Vanités Modernes, un commissariat de Raphaële Bertho au National Center of Photography and Images de Taïwan
Curator(s) Raphaële BERTHO Co-curator Hubert KILIAN au NCPI du 24 juin 2025 au 23 novembre 2025
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.
Présentation de l’exposition sur Radio Taiwan International (en français)

Exhibiting Artist(s)
- YAO Jui-Chung
- Elina BROTHERUS
- Emmanuelle BLANC
- Alain BUBLEX
- CHANG Chih-Ta
- CHEN Po-I
- CHOU Ching-Hui
- Céline CLANET
- Frédéric DELANGLE
- Alexia FIASCO
- Alban LÉCUYER
- Letizia LE FUR
- Mia LIU
- Eric TABUCHI & Nelly MONNIER
- PENG Yi-Hang
- Edith ROUX
- SHEN Chao-Liang
- TANG Yi-Choon





































OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Raphaële Bertho (5 novembre 2025). Vanités Modernes, un commissariat de Raphaële Bertho au National Center of Photography and Images de Taïwan. InTRu - EA 6301. Consulté le 11 décembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/153iv

