As part of the celebrations surrounding the 60th anniversary of Pope Benedict XVI’s ordination, Jackie Nickerson has been invited to exhibit two works in the exhibition entitled “Lo Splendore della Verita, la Bellezza della Carita”. It will be open to the public from July 5 thru September 4 2011.

Jackie Nickerson also works on a very large scale and in a global context, but she focuses on how we inhabit our ordinary, everyday worlds, presenting her own, often ambivalent, subjective position. Made over a ten-year period, the work on show explores the interplay between the global and the local in the newly affluent Gulf States.

Through 50 authors and 165 photographs and videos from the collection of Martin Z. Margulies in Miami, the exhibition, curated by Régis Durand, explores the question of how man lives in the world, appropriates it, changes it and finally leaves his/her mark on the reality of emotions, life, work or nature. Artists include Roni Horn, Gilliam Wearing, Thomas Struth, Walker Evans, Lee Freidlander, Jackie Nickerson, Luc Delahaye, William Eggleston, Gregory Crewdson among others.

‘The Past is Another Country’ is a new exhibition of large-scale photographs by Jackie Nickerson at the Millennium Court Arts Centre in Portadown. This artist’s work is driven by a passionate interest in people and their environments. The current show continues her investigation into the nature of identity, exploring how global homogenisation has affected indigenous and local culture.

The exhibition inaugurating the festival in the gallery Pionova, Jackie Nickerson from the cycle Ten Miles Round, is a peculiar sociological record of her home village in Ireland, which evokes associations with the work of Sophia Rydet and August Sander. transfotografia.com

The exhibition “Press Art. The Collection Annette and Peter Nobel“ at the MdM MÖNCHSBERG is devoted to art associated with mass print media. The private art collection gathered by Peter Nobel, a prominent Swiss media and commercial lawyer, which today comprises more than 700 works of art, is presented in Austria for the very first time. A selection of 360 works, chosen by guest curator Christoph Doswald, will be shown in Salzburg. The collection is not an encyclopedic presentation of various works dealing with print media, but is based on the principle of randomness. The collection randomly and effortlessly combines works by renowned international artists with works that only have regional significance. The resulting combinations, interrelations and juxtapositions give visitors an insight into 20th century art related to print media but also highlight the influence of mass print media on our society and culture.

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Like many newly prosperous regions, the Gulf charts a course between specific traditional local culture and the global everywhere of the contemporary developed world.

Economic prosperity and technological advancement are transforming all forms of cultural activity. The desire to increase the standard of living, enjoy foreign products and ideas and adopt new technology and practices can enhance as well as disrupt cultural values. As a result there is a certain amount of displacement of traditional cultural practices by the incorporation of new technologies and cultural ideas. There is evidence of this in the interplay between architecture, commerce and technology.

The local is a matter of culture and ethnicity whilst the global invokes uniformity and commoditized blandness. In the local we have the specific and the particular. We have a sense of relevance and utility. Globalization usually involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenization that are then reinvented and absorbed into local political and cultural economies. The juxtapostion of the old and new begin to create new social landscapes.

Scarcity of resources has informed desert culture. The climate and environment dictate the importance of utility. The images of found objects of the everyday address fundamental concerns of how we choose to live and how we want to develop our culture. They become metaphors for the dilemma of our modern existence.