Tag Archives: media/visual literacy

Walid Raad

Unreliable Informants: A Walid Raad Primer [Hyperallergic]

A survey exhibition dedicated the work of Walid Raad, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oct 12, 2015-Jan 16 2016

Walid Raad was born in Lebanon in 1967, eight years before that country was rent by civil war. In a precursor to the ongoing bloodshed in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the conflict dragged on for fifteen years, claiming more than 100,000 lives and creating a million refugees.

… Raad has taken up the tradition of artist-as-trickster — a role carried into modern art though the Dadaist antics of Marcel Duchamp’s transgender alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy — while reaching even farther back to the artist-as-historian-cum-fabulist. Some works trip you up and others leave you out in the cold. [ read more ]

 

Fashion Photos with Outfits Made from Trash in Senegal

Fashion Photos with Outfits Made from Trash Found in Polluted Areas of Senegal

“The Prophesy” is a striking series of photographs by photographer Fabrice Monteiro that shines light on the problem of pollution in Africa, yet offers a message of hope. Each image is a “high fashion photo” in which the garment is crafted from things found at locations that have been altered by trash.

Partnering with costume designer Doulsy and the Ecofund Organization, Monteiro visited 10 different polluted sites in the country of Senegal. The team created haute couture outfits using bits of things found here and there, and then photographed the models in front of the polluted environment as a backdrop.

from Peta Pixel

LAURA POITRAS and HITO STEYERL [together]

A conversation between two brilliant minds,  LAURA POITRAS and  HITO STEYERL, in the pages of Art Forum May 2015
 A few excerpts:

LP: The limits of my imagination are much less interesting than what I encounter going into the field and filming. So yes, it obviously changed the narrative. But part of vérité filmmaking, and documenting in the present tense as things unfold, is going where the story leads. It’s uncertain and scary at times, but that is why there is drama.

HS: What kind of storytelling can adapt to the technological novelty and also to the vastness of the database as an archive?

….how does the editor work in the twenty-first century? Especially if, as in your case, the editor is also the person with the movie camera and the Soundbeam and the encrypted hard drive; she is a writer who designs a whole infrastructure of communication.

HS on Editing:
… And I think that editing, not only in filmmaking but in a lot of different activities, is a crucial activity. Postproduction is not working on content in retrospect but creating the content. Editing is where the meaning is created.

Godard said an edit could be an “and” or an “or.” That is how traditional film or video editing works. But now editing, with newer media and with physical reality becoming mediatized to a large extent, becomes a much more expanded activity, being able to channel and process information and to put together meaning in a much more expanded field.

Now instead of expanded cinema, it’s expanded editing, expanded postproduction, and circulation across different platforms and formats. I think it’s one of the crucial lenses through which to analyze contemporary activities.

LP: I think in the art world, duration is often seen as transgressive because it’s somehow forcing the audience to go beyond their comfort level, to subject them to an endurance test. And yet duration is absolutely accepted within mainstream cinema. So duration is perceived very differently in those two domains. Warhol, of course, was the supreme example of really pushing that in beautiful ways.

[read entire article]

“Hito Steyerl” is on view at Artists Space, New York, through May 24. “Laura Poitras” will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Feb. 5–May 15, 2016.

Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013more links:
Hito Steryl in e-flux and more articles in Art ForumLaura Poitrais Praxis Films

‘Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office’

‘Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office’ Recreates a Dark Time in a Laboratory’s Past  NYTimes.com.

“Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office,” a new exhibit at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute, transports visitors to 1924, the height of the eugenics movement in the United States. Inside a dimly lit room, the sounds of an old typewriter click and clack, a teakettle whistles and papers shuffle. The office’s original file cabinets loom over reproduced desks and period knickknacks. Creaky cabinets slide open, and visitors are encouraged to thumb through copies of pseudoscientific papers.

“There’s a haunted quality, that’s the nature of the files,” said John Kuo Wei Tchen, a historian at N.Y.U. and co-curator of the exhibit.  “We hoped we could evoke a visceral feeling of what it was like to be in a detention center, where people were presumed to be ineligible unless proven otherwise.”

When the Eugenics Record Office opened its doors in 1910, the founding scientists were considered progressives, intent on applying classic genetics to breeding better citizens. Funding poured in from the Rockefeller family and the Carnegie Institution. Charles Davenport, a prolific Harvard biologist, and his colleague, Harry H. Laughlin, led the charge. [read more]

Hank Willis Thomas on Black Male Identity

Re-blogging from photoandimaging.net

“What Is Common to All of Us?” Redefining Black Male Identity
by Hank Willis Thomas
Creative Time Reports.

Drawing from his collaborative transmedia project “Question Bridge: Black Males,” the artist Hank Willis Thomas examines the racial context of the 2012 killing of Jordan Davis as the man who shot the 17-year-old Florida resident, Michael Dunn, is retried for murder.

Screenshot from “Question Bridge: Black Males,” a collaborative transmedia project of Chris Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair.

Every person has a “day of infamy” in his or her life. For the parents of Jordan Davis, that day was November 23, 2012. For the parents of Trayvon Martin, it was February 26, 2012. For the parents of Michael Brown, it was August 9, 2014. For me, it was February 2, 2000—a Tuesday. That was the day I lost Songha Thomas Willis, my cousin, roommate, best friend and, for all intents and purposes, big brother. He was shot dead in front of dozens of people during a robbery in which he did not resist. [read more]

– – – – – – – – – – – – –
{Proud to say that Hank was a alumnus of Photography & Imaging and a student in my senior projects class.}

about Selfies

[Reblogging] About Those Callous Selfies — by Michael Shaw, BagNews Notes

photo: Manu Fernandez/AP

You’ve seen them before. You’ve seen them in war zones and funerals, even. More often than not, they result in disdain — or head scratching, at least —  for the apparent soullessness and narcissism. This is just the latest I’ve seen. It appeared, in all it’s blasphemy, as the leadoff photo in The Atlantic “In Focus” Photos of the Week slideshow on Friday.  Documenting the perceived insensitivity, the caption reads:

Tourists take a “selfie” as demonstrators burn a trash container during a May Day rally in Barcelona, Spain, on May 1, 2014. Tens of thousands of workers marked May Day in European cities with a mix of anger and gloom over austerity measures imposed by leaders trying to contain the eurozone’s intractable debt crisis.

How dare these tourists (ugly Americans, perhaps?) denigrate the anger and gloom of tens of thousands of European workers?

Well, I’m not prepared to say that this photo or its innumerable cousins have any moral implications at all.  What is clear is that these types of photos need to be understood on two completely independent levels. [read rest of article]

 

Racism as Style: The Return of Blackface

Important read in BagNews Notes:
Racism as Style: The Return of Blackface — BagNews

by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa
(adapted from the Tumblr blog, The Great Leap Sideways)

Excerpt from essay > “On Tuesday of this week, the British creative arts website It’s Nice That published a feature on a photo-shoot by French multi-disciplinary studio Akatre entitled Tropical. The images consist of two young naked women painted entirely (and unrecognizably) black, stood in front of a brightly patterned tropically-themed seamless backdrop, or reflected in the smooth dark mirrored surface of a black table…” [ read more ]

—-

Happy to learn about thegreatleapsideways.com and greatleapsideways.tumblr.com, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, editor. The sites showcase contemporary photography with small and extended surveys of work by contemporary photographers alongside extended interviews, features, videos and extracts from texts that illuminate the practise of photography and its wider context. Looks like a great resource.

Teaching The Camera To See Skin Color

[Reblogging this interesting piece from Buzz Feed]

Teaching The Camera To See My Skin by Syreeta McFadden – BuzzFeed

I was 12 years old and paging through a photo album; my memories of the days seemed to fade in the photo’s recreation. In some pictures, I am a mud brown, in others I’m a blue black. Some of the pictures were taken within moments of one another. “You look like charcoal,” someone said, and giggled. I felt insulted, but I didn’t have the words for that yet. I just knew that I didn’t want to be seen as a quality of a dark black that would invite hatred on my skin.

A year later, it was 1988 and the overhead kitchen light burned the dullest yellow as my mother placed four proofs on the table from an Olan Mills photo session. Each wallet-sized print contained various permutations of my little sister, my mother, father, and me. She wanted to know what we thought.

I considered each of the images. I couldn’t see my face. “Why do I look so dark?” [read more]

Mirror of Race

The Mir­ror of Race Project, a place for reflec­tion on the mean­ing of race in Amer­ica — its past, as well as its present and future.

Here you will find both a main exhi­bi­tion of early Amer­i­can pho­tographs as well as exhi­bi­tions on spe­cific top­ics.

You will also find crit­i­cal com­men­tary in var­i­ous forms, such as essays and film.

Enter