International Symposium on Photography & Visual Culture
International Symposium on Photography & Visual Culture
© JOSÉ MAÇÃS DE CARVALHO
UNFOLDING HISTORIES
THE ARCHIVE AS MODEL AND SOURCE FOR CRITICAL PRACTICES
The webinar series "Unfolding Histories: The Archive as Model and Source for Critical Practices" explores the evolving functions of archives in contemporary art, historical inquiry, and cultural memory. It investigates how archives not only preserve historical narratives but also serve as critical sites for interrogation and creative reinterpretation. Addressing themes such as the materiality and organization of photographic archives, the potential of archives for fostering unlearning and the relationship between archival preservation and exhibition practices, the series examines how archives both reinforce and challenge dominant narratives. By exploring how archives structure and mediate historical narratives, and examining innovative methodologies for archival research and display, this webinar series emphasizes the evolving relationship between archival practices, historical representation, and cultural production. These discussions aim to foster a nuanced understanding of the archive’s role in shaping, contesting, and reimagining histories.
SPEAKERS
OPENING SESSION
JOSÉ MAÇÃS DE CARVALHO
Coimbra University, Portugal
AUDREY LEBLANC
EHESS Paris, France
BIRGIT EUSTERSCHULTE
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
CLARE CHUN-YU LIU
Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin, Germany
TICKETS
- 22 May 2025, 18:30 – 19:30 WESTThis talk asks how the archive can be understood both as a model and a source of unlearning and what challenges this poses for artistic works dealing with archival material. The emphasis is on artistic methods of historicization that deal with colonial history, the entanglement of ... [more info]
- 30 Jan 2025, 18:30 – 19:30 WETThis webinar examines the archive as both a physical and institutional space, emphasizing its connection to memory and spatial constructs. It explores its relationship with memory and cultural production through theoretical insights and artistic works by the speaker’s own practice. [more info]
© CAROLINE MONNET
THE INDIGENOUS GAZE
DECOLONIZING VISUAL CULTURES
This Webinar Series seeks to continue the ongoing discussions in decolonial thought and visual practices beyond Western-centred conceptualisations of the image. Throughout five sessions, scholars, artists, and curators, will critically approach the concept of the 'gaze' in visual culture, interrogating it from historical, cultural, and ontological standpoints, and addressing the Indigenisation of the image as a means for decolonizing the fields of visual culture and contemporary art studies.
SPEAKERS
NASHELI JIMÉNEZ DEL VAL
Independent Researcher, Spain
LAURA SINGEOT
Reins University, France
MARIANNA TSIONKY & MARIANA CUNHA
Leeds Arts University
University of Westminster, United Kingdom
SPRING ULMER
Middlebury College, USA
HELEN STARR & KINNARI SARAIYA
Worldbuilding Curator & Producer, United Kingdom
Visual Artist, India
WEBINAR RECORDINGS
Dismantling the Coloniality of Seeing
Contemporary indigeneities and counter-imaginaries for the global age
Nasheli Jiménez del Val — In this session I will propose a theoretical decolonial reading of current global networks of indigeneity and their production of counter-imaginaries as strategic interventions in the dismantling of the coloniality of seeing. Following Joaquín Barriendos’ work on the coloniality of seeing (la colonialidad del ver, 2011), I will first broadly consider how the coloniality of seeing is constructed and perpetuated in a contemporary global setting. Centrally, I will analyse how the coloniality of seeing is contested, disarticulated, and disassembled by the rich counter-imaginaries produced by South-South networks of Indigenous image-making. Drawing from a corpus of images produced in Abya Yala, I will discuss how these counter-imaginaries have contributed to shape what Barriendos has termed a new decolonial inter-epistemic visual dialogue. — Q&A moderated by Polina Golovátina-Mora
Gazing into the Representation of Indigeneity in Indigenous Contemporary Art
Laura Singeot — From 2000 onwards, Indigenous contemporary art displayed a new reflective dimension : not only did artists represent their own perception of Indigeneity, but this also emphasized a change in curatorial practices as such pieces of contemporary art started to be integrated in and sometimes commissioned for primarily ethnographic exhibitions. From a colonial institution by excellence, the museum seemed to become also an agent for change: by implementing new curatorial practices, it enabled new voices to be heard and started to function as a teller of alternative histories, which definitely leave their imprint on the visitors’ experience of art. After a brief overview of those curatorial changes, this webinar will consider how the fact of visualizing History in art comes as a way of re-writing or rather re-righting it, while also including other testimonies and voices. Artists choose specific historical themes they draw their inspiration from, but their very practice and the form they choose is also telling of a deep reflexivity on aesthetics. While drawing from a corpus of artists from Australia and New Zealand, I will argue that contemporary Indigenous art draws from the former European epistemologies of the Indigenous while exposing that European gaze and layering it with Indigenous prisms of perception – the «Indigenous gaze». — Q&A moderated by Annalisa Laganà
Curating 'We live like trees in the footsteps of our ancestors'
Marianna Tsionky & Mariana Cunha — The webinar will discuss aspects of the curatorial project We live like trees in the footsteps of our ancestors; an ongoing investigation on forms of ecological thinking in artistic practices, and the extent to which environmental shifts and crises come to bear on contemporary art from Latin America. The project is concerned with the dialogues between cultural production, natural environment, and modes of decolonial thinking. By examining the link between artistic practices and the environment in Latin America, this body of work contributes to a decentred knowledge production, while also providing a crucial stance from the Global South. Drawing on the anthropological and philosophical works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway, it will consider some indigenous artistic practices, more particularly on the works of Daiara Tukano, Seba Calfuqueo, and Amaru Cholango. Daiara Tukano’s practice operates at the intersection of art and activism. She has built alliances to encourage the creation of strategies that can contribute to the protection of mother nature, cultural diversity and human rights across the vast region of the Amazonas. Seba Calfuqueo’s artistic practice is proposing a decolonial view through critically questioning the colonial order and its consequences in the indigenous societies. They are interested in the study of race, gender, social class, and their political, social and cultural implications. Amaru Cholango’s performative practice deals with questions of ancestry, shamanism, and rituals. By examining these practices in relation to their respective cosmovisions, we will raise timely questions regarding the ethical role of curatorial practices in face of our epistemic constructions and propose routes to think new avenues to present non-Western works. — Q&A moderated by Rashmi Viswanathan
Environmental Justice through a Decolonial Gaze
Spring Ulmer — Dina Gilio-Whitaker argues that environmental justice must be indigenized, “capable of a political scale beyond the homogenizing, assimilationist, capitalist State,” and, therefore, “requires the use of a different lens, one with a scope that can accommodate the full weight of the history of settler colonialism, on one hand, and embrace differences in the ways Indigenous peoples view land and nature, on the other” (As Long as Grass Grows, 2019). With a nod to Secwepemc grand chief George Manuel’s 1974 coining of the term “Fourth World,” Gilio-Whitaker favors the term “fourth world nations” over “Indigenous nations” as it de-emphasizes the state and repositions Indigenous peoples into self-determining peoples (“Idle No More and Fourth World,” 2015). Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay similarly theorizes “Fourth Cinema” as a flexible space in which Indigenous filmmakers “may seek to rework the ancient core values to shape a growing Indigenous cinema outside the national orthodoxy” (“Celebrating Fourth Cinema,” 2003). This webinar endeavors to comment upon how certain Fourth World peoples’ contemporary creative works, like Camille Seaman’s photo series The Last Iceberg (2008), Melting Away (2014), and The Big Cloud (2018); Natalie Diaz’s poems “From the First Water Is the Body” and “exhibits from The American Water Museum” (2020); Heather Hatch’s documentary Wochiigii Lo: End of the Peace (2021); Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poetry collection Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshelle Daughter (2017); Yhonnie Scarce’s glass art installations Thunder Raining Poison (2015), Only a Mother Could Love Them (2016), Death Zephyr (2017), Cloud Chamber (2020), and The Near Breeder (2022), and Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013), indigenize environmental justice.
To Dance in the Dark
Helen Starr & Kinnari Saraya — The presentation draws attention to the diversity in the meaning of “the image” beyond Occidental visual culture. Written alongside the interactive animations of the decolonial, feminist, Indian artist Kinnari Saraiya, this webinar opens up a space for the shared commonalities between the indigenous Carib and the Indian poetics of touch and proprioception. The importance of interrogating the historical, cultural and ontological injustices embedded within colonial reality, its mentality and gaze cannot be understated. In the sensory scale of races, a hierarchical world structure was created by the natural historian Lorenz Oken (1779 – 1851). Here, the civilised European eye-man who focused on the world with imperial visuality was positioned at the top and at the bottom was the African skin-man who used touch as his primary sensory modality. This webinar focuses on an indigenous concept which is conceptualised here as skin-thinking. Skin-thinking thinks through the lesser-known sense of proprioception or kinesthesia - the sense of self-movement, force, and body position. And skin, unlike the eyes which are closed during our sleep, is always thinking, always processing information from the many worlds we inhabit. We can rethink the concepts of close proximity and co-presence as we use our fingertips to move through worldbuilding artworks such as, किन्नर's prakṛtiḥ, nṛtya, laya (2022 onwards) and Seven Acts of Nature’s Devastating Dance (2023). Finger kinesthesia is a form of haptic perception that relies on the forces experienced during touch. As the rhythm of our fingers dance us, (as informational beings) through these worlds, our mind creates virtual, illusory haptic shapes. Proprioception, our skin-thinking sense is what allows us to see in the dark. — Q&A moderated by Astrid Korporaal
© EVAN HUME
PHOTOGRAPHIC (IM)MATERIALITIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE
ARCHIVE & CONFLICT
Focusing on the production, circulation, and archiving of images, the Archivo Webinar Series 2024 aims to explore the Archive & Conflict through two main perspectives: on the one hand, to delve into the materialities and immaterialities of archival production within the digital age in regard to contemporary critical appropriations through visual arts that address, access and contest past and present conflicts, history’s repressed events and violations. On the other hand, to examine the aesthetics of datafication, understanding artistic strategies as potential sites for resisting and counter-acting current extractivist processes, which tend to capture and transform everyday life into data.
SPEAKERS
OPENING SESSION
GIL PASTERNAK
De Montfort University, United Kingdom
JENNIFER GOOD
University of the Arts London, United Kingdom
IDIL CETIN
University of Oslo, Norway
EVAN HUME
Visual Artist / Iowa State University, USA
WEBINAR RECORDINGS
The Photographic Divide
Remaking Community Heritage in a New Cultural Order
Gil Pasternak — This talk will centre around the craze for collections of photographic community heritage to explore its socio-political ramifications in a cultural order underpinned by a conflictual politics of recognition. Steadily proliferating in Western society and its proxies following the dissolution of twentieth-century political idealisms, these collections have tended to draw on historical domestic photographs in an attempt to safeguard the cultural heritage of weakened communities, via self- reliance and in accordance with their historical self-imaging. The resulting collections have arguably enhanced public recognition of the values and beliefs upheld by members of their administrating communities. Yet, they have also standardised a perception of historical domestic photographs as pathways to the community’s authentic identity and irrefutable past. The talk will thus introduce the notion of the Photographic Divide to consider the way in which unequal access to domestic photographic production in the past has come to prevent some communities from participating on equal terms in the remaking of community heritage in the present. In doing so, it will argue that the craze for photographic community heritage has prompted photographically disadvantaged weakened communities to experiment with alternative photographic production and archival practices in an attempt to take ownership of their political recognition. — Gil Pasternak is Professor of Photographic Cultures and Heritage in the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) at De Montfort University (UK), also serving as Europe & UK Editor of the quarterly Photography & Culture. His research explores the reciprocal influence of political discourse and photographic practices, with his recent publications analysing intersections between photographic cultures, liberal-democratic aspirations and populist politics. In 2018-21, Pasternak led the European Commission funded research project Digital Heritage in Cultural Conflicts (DigiCONFLICT), investigating exploitations of digital technology in the political administration of visual history within nationally framed zones of cultural conflict.
On Point of View
Writing Photography, Violence and the Self
Jennifer Good — In this talk, I discuss the process of writing my current book-in-progress, a work of experimental non-fiction about photography, violence and love. As an academic, I am tasked with understanding photography’s history, but my own experience of violence has shaken my trust in my eyes, even as I carry the authority of someone who ‘sees’ for a living. Writing involves occupying a point of view, taking a position, orientating myself in relation to the issues at hand. By extension, it means questioning knowledge itself: what it is to write ‘I see’ as another way of claiming that ‘I know’. For the past fifteen years, my research has been concerned with photography of conflict, violence, terror, trauma and loss. Behind this book is a recognition that the true connecting thread that has held that work together – the motivation underneath it all – has been their opposites: desire, vulnerability, and love. These are the reasons why photography plays such a critical role in times of crisis and despair. It is also why photographic archives are sites of such contention. I will draw examples from the chapters of my current work that are focussed on conflict and war, to pose a challenge to those writing about violence and seeing: to centre their bodies and their selves, while in turn creating space for the uncertainty of their own vision as a radical political stance. — Jennifer Good is a writer and Senior lecturer in photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She is the author of Understanding Photojournalism (Bloomsbury 2017), and Photography and September 11th: Spectacle, Memory, Trauma (Bloomsbury 2015), and co-editor of Mythologizing the Vietnam War: Visual Culture and Mediated Memory (CSP 2014). She writes regularly about the cultural and political histories of photography in editorial and scholarly publications.
Fragmented Archives and Photographs
Idil Cetin — Dwelling into the Armenian past through photographs is not an easy task not because of the characteristics of the technical image, but because of the way one can encounters the photographic collections. Just like the survivors themselves, Armenian libraries and archives took root in several countries around the world in the past century following the 1915 Genocide. The photographic collections these institutions hold have been accumulated throughout the years mainly through the donations by the Armenians. One of the striking features of these collections is their fragmented nature in the sense that images that apparently belonged to the same body once are scattered today across different institutions and it is difficult to notice this unless one visits these institutions in person mainly because the majority of the collections in several places remain undigitized. The fragmented nature of the photographic collections is further reinforced by the fact that the available images are those that survived the Genocide, which complicates even further the possibility of finding a coherence in the collections. The webinar will entail a description of the fragmentedness of these archives and photographic collections alongside a discussion on the ethical, political, and social implications of studying them. — Idil Cetin is a Marie Curie postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, Norway, with the project Histories of Reception of Photography in the Ottoman Empire, where she investigates the heterogeneity of experiences of different imperial ethnicgroups in their use and interpretation of the photographic medium. She intertwines her interest in visual culture and history with archival studies, with a specific focus on photographs as archival materials, on which she writes regularly.
Photographic Disruptions in Declassified Archives
Evan Hume — Evan Hume's research and creative work focus on photography as an instrument of the military-industrial complex for reconnaissance, surveillance, and documentation of advanced technologies. He obtains declassified documents by searching the National Archives and filing Freedom of Information Act requests to US government agencies. The Cold War period that much of the material originates from is a significant turning point in the photography's development and use for intelligence gathering. His artwork combines images pertaining to the photographic innovations and operations of that era with contemporary documents and devices, connecting past and present. Imaging processes including analog printing, digital collage, and data bending are used to animate the archival material and emphasize the tension between informational and enigmatic source images. Through this disruption and layering, historical fragments are shown in a state of flux, open to alternate associations and implications. What we are allowed to know and see is often incomplete and indeterminate, encouraging speculation and critical vision. — Evan Hume's research-intensive creative work focuses on photography as an instrument of the military-industrial complex for reconnaissance, surveillance, and documentation of advanced technologies. He has exhibited widely and his work has been featured by publications such as Aperture, Der Greif, and Fisheye. Hume's first monograph, "Viewing Distance", was published by Daylight Books in 2021.
