A conversation on (re)framing as artistic gestures of care and their situated affordances.

A conversation on (re)framing as artistic gestures of care and their situated affordances.

GOPOLANG LEDWABA / GUNDEGA STRAUBERGA

MODERATION BY ANDREA STULTIENS

The notion of 'reframing' is often used in relation to (photo)archives.[1] It is a play with the Frame that American curator John Szarkowski identified as one of five "characteristics and problems" particular to the medium of photography.[2]  The frame is also a central notion in Joanna Zylinska's 2023 book The Perception Machine. The frames, she states, are produced by 'us', but their  "mechanical infrastructures" (p.8) also frame us.

Reframing implies that earlier 'frames' are insufficient and, indeed, 'a problem' and therefore need to be revisited.[3]

Research Fellow Andrea Stultiens studied a collection of photographs produced by a Scottish gardener who became a colonial botanist and subsequently forestry officer. The photographic frame and its reframing emerged along the way as an important thinking tool raising complex ethical questions. In this session Stultiens will be in conversation with Gopolang Ledwaba (SA) and Gundega Strauberga (LV) about their respective use of ‘frames’, both in a literal and proverbial or metaphorical sense. What does framing mean in their respective cultural contexts? How can the frame be appropriated as a subversive and empowering tool? And what is, consequentially, the potential of ‘reframing’ in their practices?

[1] e.g. Alice Twemlow et. al., 2021, "Framing and Reframing Archives" in, Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain. Ana Catarina Pinho, 2021, Reframing the Archive, Archivo Press.

[2] John Szarkowski, 1966, The Photographer's Eye, New York, MOMA.

[3] Joanna Zylinski, 2023, The Perception Machine, Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI, MIT Press.

GUEST SPEAKERS

Gopolang Ledwaba (1993) is a South African born social documentary photographer. Ledwaba studied photography at the Market Photo Workshop. He has exhibited his work locally and abroad. In 2024, with the Mandebele Photo Gallery. Ledwaba’s brainchild, is a centre promoting the use of photography as a tool to help people to explore their own capabilities with the camera and to express themselves. In his own practice Ledwaba experiments with the (re)framing of contemporary photographs in historical (archival?) frames.

Gundega Strauberga (1996) is a Latvian artist and visual researcher based in The Hague, Netherlands. She works with the notion of reframing photographs - both literally and conceptually, engaging the absence of personal archives and the complexities of memory, identity and photographic representation. Her most recent project Paper Pictures emerges from a deeply personal lack: the absence of photographs from her own childhood. Rather than approaching this absence as a deficit, she turns it into a methodology.

MODERATOR

Andrea Stultiens (NL, 1974) is an artistic researcher doing things with photographs to contribute to the understanding of their past and present day production and uses, particularly in the context of Uganda, where she has been developing projects in various collective settings since 2008. She holds a BFA (Utrechts School of the Arts, 1998), MFA (Post-St. Joost Breda, 2001), MA (Photographci Studies 2012) and PhD (PhDArts, 2018, both Leiden University).