THE INDEPENDENT LIFE OF IMAGES: Collaging Image Histories

PHOTOGRAPHIC TEMPORALITY

From Freezing Moments to Circular Dances

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Course Instructor: Aikaterini Gegisian

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ONLINE WORKSHOP — June 2023

4 sessions / Tuesdays 6; 13; 20; 27 — 6pm - 9pm (GMT)

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Early Bird Fee [see below]

:: Special discounts to Archivo Membership Plans

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Photography not only contributed to the development of disciplinary (archaeology, ethnography, anthropology) collections and popular archives but also aided their visibility through the mechanical reproduction of images (Benjamin, 1935), brought about by new media technologies (print, television, and now the internet). On the other hand, collage practices, from the early photomontages to the surrealist phonograms, are associated with breaking dominant conventions and the radical potential of transforming the ways of seeing.

Approaching collections of found material, not as archives, but as image histories allows us to question structures of archival knowledge by bringing into equal dialogue photographs produced in diverse historical, geographical and ideological contexts. This ‘inappropriate’ dialogue, expressed as collage making, provides a strategy for interrogating the social function of photography and for investigating how photographs shape and reshape bodies and identities, since the collision of contradictory meanings opens up gaps in perception.

The Independent Life of Images is a practical workshop that invites participants to engage with a specific archive, image collection or photographic typology that interests them and utilise collage strategies in order to question the dominant narratives inscribed in their production and circulation. In the course of 4 sessions, drawing from a diverse set of practices, from Aby Warburg’s ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’, the work of Carmen Winant and Arthur Jafa, by incorporating theoretical positions (W. J. T. Mitchell, Ariella Azoulay) proposing a shift away from an indexical understanding of photography, and through individual presentations and group discussions, each participant will develop an expanded photographic or collage project.

Session 1. From Archives to Image Histories: Collections & Typologies 

Session 2. Photographic Temporality: Production, Display, Circulation, Erasure

Session 3. Collage: Fragmentation, editing, montage, sequencing

Session 4. ‘Inappropriate’ Dialogues as the new Cultural Logic of Association

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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 © Aikaterini Gegisian, Exercises in Speaking Out, Volume 1 (Nude), 2020