Taipei.
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Vanités Modernes

In France and Taiwan alike, the ideals of modernity are crumbling under the strain of climate change. The vision of a world with boundless resources, perpetual growth, and human mastery over nature is no longer sustainable. Today, we find ourselves at the edge of this collapsing modern paradigm, searching for equilibrium. This is the narrative that photographers explore in this exhibition: a society clinging to obsolete utopias while confronting the raw power of living ecosystems. Their images depict a world in flux, unstable, fragmented, and marked by a profound loss of identity and coherence, serving as contemporary vanitas. Although these works differ significantly from the Dutch vanitas paintings of the 17th century, they share a common purpose: to remind us of the emptiness behind the illusion of stability in a world on the brink.

The photographers present a visual reflection on how we inhabit a world teetering on collapse. Landscapes are no longer static territories but instead become subjective, fragmented, and ever-shifting constructs shaped by human presence and intervention. These works interrogate how we divide time and space, visibility, and invisibility, situated at the crossroads of aesthetic and political practices . The exhibition seeks to foster a shared perspective by connecting artists from vastly different corners of the globe, each working within distinct economic, geopolitical, cultural, and social contexts. Despite these differences, both tangible and imagined, a unifying thread emerges: their work compels us to confront the roots of our ecological crisis, exposing humanity’s foundational arrogance, the myth of dominion over a submissive nature. Photography exposes hubris and its consequences, revealing the fragile aspects of our reality. In response to these crises, philosopher Bruno Latour calls for abandoning the dualistic separation between nature and culture to (re)embrace our terrestrial existence. His critique targets the abstract technocratic modernity that alienates us from direct experience and observation of the world. Latour advocates for a bodily engagement that enables both physical and symbolic reappropriation of our place within it, a survey that exposes the state of our environment while redefining our being-in-the-world in Heideggerian terms.

The city epitomizes modernity’s pursuit of progress and spatial rationalization. As both product and driver of modernity, it serves as a potent metaphor for its aspirations and contradictions. The urban figure becomes central to critiquing modern ideals through contemporary photography, capturing their birth, life, and eventual demise. This existential cycle unfolds as a recurring tragedy across continents.


Nos Territories
The vanity of moderns lies first and foremost in believing themselves masters of the Earth with endless resources. Soil and subsoil, land and sea: no part of the living world seems to have escaped the insatiable appetite of industrial societies. The photographers here invite us to wander through these territories that we have so patiently and completely transformed into our own image. More than a real or objective picture, they offer us a reflection of our human-shaped world that is both subtle and clear-eyed, questioning how we might learn to live in a world where concrete, asphalt, and neon have

Curator: Raphaële BERTHO
Co-curator: Hubert KILIAN

Artists (Listed in Alphabetical order):

Nos Territories
Emmanuelle BLANC
Elina BROTHERUS
CHANG Chih-Ta
Céline CLANET
Eric TABUCHI & Nelly MONNIER
Letizia LE FUR
PENG Yi-Hang
SHEN Chao-Liang
YAO Jui-Chung