Soulmates. Lynne Cohen

Photographer Lynne Cohen (1944–2014), born in Wisconsin (United States), spent most of her teaching and artistic career in Canada. In the early 1970s, she began taking photographs, focusing from then onward on interior spaces always marked by the absence of the human element. Uninhabited and silent offices, waiting rooms, halls, and corridors become the focus of a photographic gaze that resolutely seeks a neutral, transparent, and unadorned view of the world. This exhibition shows, for the first time, the work she did in 2009 for the Tender Puentes project at the University of Navarra Museum. Taking inspiration from a selection of photographs from the 19th-century collection in which she found the same expressionless and anonymous vision of empty space that she pursued in her own work, the artist proposed a tour of the interiors of the University itself, Pamplona, and Navarra. Throughout the eleven photographs, the absence of the human element, combined with the distance of a vision marked by symmetry, homogeneity, and the absence of visual hierarchies, induces a progressive estrangement and invites the viewer to enter into photographs that seem to have appeared mysteriously.