This programme is born of the present, an unprecedented global experience, which confines us physically and at the same time brings us together through digital media.
The dialogue with different places, cultures and disciplines in this new temporality of the virtual world opens the possibility of meeting in real time with artists, curators, collectives, editors, writers from all over the world. The proximity of the screen makes possible a personal dialogue with people from cultures that were previously completely remote to us. And at the same time, it allows us to see the complexity of the context of each universe that constructs the moment and the perspective of each person and their work.
We are faced with the urgent need to ask ourselves from where and for whom we produce our work, where the material that nourishes it comes from and what are the new spaces we need to rethink the purpose of creation, its place in society and, above all, what are the spaces of validation we choose as our goal. What do we aspire to with our work?
It seems fundamental to us that these questions arise from listening and dialogue between a broad spectrum of creators from different parts of the world, which will allow us to open up questions and the possibility of reconstructing art scenarios. We thus begin a journey of learning, questioning and reflection that will take us along untrodden paths and, therefore, fortunately, to places as yet unknown, starting from our own practice.
53
HYDRA HEADS
WITH-TEXT
PRE RECORDED ONLINE WORKSHOP
Pre-recorded sessions, translated and subtitled in English and Spanish languages
For this reason, we consider it fundamental to begin with recorded sessions in which we give access to a wide and diverse audience, to the uniqueness of each participant, crossing the borders between different languages, time zones, technological capabilities, to access the richness of the context of each voice, of each work.
These sessions are the basis of a common ground of information, which allows for other live programmes, to seek production, collaboration and dialogue that open the way for new projects to be built on the basis of the activation that access to the experiences shared in the HEADS OF HYDRA programme will provoke in each participant.
GUESTS FROM AFRICA, ASIA, EUROPE, THE UNITED STATES AND LATIN AMERICA
ABDO SHANAN(Algeria)
ALAN SSALI HOFMANIS (U.S.A. | Uganda)
ANA MARIA MAUAD (Brazil)
ANDREA SULTIENS (Netherlands)
ANSHIKA VARMA(India)
CANON GRIFFIN (Uganda)
巢佳幸 CHAO JIAXING (China)
DARIA TUMINAS (Netherlands)
DAVIDE QUADRIO(Italy | China)
DEBORAH KLOCHKO (United States)
DUNCAN WOOLDRIDGE(United Kingdom)
EUGENIA MACIAS (Mexico)
ESTRELLA DE DIEGO(Spain)
FRED RITCHIN (United States)
GERARDO MONTIEL KLINT (Mexico)
GUILLERMO SANTOS (Colombia)
HALEH ANVARI (Iran)
ISAAC NABWANA (Uganda)
ISHAN TANKHA (India)
JESSE LERNER (United States)
JOAN FONTCUBERTA (Spain)
JUAN PERAZA GUERRERO(Venezuela | Argentina )
KAALI COLLECTIVE (Bangladesh | India)
KAREN IRVINE(Chicago | United States)
KRISTIN TAYLOR (Chicago | United States)
LAURO LÓPEZ-SÁNCHEZ(Mexico)
LIZ WELLS (United Kingdom)
LUCY SOUTER (United Kingdom)
LUKAS BIRK (Austria)
MARGARITA MARTÍNEZ PÉREZ(Chiapas, Mexico)
MARIA DO CARMO RAINHO(Brazil)
MRIDU RAI( India, Confluence Collective)
MUNIRA MUTAHER(India)
MYNA MUKHERJEE(India)
NAIEF YEHYA(Mexico | United States)
NIDA MEHBOOB (Pakistan)
PAULA ACOSTA (Colombia)
PEDRO VICENTE (Spain)
RAHAAB ALLANA (India)
RUSSELL LORD (United States)
SADIA MARIUM (South India)
SANTIAGO RUEDA FAJARDO (Colombia)
SHI HANTAO ANVARI (China)
SHWE WUTT HMON (Myanmar)
SUSAN BRIGHT (United Kingdom)
SVEA JOSEPHY (South Africa)
SRINIVAS KURUGANTI (India)
THUMA COLLECTIVE(Myanmar)
Bye Jiaxing. Rituals inRituals of the Future.
PROGRAM
DATE TO BE CONFIRMED
Due to COVID conditions in the different countries of the workshop participants, the starting date had to be adapted to the circumstances of each case.
ABDO SHANAN (ALGERIA)
Finding your voice
How can we find our voices as artists? I will take you through my own never ending journey to find my voice as an artist. My influences and inspirations and how they helped me build my way of telling a story in my own voice.
ALAN SSALI HOFMANIS (UNITED STATES | UGANDA)
Wakaliworld - from Uganda and beyond
How local genre filmmakers are discovering a global audience
ANA MARIA MAUAD (BRAZIL)
Photography and history. A look at contemporary visual experienceThese sessions address the relationship between history and the visual dimension of social experience. It is part of the field of cultural history and representations, supported by conceptual reflection on the fields of the history of images and visual culture.
ANDREA SULTIENS (NETHERLANDS) and CANON GRIFFIN (UGANDA)
On The Record | Since 2011 Ugandan artist R.Canon Griffin and Dutch researcher and artist Andrea Stultiens run the platform History In Progress Uganda. They have digitised and made available to the general public numerous collections of photographs from or about Uganda. More importantly, they have developed ways to artistically engage with these historical materials and make them relatable, and thus relevant to the present. Their contribution is based on this experience and on the idea that history is here, and that it is still important to place the as-yet-unknown glimpses in The Record.
ANSHIKA VARMA (INDIA)
Metaphors in Nature | Through her own personal memories and engagement with nature, the artist will discuss how photography has led her to decipher and create mythologies in photography. Through the artist's own works and those that have impacted her, Anshika seeks to reaffirm the complex relationship between human psychology and our natural environments. The photographic medium and its enquiries synchronise with our desire to find belonging. In it is embedded a language layered with metaphor and symbolism, which can transform our hakikat (reality) into the kahani (story) of all.
BUNU DHUNGANA (NEPAL)
The life experience of a Nepali woman is shaped by patriarchy. The need to control a woman is ingrained in the Nepali psyche. Non-conformity has a cost: any challenge to norms raises questions, suspicions, concerns, ridicule - some visible, some silent and invisible. I regularly find that I keep crossing many of these boundaries. Given the psychological push and pull, I struggle to be the woman I want to be: fearless and supportive of my choices.my work attempts to explore my sense of self in relation to society by saying things I am not supposed to say, by making visible what is supposed to remain out of sight. I use the colours red and white to question what it means to be a woman in my society. The colour red is significant in the life of a Nepali woman: it indicates marital status, it symbolises prosperity, sexuality, fertility and life. And the colour white is used to signify the purity, vulnerability and fragility of the woman as the untouched bearer of patriarchal honour. Confrontations also explores my relationship with my mother.
Nepal
Catherine Opie
佳幸 CHAO JIAXING (CHINA)
I. Ship of Theseus - Three ritualised scenes Based on the research "Ship of Theseus" at the Asia Culure Center, Gwangju, South Korea, which excavated the ritual changes in East Asia and their revitalisation today as forms of artistic creation in traditional markets, sports competitions and Zen temples.
II. Rituals in the future Rituals in the future is a collective creation project. The mission of the artists is to become "assistants" and help each participant to represent their thoughts on this theme in artistic languages, shown in the exhibition and to interact with each other, and all this will generate the rituals of ceremony that relate us.
DARIA TUMINAS (THE NETHERLANDS)
CinePhotoBook A book "with a cinematographic style", "an almost cinematographic non-linear narrative", "raw cinematic flow of consciousness". That's what you can often hear about photo books. But what exactly is this cinematic aspect of publications, and what are the relationships between cinema and photo-books in general? The lecture is based on the research I was conducting for the Sunday Seminar at the Stedelijk Museum and the Opening of The PhotoBook Review #012.
DAVIDE QUADRIO (ITALY | CHINA)
The Asian context in the 1990s and 2000s: from independent initiatives to the rise of public and private institutions in China and Asia Informal networks among Asia: the role of China, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta and Taiwan. Third Realm exhibition and the FarEastFarWest collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Global China: a historical summary of the last 20 years of contemporary China's presence on the world stage. Problems of interpretation and cultural diffusion
DEBORAH KLOCHKO (UNITED STATES)
I. Out of the Shadows: Contemporary Chinese Photography. This is part of our Pacific Rim focus which Australia was part of and next year it will be Japan. Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres is our curator for the China exhibition. Discussion of contemporary photography exhibitions from Mexico, Australia and China. Each incorporated a different curatorial model in their creation and all added to the global dialogue on contemporary art through photography. A strong advocate for diversity, empathy and equality, Klochko's major initiatives include the admission of Pay-What You Wish, the screening of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival for nearly a decade, and the growth of the Youth Exposure and SEPIA senior learning programmes. Deborah Klochko received her Master of Arts in Teaching, Museum Education from George Washington University in Washington, DC and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the Studio for Visual Studies (SUNY) in Rochester, New York.
EUGENIA MACIAS (MEXICO)
Archives, recent mobilisations and heritage monuments. This session will address the documentation of the movements Yo soy 132, the Ayotzinapa 43 and women's protests in Mexico and how they expanded the significance of heritage monuments as memory supports for social protests.
GUILLERMO SANTOS (COLOMBIA)
Towards a photographic poetics of time in the GIF and the cinemagraph This session presents a reflection on the methodologies of photographic creation that involve the liminal territory between the still photographic image and the moving image in hybrid formats such as timelaps, animated gif or the cinemagraph. This reflection traces the malleability of time as a creative core and artistic strategy. These formats are used in the immediatist context of the web and social networks, and involve visual rhetorics that play with the malleability of time. Based on an analysis of the way we assume the temporal experience in our everyday lives in these early years of the 21st century, especially in the urban context, we investigate how these ways of understanding and experiencing time have had an echo in the evolution of visual languages and the mechanisms of creation, dissemination and circulation of images that have developed in recent centuries, and especially in the specific case of photography. It analyses how the use of these formats in other contexts offers an artistic strategy that can be capable of arousing both a critical and poetic sense of the urban environment we live in every day.
Exhibition Views, Catalyst, Presented at Jimei X Arles 2019 in partnership with Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, Xiamen, China
Image 1: Bunu Dhunghna (Nelpal - Image 2: Genevieve Naylor Blocos (Brazil)
DUNCAN WOOLDRIDGE (UNITED KINGDOM)
I. Thinking photography as an experiment: it is about rethinking photography as a meeting point of testing and observation, as a way of thinking about the image in its full relationship with the world. In other words, I propose that the image is not simply a record, but proposes a way of seeing, thinking and acting in the world. I argue that photography has a long relationship to experimentation, going back to optics and experimental methods before photography was invented, but also visible today in artists working with photography and asking new questions about what it can do. I am currently doing research for a book on this area.
II. Photography and Future, beyond the Past or the Present: this comes from several of my recent essays, where I am interested in how we are obsessed with the image as a record of the past, but never - in most of the literature on photography - consider at all the idea that the image might tell us about the world to come. Despite this, in projects as varied as Edouard Taufenbach, Rosangela Renno, or Dafna Talmor, the image is always in motion. I make this a strange but purposeful argument that photography can also show us the future. By this I don't mean that it produces an image exactly of something that has not yet happened, but that it can try to imagine the impact and consequence that an image has on the world; for example, how, today, many photographers increasingly consider the image alone, thinking spatially, discursively, affectively and gesturally. We now consider the object the photograph becomes, the life the image will lead and the way people will interact with it beyond the moment of its making. This proposes an understanding of photography that has substantial agency and the capacity to act in the future.
ESTRELLA DE DIEGO (SPAIN)
Photographing New York: Austen and AbbottAlice Austen and Bernice Abbott are united by the New York skyline. In fact, both take the city as a frame of reference and their privileged setting. Through their photographs, they also organise their own freedom and construct a new idea of the documentary.
FRED RITCHIN (UNITED STATES)
The transformation of photography, the challenges this represents, and what can be done differently, and in some ways more effectively, than before, both in terms of personal expression and social impact.
GERARDO MONTIEL KLINT (MEXICO)
That strange phenomenon we call photography. The intensities of being installed in pleasure, speed, ceased. It was so comfortable to be someone else, to contain crowds, to ride a plane, to be, to desire and to imagine induced futures. Emotions without representation... the origin of creation. What kind of tool is art? What can it do for us, for our psychological fragilities? The process of transformation is to accept, to deny is to subdue. Immateriality is the ghost that the creator must grasp, apprehend from hauntology, trying to listen to what is not here. Disruption, displacement and dissociation are necessary in the face of visual circuits increasingly predictable by the dominant photographic aesthetics of the moment, as a dangerous reality of homogenisation. To colour the captivating resonance of the absence that is out of sight, to look into the unknown, then to provoke the counter-reflections of the inner voice, the abyss in the doubt of provoking the unrepresentable, perhaps the sublime phenomenon of the creator of strange visible spectres.
HALEH ANVARI (IRAN)
Iran's politics of representation. The solidity of words, the fluidity of images, finding balance in documentary and artistic photographyThe role of revolution and war in the development of Iranian photography.
JESSE LERNER (UNITED STATES)
I. Experimental Cinema in Latin America. This conference offers a concise review of the diversity of experimental cinema in Latin America produced at the crossroads between political radicalism, visual arts, photography, anthropology, experimental documentary, performance and avant-garde, and the critical review of third cinema.
II. To Read Easter Duck. Disney's Latin America and Latin America's Disney "Taking as a reference point the scope of one of the world's largest companies, To Read Easter Duck explores the preponderant presence of Walt Disney in Latin America and the strategies applied by artists in the region to respond to and play with Disney's iconography, through appropriation and misrepresentation.
III. The image of the one who works it: The cinema of Jesse Lerner. A quick review of the cinema of documentary filmmaker Jesse Lerner, director of short films such as Magnavoz (2006), T.S.H.(2004) and Nativos (1991, with Scott Sterling) and feature films such as The Absent Stone (2013, with Sandra Rozental), Atomic Sublime (2010), The American Egypt (2001), Ruins (1999), and Fronterilandia (1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres) . His films have won awards at festivals in the United States, Latin America and Japan, and have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Biennale of Sydney, and the Sundance, Rotterdam and Los Angeles film festivals, among others.
Protecting the Great Shanghai, Tang Zaiqing, Protecting the Great Shanghai, Shanghai, 1970s.
from the film Ruins
JOAN FONTCUBERTA (SPAIN)
I. Post-photography: managing abundance For the first time in history we are producers and consumers of images. The Internet, mobile phones, video surveillance cameras and all kinds of graphic recording devices provoke a visual oversaturation that can end up blinding us. At a time when the image constitutes more than ever the social space of the human, it becomes a priority to manage its abundance: to discriminate and order images so that their meaning does not fade away, so that crumbs of truth and memory persist in them.
II. Photography in purgatory In many archives there is a section known as "purgatory", where documents in such a poor state of preservation are placed that they should be isolated to prevent them from contaminating healthy materials. Under certain hostile conditions, photographs deteriorate. Thus we speak of diseased images or suffering images, whose decomposition process transforms their ruins into fossils: they are the remains of the wreck of memory.
JUAN PERAZA GUERRERO (VENEZUELA | ARGENTINA)
Marginal histories of photography. These sessions open two books on the history of photography. Despite the overwhelming number of images produced in the more than 180 years of the medium's life, we will find a familiar landscape: the same names, places, dates; an invariable list of white, heterosexual, European or American men, also a few women. These sessions offer some conceptual and methodological tools to escape the restricted field of the canonical and to encourage research on some forgotten narratives: the contributions of women, of photographers from the LGBT+ community, of varied ethnic origins and from peripheral geographies.
KAREN IRVINE (UNITED STATES)
Social Justice in Contemporary Photography: Recent Projects at MoCPThis session will examine projects organised in recent years at the Museum of Contemporary Photography that focus on social justice issues. Topics to be discussed include climate change and the environment, anti-racism, LGBTQ+ rights, women's reproductive health, and the role of photography in creating change.
ISAAC NABWANA (CONGO)
Money vs. talent. Experimental cinema in the Congo
KRISTIN TAYLOR (UNITED STATES)
Artists working in the collection The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago periodically invites artists and scholars to creatively interpret and curate from the museum's permanent collection. I will discuss some of the ways in which our collection of over 16,000 photographs has been reimagined and used for innovative modes of storytelling, and the ways in which artists working as curators can challenge traditional modes of display.
LAURO LÓPEZ-SÁNCHEZ (MEXICO)
These sessions aim to trace an archaeology of technological media and their close ideological relationship in the development of reproduction media such as cinema, the camera and audiovisual media since their beginnings. On the one hand, we will analyse concrete examples of how the gaze has been gradually displaced and supplanted by a complex system of military and police security surveillance. We now have a hybrid technological system deployed at all levels of life, where reality is associated, organised and determined. This leads to a whole ontological problematic, as it rethinks the place of the production of the gaze and the place of the spectator.
LIZ WELLS (UK)
Seedscapes:Future-Proofing Nature, Modes of intervention related to photography and the environment Photography, location, environment.
LUCY SOUTER (UNITED KINGDOM)
I. Expanded Photography in Contemporary Art Artists are increasingly pushing photography beyond the traditional boundaries of the wall, the page and the screen, and into the territory of other contemporary art forms, in particular painting, sculpture, performance and the moving image. A manifestation of global art in the digital age, expanded photography is an international phenomenon, growing in prominence every year, with works adopting ever more ambitious, exuberant and creative material forms. It is creating a remarkable new sense of permission and possibility for photographers, and for artists who engage with photography as part of their practice. Although some critics describe contemporary art as having entered a 'post-media condition', the works at stake in this debate maintain a conscious engagement with photographic processes, aesthetics, stories and concepts. Rather than considering these works as post-media or post-photographs, we might consider them as a refiguration of the photographic.
II. Contemporary photography and the performative turn In an era of increasing eclecticism in the visual arts, performance increasingly appears in contemporary art photography. Some photographic works document performances that were staged for live audiences, and others capture performances that were staged specifically for the camera. This talk argues that alongside these familiar manifestations of performance in photography, there has also been a major performative turn, based on the activities of the conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s. As an unintended consequence of conceptual art, the visual content of the works is often supported by an explicit or implicit biographical narrative about the artist's actions in producing the work. The awareness of these actions adds another layer of meaning and infuses the works with a performative force, even when no element of the performance is visible. At the same time, photographic artists increasingly conceive their works not only as image but also as event. Among the artists to be discussed are Tom Lovelace, Gauri Gill, Craig Owens, Sethembile Msezane, Haley Morris-Cafiero.
Unknown Photographer ['The Hairy family of Burma'] Alkazi Collection of Photography
Terry EvansPetcoke piles in Southeast Chicago at Koch Industries distribution site along Calumet River, 2015
LUKAS BIRK (AUSTRIA)
I. Archives: Why it is important to reinterpret archives Whether in museums, institutions or private collections, recent years have provided much-needed incentives to rethink the power and legacy of archival materials. The visual arts, in particular, have contributed to a new discourse on how to view recorded images and to view these records in a broader context of political significance. Lukas is examining these issues and providing first-hand examples of the positive impacts of these reinterpretations.
II. Understanding "belonging" through visual culture Identities, their formation and the feeling of belonging are complex issues with a myriad of variables in place. In this lecture Lukas provides examples of how a sense of belonging can be created, stabilised or reinvented through visual culture. He is giving specific examples from his work in Myanmar.
II. The ethics of publishing: why it matters Publishing has been the preserve of economically stable regions. The usual practice to date is for manufacturers of all kinds to venture out in search of stories and then publish them in their country. But who benefits most from a story? Who should have access to the information? Access is a privilege and is rarely granted to those who really need it. Lukas talks in this lecture about how to deconstruct and rethink publishing. His own publishing practice is based on the idea of creating books where the content comes from.
MARGARITA MARTÍNEZ PÉREZ (SAN JUAN CHAMULA, CHIAPAS. MEXICO)
Minoritised languages, cultural practices and arts in resistance It is proposed to talk about the situation of Mesoamerican languages as minoritised languages with respect to the languages of power or of greater prestige such as English or Spanish in the case of Mexico. How the linguistic attitudes of the speakers contribute to the strengthening or displacement of the language and, consequently, to the extinction of the language and cultural practices in Chiapas and in Mexico in general. It will also address the notion of "art" from the Mayan languages, how this expression of "art" is conceived and manifested, what the function of "art" is from the perspective of artists belonging to the different linguistic communities, mainly Mayan and Zoque, in Chiapas, Mexico.
Photo Kathmandu, Nepal
MARIA DO CARMO RAINHO (BRAZIL)
I. The photographer Alberto Henschel and the "black types" of the 19th century: between the exotic and the ethnographic Born in Berlin in 1827, Alberto Henschel was one of the most important photographers working in Brazil in the 19th century. Among the many images produced by him, we can distinguish the "black types", for their expressive quantity, variety of visual repertoires and different motivations. Our proposal is to examine these records of men and women, blacks and blacks, of African origin, free, enslaved or liberated, who were depicted by Henschel as models or exotic types for the analysis of science.
II. Thinking fashion with photographs: Brazilian collections, methodologies and potentialities Based on the photographic collections of Brazilian memory institutions, we propose to investigate clothing in photographs, discussing how they organise the temporal experience, allowing us to discuss social distinctions, gender relations, sexuality, among other themes.
III. Caetano Veloso: body, clothes and music defying the military dictatorship in Brazil Caetano Veloso, one of the most creative and long-lived Brazilian artists, began his musical career in 1965, during the military dictatorship in Brazil. His songs proved to be sophisticated chronicles of Brazil's political situation, libertarian behaviours, cultural atmosphere and changes in sociability. This experimental side of the singer was also evident in his clothing, which transgressed patterns of sexuality and gender. Through the photographs we propose to think about the political dimension of his clothing and the impacts of its use in the years 1960-1970.
IV. Photojournalism in Brazil during the military dictatorship: an image revolution in the 1960s During the military dictatorship, the Brazilian newspaper Correio da Manhã guided its editorial line by a strong opposition to the government. The texts and photographs show a committed look at student protests, demonstrations against censorship. In the pages of the sports, fashion and culture notebooks, the images broke the rigidity of the figurative pattern that has been in force for decades in the daily press. We propose an analysis of the newspaper photographs to discuss the autonomy of the images and how they go beyond an illustrative or documentary function.
Jean Jacques Lequeu 1794
©Kunga Tashi_The Confluence Collective
MRIDU RAI (INDIA, Confluence Collective)
I. The Politics of Visual Representation in Northeast India
The session will seek to understand the interrelationship of exotic or oriental visual representations and extractive capitalism with respect to Northeast India, a region rich in natural resources and with a history of marginalisation since colonial times and continuing to the present, as reflected in the uneasy relationship with the state. Through a critique of the works of contemporary photographers from the region, we will also reflect on how images of everyday spaces or "still photographs" - a term borrowed from Tina M Campt - can be deconstructed as deeply political works, resisting historical and current forms of marginalisation.
II. Retelling stories, reconstructing histories with family photo archives By examining the two family photo archives of the Sikkim and Darjeeling hills in India - the Sikkim Picture Library and the Confluence Collective Visual Archive - this session will look at how these two regions are reconstructing their local history, culture, tradition and collective existence from within. Drawing on the archival collections, we will seek to understand how personal photographs help to produce alternative narratives that are lost in the constant misrepresentation of external forces that continue to reduce the region to the periphery.
MUNIRA MUTAHER (INDIA)
I. www.HumanityandEarth.co - this is an ongoing project of a group of 6 photographers from all over the country who have come together to work on ecological issues in Sri Lanka. With the support of the Goethe Institute we have been working on these series for the last two years, and had our first exhibition in early September.
II. www.historicaldialogue.lk - This is related to my work on the project on memorialisation and promotion of historical dialogue in Sri Lanka, and is part of a broader project on strengthening reconciliation processes here.
Call-of-Duty-Black-Ops-2-Wallpapers-HD
Sethembile-Msezane-detail--Untitled-(Heritage-Day)
MYNA MUKHERJEE (INDIA)
India : Maximum Minimum (I & II) A panoramic look at the astonishing visual culture that reflects the abundant polarities, contradictions and dualities that make up India. From the country's ancient spiritualism to its modern materialism, from its colonial past to its growing global centrality, from its migratory flows from a largely agrarian and rural environment to rapid urbanisation, from dogma to technology, from fringe to mainstream beliefs, from majority to minority religions that fuel India, from historical monuments to contemporary architecture, from the normative to the radical, we will examine a myriad of histories and politics of representation on the subcontinent.
NAIEF YEIHA (MEXICO | USA)
I. Pornography and pornoculture. A historical, social, moral and political journey through the genre out of genres. This program will analyse the general characteristics, genres, styles, codes and languages that define what we call pornography. We will review the elements that make it unique, its continuous flirtation with the limits of the tolerable and its legal battles since its "invention" parallel to the French Revolution. We will also explore its relationship with technology and how it has reinvented itself from the movable type printing press to the internet.
II. Hunting humans. Military Drones from the Middle East to the Northern BorderThis program will study the evolution and significance of drones and their use for military purposes in combat, espionage, surveillance and assassination as well as their uses in peacetime situations. It will also review science fiction stories in which machines become stalkers and executioners of humans. This study is transcendent due to the importance of this type of semi-autonomous or autonomous devices equipped with artificial intelligence that are gradually penetrating all human spheres.
NAYANTARA GURUNG KEKSHAPATI (NEPAL)
An expanded photographic practice: the afterlife of images How are images born? From what questions or curiosities or urgent stories? What happens beyond the image-making process? What kinds of relationships are possible with the public - as consumers, as participants, as interlocutors? How can one continue to engage, dialogue or build community around the worlds of images? Kathmandu-based curator NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati reflects on these questions as she shares some of her projects and experiences from her work at photo.circle, Nepal Picture Library and Photo Kathmandu.
NIDA MEHBOOB (PAKISTAN)
Feminist storytelling and representation of Muslim women The session will explore the important role of feminism in Muslim countries and how feminist filmmakers and photographers are having an impact in the region. I would like to discuss how important it is for Muslim women to fight their own battles and tell their own stories in order to organise resistance and prevent the often exploitative representation of South Asian/Afghan women in Western media.
In addition, he will address the ethics of storytelling and the importance of collaboration for documentary filmmakers and photographers. As documentary filmmakers, photographers and visual anthropologists, how can we best relate to the people we film and represent? We need a detailed, humane and humble engagement with our societies and the most marginalised people who really know best, know more and are perhaps the best theorists. We need works that listen rather than pontificate, research that reflects rather than theorises, and visual works that show rather than represent.
PAULA ACOSTA (COLOMBIA)
I. Technological dissidence and discursive tensions in the age of metaphotography The concept of dematerialisation is nested in discourses and definitions of photography. However, and beyond the digital paradigm, this workshop seeks to map artistic proposals that investigate and controvert the principles, actors and technical-technological variables of the photographic medium in contemporary times.
II. From the condition to the post medium syndrome: obsolescence, virtualisation and future spaces for _not_ photography From a model of creation research, this workshop proposes an approach to the mutable nature of photography in the context of networks and the digitalisation of experience, starting from the categorisation of practices in the amateur space and the challenges that these interactions derive from artistic, aesthetic and historical perspectives.
PEDRO VICENTE (SPAIN)
I. Family album: policies on the representation of the family, intimacy, archive, autobiography, memory, nostalgia and mourning
II. Family Album: (re)Visions on the representation of the family, intimacy, archive, autobiography, memory, nostalgia and mourning. These sessions will analyse and study the relevance and significance of the family album in the construction of individual and collective identities; as well as different theoretical works and projects by contemporary artists on the family album that highlight the interest of artists in the family album, making it almost a genre of its own in contemporary art and photography in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
RAHAAB ALLANA (INDIA)
I. Gaze, Strange, Ephemeral and Catalyst. Based on South Asian photography/media practice exhibitions for a large festival in India/China.
RUSSELL LORD (UNITED STATES)
I. Photography and Sequencing This session would look at the history of photographic sequences, and examine the reasons why people put photographs into sequences and how we can learn from them. Based on one of my past exhibitions: Photography, Sequence and Time The Origins of Photography.
II. Where did photography come from and why was it invented? This session will examine the world before and after the invention of photography.
III. A brief history of photography and obstruction Unlike other forms of photography, every photograph is a negotiation between what exists in front of the camera and what the photographer is willing to include. This session explores the history of how photographers have handled these negotiations through playful, conceptual and artistic examples.
André Adolphe-Eugène DisdériMonsieur Van Sittart, 1858
Osang Gwon, Jangular, 2010
RODRIGO ALONSO (ARGENTINA)
I. Photography and new technologies A reflection on how new digital technologies have transformed photography and a panoramic tour of the most interesting productions arising from the intersection of the photographic image with current technologies.
II. Photography and exhibition Photographs were not always created to be exhibited. Their exhibition changed the very meaning of photographic production and its forms of presentation. We will review the notion of photography as art, its exhibition, photographic spaces and their links with curatorial practice.
Conceptual photography. Since the 1960s, there has been a type of photography that does not follow technical parameters but is a vehicle for expressing aesthetic ideas, reflections on the world and questioning photographic production itself. We will analyse this type of work from its origins to the present day.
III. Expanded photography In recent years, photography has abandoned the limited space of the photographic copy to multiply its appearances and supports. We propose to study this type of production and analyse the most interesting works in this field.
SADIA MARIUM (SOUTH INDIA)
Presentation of his work and the work of the Kaali Collective to which he belongs.
SANTIAGO RUEDA FAJARDO (COLOMBIA)
I. Conceptual art and photography in Colombia: Identifies a historical moment in Colombian Latin American art (the seventies and eighties) where the appropriation of text, photography, the use of the body in actions and performance, the use of graphics as an alternative resource, among other manifestations that are a constituent part of current art.
II. "Eternal spring": Santiago Mesa has managed in a very short time to create a remarkable visual chronicle of what it is to live and especially to die in Medellín. In the crudest and most difficult profession of a photographer - that of the chronicle - he has travelled through all the neighbourhoods of the city of eternal spring to find its tragic aspect, portraying more than a climatic season, the vicious and sinister circle of a city where criminal organisations, called oficinas - and this is not a euphemism - fight for their biopolitical control - of money, territory and people.
KAALI COLLECTIVE (SOUTH INDIA)
The "Kaali Collective" is a group of six women photographers from Bangladesh who have individual practices but felt the urge to write and rewrite "their stories", memories, contradictions collectively to counteract the gaze and question the stereotype. prescribed mode of representation, artistic production and method of dissemination. The central idea, which had initially brought them together, was to create a sense of mutual trust and respect and, in doing so, to create the conditions that would enable them to sustain themselves as artists, emotionally if not financially. The members of the collective are Aungmakhai Chak, Juthika Dewry Gayatree, Farhana Satu, Farzana Hossen, Rajoyana Chowdhury Xenia and Sadia Marium.
SHI HANTAO ANVARI (CHINA)
The Post-Revolution Era - Photograph of the city of Shanghai in the last two decades of the 20th century.The last two decades of the 20th century have been a pivotal transitional period in connecting the revolution era and the current times in Shanghai's history. While the economic, social and political reforms of the last twenty years largely determined the growth of the city, there was simultaneously a dramatic shift and a significant difference between the two decades in terms of the political and economic agenda of the state and its effects on the daily lives of the masses. This talk is based on the extraordinary historical traces captured by three photographers, Tang Zaiqing, Xu Xixian, Gong Jianhua, all of whom were active as reporters and amateur photographers in the 1980s and 1990s. By translating the narratives of these images, revealed through the lens of photographers who had their pulse on society, we will explore the rich cultural and historical significance embedded in these rare images.
SUSAN BRIGHT (UK)
Feast for the Eyes was a book and exhibition project first conceived almost a decade ago and is now a major survey exhibition touring Europe and America. It examines how food has been photographed throughout the history of photography. It shows that photographs of food can invoke deep-seated questions and anxieties about issues such as consumption, aspiration, tradition, gender, race, desire, wealth, poverty, pleasure, revulsion and domesticity.
We photograph our food for many reasons. To show how good or bad we cook, to get affirmation or to be aspirational. It shows people who we are and who we would like to be. The conference is divided into three sections: "Still Life", "Around the Table" and "Playing with Food", and explores the images and contexts of art, commerce, documentary and vernacular photography. I reveal how much one of the most common markers of everyday life can show us about ourselves and the world around us. Eating is one of the most mundane and carnal acts, but it is also fundamental to our rituals, religions and celebrations.
Food touches both public and private life. It can mean a lifestyle or a nation, hope or despair, hunger or excess. Ultimately, food is not only the literal taste, but also the taste with a capital letter, both the lifestyle we aspire to and the building blocks of culture itself. And so, similarly, photographs of food are rarely just about food. The images discussed act as portals to these many themes, and seen together, they also address photography itself: its ontology, its languages, its various uses, and our relationship to it.
Feast for the Eyes
SVEA JOSEPHY (SOUTH AFRICA)
Colonial photography in Southern Africa
The invention of photography coincided with the consolidation of colonial empires Africa. Photography penetrated Africa through ports and Southern Africa photographers initially established studios in as Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, and these moved gradually into the interior. Early photography in Africa was used to document the landscapes, buildings, life and portraits of those living in the colonies. It was also used as a tool to reinforce colonial beliefs about African people through anthropological and anthropomorphic photography. These colonial photographs are more of a document of powerful authority than a document of Southern Africa and its' people.
YU YU MYINT THAN (MYANMAR)
The journey of Yu Yu's photobook
YVON LANGUÉ (CAMEROON | MOROCCO)
Giving contours to invisible figures: Post-reflections on migration. Narratives. Movements. Observing the increasing precariousness of migrants in Morocco, "Giving Contours to Invisible Figures" is a commentary on lessons learned from my collaboration with Arts for Advocacy on Migrations. Narratives. Movements, an exhibition held at the Villa des Arts, Rabat. The article deals with migration in the broad sense, and how it is addressed in curatorial practice. It discusses the theoretical apparatus of the exhibition in light of the bold uncertainties due to the invisibility of the figure of the migrant, and the apparent disjuncture of my expectations with respect to the Moroccan context. I argue that the subject of migration demands a broadening of the boundaries of curatorial practice, at least in Morocco, precisely because the geographies of mobility, heterogeneous ideas of globalisation and common sense overlap.
YINING HE (CHINA)
"Picturing Histories" is a paper written by He Yining on contemporary Chinese photography after the 1990s. It focuses on seven Chinese artists who enter historical narratives through photography by fusing documents, historical photos, texts, and carefully constructed images. It seeks to examine the creative strategies adopted by different artists and explore the unique viewpoint photography offers in creating historical narratives from different angles. The paper discussed the broader contexts of Chinese photography, memory theory, and politics and culture.
ONLINE WORKSHOP PRE-RECORDED SESSIONS
Translated and subtitled in Spanish and English
Participants who attend the full program will be invited to register for live activities with several of the session teachers in groups of 25, to allow for a dialogue on topics covered in the sessions.
These live activities will be announced in February 2021 and will be repeated periodically with a variety of speakers and student groups.
DATES
EXACT DATE TO BE CONFIRMED
Due to COVID conditions in the different countries of the workshop participants, the starting date had to be adapted to the circumstances of each case.
MORE INFORMATION COMING SOON
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