Genocide in Namibia is an especially sensitive matterâits history has at times been ignored, underestimated, or even denied outright.
In the artistic documentary FraitaxtsÄs sores tsĂźn ge raâ gĂą - Ondjembo yo Null Vier, IxmucanĂ© Aguilar has worked in close collaboration with Nama and OvaHerero people who vividly evoke memories and rituals of mourning caused by human loss and land dispossession under Imperial Germanyâs violent occupation.
Part visual essay, oral history and artist book, DNCB - A History of Irritation is a companion to the multi-channel installation DNCB by Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger. The book plays with contrasting paper formats and materials, using glossy colourful video stills and distorted archival imagery to achieve a similar effect to the film, video and audio tracks in the installation. It gives more room to the informative and deeply touching interviews the artists did with AIDS activists and long-term survivors, and collects the archival research on DNCB for the first time in a publication.
Lâimposition des notions de singularitĂ© â comme celles des ĂȘtres singuliers et immuables, des identitĂ©s uniques et inaltĂ©rables, des plans ou des espaces uniques et fixes, dans lesquels nous nous trouvons et naviguons, des cultures singuliĂšres et figĂ©es, des divinitĂ©s jalouses avec des structures de croyance singuliĂšres, dâhistoire de politique ou de structure politique unique â semble ĂȘtre un des concepts dont il est le plus difficile de se dĂ©barrasser dans cette pĂ©riode de post indĂ©pendance et libĂ©ration des forces qui ont imposĂ© leur domination sur une grande partie du monde pendant trop longtemps. Ă nous avoir fait avaler ces concepts de force, cela a entraĂźnĂ© une perte de la multiplicitĂ© et des fragmentations, une perte des points dâintersection des diffĂ©rentes façons dâĂȘtre et finalement une perte de la complexitĂ© des notions dâhumanitĂ© et des rĂ©cits.
Contested Landscapes is dedicated to different rural regionsâtheir landscapes, their producers, and their work. The paths of the family of the artist Sandra SchĂ€fer and those of the famous German photographer August Sander cross in the Westerwald, a rural area in Germany shaped by farming and mining.
This book introduces camera-based practices at the intersections of artistic and ethnographic research that critically examine the means of their own production and social embeddedness. In shared practices such as recording in the field, editing in post-production and modes of presentation, the camera is involved as an agent rather than an innocent device. How does the camera grapple with the invisible and how does it reveal what the camerawoman is unable to see? How do films, videos and photographs provide access to vulnerable knowledges and what presentation formats can extend the linearity of narration?
Becoming Van Leo is a study of the life and times of the late Armenian-Egyptian photographer. Born in 1921, Leon Boyadjian would come to be known as Van Leo, one of the most singular twentieth-century studio photographers in the Arab world.
Momentography of a failure [Addis Ababa] brings essays, timelines, film, photography, and a series of conversations together to deal with Ethiopiaâs controversial urbanisation and the transformative space of the city. It explores the gradual transition of rural-urban space, inner-city migration, emerging and disappearing spaces, and commoning in public space.
The moment of a snapshot could be an extended moment of capturing the stream of consciousness. The moment something catches the attention of the photographer, the many associations that are made conceptually and aesthetically, the many references that are invoked and situations convoked lead to the shot. Thinking is as much an active as a passive process, and what becomes important is how that which is seen, heard, smelled, felt, tasted or perceived in another way triggers the inner eye to see or inner voice to utter thereby setting this stream of consciousness in motion.
Conçue pour la 12Úme édition des Rencontres de Bamako ce livre recueille la pensée des écrivains, des poÚtes et des artistes quant à la pratique de la photographie en Afrique et à travers sa diaspora de part la notion de « courant de conscience ».
La notion de courants de conscience est liĂ©e de maniĂšre intrinsĂšque Ă celle dâune profondeur de la vision : en dâautres termes, elle correspond Ă lâidĂ©e que la vision peut transcender ses confins optiques pour invoquer les autres sens. La photographie en tant que force vectorielle dâune telle conception de la vision, fait acte de prothĂšse pour combler notre regard appauvri.
Conceived for the 12th Edition of the Bamako Encounters this book captures thoughts and responses of writers, poets, and artists to the curatorsâ proposition to think the practice of photography in Africa and its diaspora through the notion of the âstream of consciousness.â
The moment of capturing an image can be understood as a solidifying of the streams of consciousness which occur in the photographerâs mind in that decisive moment: the photograph then becomes the place of convergence of all conceptual, aesthetic and cultural ideas and associations out of which the impetus to capture arose.
In 2008, an exhibition opened at the Umm el-Fahem Art Gallery, Israel, that focused on the launching of a new on photographic archive: âMemories of a Place: The Photo-Archives graphic History of Wadi âAra, 1903â2008.â Notably, the archive used a series of historical images from existing archives, often giving them different captions that retrieve lost histories in the area. This archive exemplifies the possibilities that can result from the critique of institutional image archives: that rethinking archival arrangements can bring to light legible traces of suppressed histories.
Culture Is Our Business considers the case of Willy Römer, who in 1919 took a photograph of the street battles in the media district of Berlin during the German Revolution. Circulating widely throughout the twentieth century, Römerâs photograph in 2004 came to be owned simultaneously by a number of archives. Among them were the commercial stock-image agency Corbis, founded by Bill Gates, and the Agentur fĂŒr Bilder zur Zeitgeschichte (Agency for images on contemporary history), an independent organization established by photo historian Diethart Kerbs.
In digital data banks, images travel more frequently from one archive to another than they did in analog archives. Sometimes images that are in the public domain are taken by commercial stock-image agencies and offered for sale. This is the case for a series of images of breaker boys in Pennsylvania that Lewis Hine made in the 1910s as part of his series on child labor. The images are both digitally available for free from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and for a fee from Corbis, Bill Gatesâs stock-image company, which offered them for sale until it ceased operations in 2016.
Unnamed Series features a succession of artworks provoked by photographs that art historian Aby Warburg had taken as part of his travels to the Hopi Indians in 1898. Warburg noted that the images should never be published, but in the 1990s, the Warburg Institute in London made the images available as part of a glossy hardcover book. The book circulates around a series of aspects that this famous encounter evokes.
Stonemasons, cinema staff, a climbersâ cooperative, a group of 1970s militants. These communities testify to a period of upheaval that swept across Europe from the late 1960s to 1989. The fragments of biographies and the social relationships that Cora Piantoni depicts, are episodes in the context of this historic narrative: the legacy of anti-fascism in Italy, political dissent in the former Eastern Bloc, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Mobile Cinema presentation apparatus â somewhere between urban model, cinema, and plate camera â derived its form from Alexander Medvedkinâs film The New Moscow (1938), in which an engineer used it to present his designs and visions for Moscow on his journey into the Soviet capital. The real space is replaced by a city of models representing a new reality by cinematographic means.