Photographers Abroad: Exhibition Catalogue (original) (raw)
The broadsheet advertisement on the front page of the world's most widely circulated English daily, The Times of India, and its sister publication, The Economic Times, on February 1, 2013, promoting the exhibition, The Naked and the Nude, was perhaps the reason it drew so much attention – chiefly of right wing elements banded together as a fhjjfghj affiliation, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and its fjjffjg wing, the Durga Vahini. On that day and the next, city papers carried curtain raisers and reviews on the show, subtitled The body in Indian art. By February 3, the discourse and coverage had changed as the two gjgjkk organisations reached out to the media to 'protest' what, by then, was a familiar bogey – the desecration of Indian culture. First, suggestions, then intimidations, were phoned in by what appeared to be lumpen elements against the continuity of the exhibition with the violence being threatened against both works and those associated with the exhibition. On February 4, the 'protestors' gathered outside the gallery but were not let in by a large posse of policemen and policewomen who had been rushed over on the gallery's request for security. The organisers had also reached out to the art and intellectual community who turned up in a number that equalled that of the protestors inside. The media too was let in and had free access to the hjjhjh who put up an informed defense that ranged from India's liberal past to the trope about freedom of expression and its guarantee under the constitution. The press was largely supportive and cheered the gallery's decision not to withdraw either the exhibition or specific works included in the exhibition, as demanded by some of the protestors. Though they had not been inside the gallery – a precautionary measure to ensure the safety of the exhibited works – visual references for the entire exhibition were available on the gallery's website. Television chat shows were supportive too, and put together panels where such intolerance was berated by most guests and the anchors. The reason I bring this up in some detail is to establish the context of this exhibition. The protestors – mostly women – had been brought to the venue in a bus. It would be safe to assume that none of them had been in an art gallery before, or had any views on art. The more intrepid among the media who talked to them found that though they shouted slogans against the commodification of women, had no idea what they were really protesting about. While photographer and gjgjghjk of cultural organization Sahmat, Ram Rahman, was talking to newspersons inside about explicit sculptures from the gjgj, and others were making references to the erotic nature of temple sculptures in Khajuraho and Konark, the women outside appeared restless and keen to return to their homes. They had been hired to grab headline attention, but now that the electronic media's interest was diverted, their own enthusiasm seemed to be flagging. In a short while they would be herded back into their bus and sent home. The policemen and barriers would remain, in scarcer numbers, for a few more days, before being withdrawn entirely, letting the exhibition continue. The manufactured protest and its gjgjj reveals some of the chinks in Indian society in general and the gjjg of the art world in particular. The discomfort it has with art seems to be a fjjg of modernism, something that is new and alien and foisted on a traditional sensibility which leaves it open to interpretations of being exploitative and gjgjjg. The famous sculpture of a dancing girl from Mohenjodaro, excavated from the gjjg of the Indus Valley Civilisation and five millennia old, is unclothed – a convention many of the artists continue to follow today for reasons I will explain in some detail a little
(Re)thinking the IMAGE (Curatorial Essay)
Since the advent of photography the phenomenon of the image has redefined the human experience, both taking us deeper into, and further away from ourselves, blurring the lines between subject and object. The work of these six talented emerging artists calls the image back into question, both stretching and problematizing its definition. Implicit in this action, is challenging the link between the image and how we see/know our human selves.
The body as interactive display: examining bodies in a public exhibition
Sociology of Health and Illness, 2006
‚Body Worlds' is an exhibition of human bodies that currently tours Europe, the Far East and the USA. The public display of 'real' human bodies has caused public controversy and debate about the moral and educational value of the exhibition. However, relatively little academic research has been undertaken to explore how visitors see and reflect on the exhibits. In this journal, Walter recently examined comments people left in the exhibition's comment-books to reveal how people see the bodies. His investigation provides interesting insights into people's understanding of and attitude to Body Worlds. This paper complements Walter's findings by analysing video-recordings of visitors looking at the 'plastinated' bodies at the showing of Body Worlds in London in 2002/03. The analysis reveals how people anatomise the exhibits and consider them in the light of the knowledge and experience of 'real' human bodies, such as those of other people and their own. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the observations and findings from the analysis bear upon debates on Body Worlds and in the sociology of health and illness.
Current museum strategies are by now going towards interdisciplinary forms profiting from the cross-matching between visual arts and performing ones. The negotiation between different art languages engenders a heuristic dialogue which, in turn, enables aesthetic experiences to arise, at the same time that it defines new exhibiting forms: "choreographed exhibition and exhibited choreography". Within a migration from the black box to the white cube, the theatrical body becomes a work of art through a process of objectification. Simultaneously, the exhibition space turns into a hybrid place of creation. Eventually, the beholder is called into question: his participation is choreographed, as well as the very act of observation. This article probes the dynamism of this situation and analyses a series of study cases from both, the institutions' and the artists' perspectives.
Ritual Curating: Deep Hanging Out and Exhibition Making
The International Journal of the Arts in Society: Annual Review, 2024
In this interview with curator David Ayala-Alfonso, which was conducted on August 23, 2023, Daniel Tucker inquires into Ayala-Alfonso’s recent curatorial projects in Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Bogota and the traveling exhibition Never Spoken Again.
New Turnings of a Networked Age: Reconsidering Photographic Actions in Light of Curatorial Practice
We are approaching the end of an age dominated by the lens—that is, by ways of knowing informed by the lens—and entering a new age informed by distributed network architectures. A result of this transition is the culture-wide shift away from the certainties of our past seven or eight centuries, and a movement toward more fluid and immanent ways of knowing and acting. One characteristic of this change is the gradual disappearance of the ossified single-point perspective and its replacement by a more multi-dimensional and immersive point of view, which is marked by participation and real-time talk-back, among other things. Photographic practice is evolving in response to these changes. In fact, the word photography no longer means what it once did. To put it more strongly, looked at historically, the notion of photography that we all grew up with is proving so ephemeral that we might argue that photography itself never really existed; rather, as a set of culturally determined actions, it marked a fuzzy slide through the final two centuries of one way of knowing (dominated by the lens), and a turning toward a far older way of knowing (dominated by networks of human relations). This paper considers these redefinitions of photography in the light of curatorial practice, a way of knowing and making that has deep cultural affinities with traditional notions of photographic practice.
Curatorial Care in Practice: Photographic Subjectivities, Archival Re-Positionings, Queering Spaces
Critical Arts, 2020
Centring black visual presences in Victorian Britain through the prism of studio photography, this fourth iteration of Autograph's critically acclaimed curatorial archive research programme, The Missing Chapter: Black Chronicles (2013-present), explored politics of representation, subjectivity, community, mobility, history and agency. In addition to an extraordinary collection of photographic studio portraits-a majority produced in collaboration with the Hulton Archive, London, as large-scale modern silver gelatin prints, taken from original nineteenth-century glass plates-Black Chronicles IV featured the immersive sound-image installation The African Choir 1891 Re-Imagined (with songs composed by Phillip Miller and Thuthuka Sibisi) and a special display of The Paris Albums 1900. The latter was first shown as a discrete gallery installation at Autograph in 2010, co-curated by Mussai and Mark Sealy, and featured more than 200 photographs reproduced from pioneering scholar and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois's groundbreaking exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition 1 (Mussai and Sealy; see also: Mussai and Talmor 2014, 1). Extending Autograph's longstanding commitment to annotating the cultural histories of photography by addressing its "missing chapters", and advocating for rights, representation, and a diversity of artistic practices and constituencies, the exhibition found resonance with VIAD's focus on historical redress within colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid photographic archives, and the role of positionalities in the production and reception of these visual grammars.