PHOTOGRAPHIC TEMPORALITY: From Freezing Moments to Circular Dances

PHOTOGRAPHIC TEMPORALITY

From Freezing Moments to Circular Dances

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Course Instructor: Aikaterini Gegisian

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ONLINE COURSE — April 2023

4 sessions / Tuesdays 4; 11;  and Wednesdays 19; 26 — 6pm - 9pm (GMT)

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Early Bird Fee [see below]

:: Special discounts to Archivo Membership Plans

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Photography has long been held as an essential instrument in the long march of modernity, and the photographic apparatus linked to technological progress and the construction of linear time. With the closing of the shutter, this capturing of a decisive moment, photography has been continuously freezing time, fixing events into immovable memories (Barth, 1981) (Wollen, 1984). However, with the development of the analogue and digital reproduction of images (Benjamin, 1935) (Groys, 2016), processes that have aided the circulation of photographs across time and space, and their movement within media formats, photographic temporality is at least transformed.

Apart from the continuous movement of photographs turned images in the deterritorialised space of global networks (Steyerl, 2009), photographs enter into a new set of relations, ‘a civic contract’ (Azoulay, 2008), that renders them as our contemporaries. This shift becomes even more pronounced, if we consider the challenging of the vast memorial spaces of the colonial photographic archives through the introduction of multiplicity of gazes (female gaze, indigenous gaze).  Photographs do not stay still; they move and circulate, they escape their assigned spaces and talk back, they exist simultaneously in a heterogeneity of contexts. 

Despite current efforts to ‘decolonising the camera’ and to challenge photography’s construction of ‘Others’, the engagement with marginalised bodies rests on issues of representation, of making visible, the multiple voices and alternative ways of being. What happens however, if we question the dominant vision of photography as a measurement of teleological time, by considering time and circularity in indigenous cosmologies as a fundamental break with the western model of progress?

Inspired by recent challenges of social evolution narratives (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021) and the development of speculative thought (Hartman, 2007), this short course will explore shifts in the understanding of photographic temporality, departing from the notion of freezing time, by adopting the idea of photography as the continuous creation of images, and thus, pointing to an endless circularity.

Session 1. Immobility 

Session 2. Circulation

Session 3. Simultaneity

Session 4. Circularity

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ABOUT THE TUTOR

Aikaterini Gegisian is a visual artist, academic and researcher. Her expanded photographic and moving image practice examines the role of diverse image histories in the production of gender, cultural and national identities. In 2023, will see the premiere of Third Person (Plural), her first feature length film and eponymous book (published by MACK); a long-term archival project based on a collection of two hundred post-war informational films and newsreels sourced from the Library of Congress and the American National Archives. Originating as a quest to source documents of the early European integration processes in the post-war United States, Gegisian’s project unfolds into an expansive feminist re-reading of the hegemonic imperial masculine gaze and its manifestation in material images. During the ‘archival fever’ of the COVID-19 pandemic, she initiated The Manipulator Vlog, a YouTube channel that documents a rural-agricultural shift in her life and work, set against the backdrop of her teenage magazine collection. In 2015, she was one of the exhibiting artists at the Armenian Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale, which received the Golden Lion for best national participation. Further recent shows include The Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (2020); National Arts Museum of China (2018); The Jewish Museum, Moscow (2018); Kunsthalle Osnabruck (2017) among others.

Image © Marianne Brandt, L'Atelier se reflétant dans la boule (autoportrait dans l'atelier Bahaus à Dessau), 1928-1929