HITO STEYERL

April 23, 2021 by Nina Strand in Interview

By Nina Strand

Of all the exhibitions that were prevented from opening this year during the pandemic, I Will Survive – Espaces physiques et virtuels with Hito Steyerl at Centre Pompidou in Paris might be the most missed. The grand retrospective showing 20 works by Hito Steyerl at Centre Pompidou is currently waiting to be seen. Speculations are circulating that museums in France may be allowed to open in mid-May. Luckily, the German publisher Spector Books has produced a very comprehensive catalogue for the show, which is a small exhibition in itself, conceived by curator Doris Krystof at K21 in Düsseldorf – where the coproduced exhibition actually opened in September last year – and curators Florian Ebner and Marcella Lista from Pompidou. This very comprehensive and thorough publication will survive even if the actual show never opens. As Ebner explains, the idea was to create a referenced monograph on Steyerl: ‘It's rich in content and images, trying to provide a lot of information about each of the 20 exhibited works.’

In the introduction, the curators write that the aim is present a French/German perspective on Steyerl. ‘This is the first exhibition of this kind that exists on her in France’, Lista explains. ‘And she's not that well known here, except in university and artists' communities. Maybe what’s really French about this perspective is that we worked with her on the specific aspects of the social debate in France over the past year. And since the COVID-19 crisis, she’s been very interested in digging into the specificities of the French context.’

Steyerl’s new work SocialSim, consisting of video projections and a computer game, is made with this in mind, described as ‘a reflection of our society’s digital media overload that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic’. Lista elaborates: ‘It's really conceived on the template of a video game, a computer game, and among the parameters you can play with are these issues of the statistics of discrimination, pressure, intimidation and violence that were taken from official and independent sources of information here in France. And this version of the piece is called Rebellion (A bout de souffle) which is an homage to Jean-Luc Godard.’ Steyerl was keen to adapt the piece to the context ‘and see how the topics of her work would resonate in the country where so many of the philosophers she refers to have shaped critical culture with regard to media, cinema and post-cinema aesthetics.’

The building itself, the Centre Pompidou, was also of interest for Steyerl, Lista explains, as ‘a model of this notion of transparency that was important in modernism, but which also has its ambivalent sides. She was interested in the democratic utopia of the Centre Pompidou as the first cultural centre open to encouraging wider and sociologically diverse audiences to access culture.’

Hito Steyerl, This is the Future (détail), 2019.

As an artist dealing with the responsibility of being an artist, and working with the social role of art and the museum, Steyerl has stated that she observes the world as it is and then asks how it could be different. Her work addresses the responsibilities of museums today. She believes that the public museum and the art scene in general are under threat, and that this was so even before before the pandemic. They receive less and less funding, making the title of the exhibition poignant: I Will Survive. As the curator says, ‘Steyerl has used pop musical references in almost all her work from the year 2000, because she wants to include everyone. She has this unique ability to draw in so many with her video essays, always with many layers.’ Ebner adds that the show’s subtitle, Physical And Virtual Spaces, ‘indicates that I Will Survive isn’t only a response to the current crisis, but a retrospective, with many works, interacting and echoing each other, from the early critic of the rising nationalism in the public space of reunified Germany to the reflection on digital capitalism in the later pieces. And I think this transfers to what’s already happening in the world, because it’s currently this cut-up and collage situation.’

For someone like Steyerl, who claims that we're submerged by the many images around us and questions their digital truth, there’s much play with perspectives and disruptive situations in this show, the curators say. ‘In theory it might take eight hours to see everything’, says Ebner, ‘and you have all these different approaches to the question of the image in her different films. In November, there’s the notion of the travelling image, and then in How Not To Be Seen, you turn invisible in a world full of images. This Is The Future is about the idea of finally predicting the future and anticipating the image. She's working with the paradoxes of the image as a source of inspiration.’

Steyerl’s talk with Trevor Paglen at Pompidou in 2018 was packed with eager Steyerl fans. Even Lista and Ebner were surprised by the turnout: ‘She's bringing some interesting questions for the public today’, Ebner says, ‘and even if she doesn't have the answers, she’s formulating good questions and doing it with enough humour to make it not sound like homework. Lista agrees: ‘She's always flipping things around so you can see two sides of every issue. I think her message is that everything is unstable, and today, something can be seen from a different angle from tomorrow, which obliges us to revise our judgements or our perceptions. The strongest aspect of her work is to play with this instability and find a way to navigate the storm. Every time she addresses an issue it's really about finding the tools not to be its victim, but trying to acknowledge the situation fully in order to overcome it.’

Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (detail), 2013.

The exhibition Hito Steyerl I Will Survive – Espaces physiques et virtuels was scheduled to open at the Centre Pompidou 3rd of February. Due to the lockdown it is unlikely to open before mid-May, but it has been prolonged until 5 July.

DAMIAN HEINISCH

June 24, 2020 by Nina Strand in Interview

Damian Heinisch has won the MACK First Book Award for his photographic journey from Ukraine to Oslo. The book, titled 45, records Heinisch journey through Europe, a trip inspired by train journeys taken by his grandfather in 1945 and his father in 1978.

As he writes, he drew on his grandfather’s dramatic train journey in the depths of winter 1945 from Gliwice [Poland] to a labour camp in Debalzewo, Ukraine: “While his travels ended in death, my father and his family rode the train to freedom in 1978 from Gliwice to West Germany. Like my father and grandfather before me, I too embarked on my voyage at the age of 45.”

While working on this long-term project - focused on his family's history in the context of the Second World War - it became inevitable for him that he would visit the site of his grandfather's unknown grave in Ukraine, saying: “After my return from Ukraine in 2013, the material disappeared into my archive. When the time allowed, I looked over it again. Seeing great potential for it to become a book, I set out on an unexpected experiment. I realised that my family's lives had been considerably influenced by forced immigration and that, as a method of transportation, trains had played a significant role in the process of resettlement. It therefore made sense to take the train to all these places to which they’d travelled – Ukraine, Germany, Poland and Norway – and to document this journey. The train window became the stage. In each of these countries, I used different photographic approaches and techniques, inspired by historical events.”

Heinisch travelled in Ukraine for 13 days, 8 months before the revolution started in Kiev:“I had this worry that my father’s fear of the Soviet presence, which he experienced in his childhood and in the following years, would somehow transfer to me. He’s had this fear his whole life. Still, I decided to go. It was like a calling, and this was the strongest call in the whole project. In my head, Ukraine was a no-man’s land, but I knew it was necessary to visit the place where my grandfather disappeared, almost like a ghost. None of my family members had been there after his death. For a long time, it was impossible to go.”

For a while, Heinisch asked himself what the motivation for the travel to Ukraine was: “At first I thought it was for me and my project as a photographer, but in the end I realised that it was for my grandfather, for my father and for my aunt. It was for all of us. I needed to understand the history of my family, and through that, to understand where I come from. In Debalzewe, the place where his unknown grave is - an authentic and beautiful graveyard - I chose one grave as his symbolic, final resting place. I left some red and white flowers there. And I called my father. When I heard his voice I felt something was changing and closing - in a positive way.”

One approach to a visual solution was to photograph landscapes as evidence of the events he elaborates:”In Oslo, there was still snow outside my flat when I left in May, but it was thirty degrees in Donetsk, Ukraine, with a clear blue sky throughout our stay. It felt like the right opportunity. I was forced to photograph at the time of day when the light is so blue that the pictures became almost boring in the pictorial sense. But people died at this time of the day – they didn't only die when it was raining or foggy or snowing, which is the impression you get from documentaries or films about war. People died in the most beautiful weather.”

In Ukraine, Heinisch decided to document the terrain where his grandfather’s life ended, through photographs and an imaginary diary he left behind: “I searched for places that he might have walked through and where he might have been forced to work. The terrain is marked by heavy industry and manmade mountains. I photographed these mountains, which look sacred in a biblical way. The whole experience was quite surreal.”

The project was first shown as an installation at The Autumn Exhibition in 2018, before you did the book with Michael Mack: a Japanese-fold paperback also including a large-format fold-out poster: 45 is my first book and each step in the production felt very intense. It was close to an experiment with an unknown outcome. I was surprised to find myself intuitively fragmenting my images in order to achieve a higher abstraction associated with surveillance, veiled in a layer of noise. Through this, I hoped to leave the viewer with an existential feeling.”

The edit of the book felt logical on one hand and challenging and time-consuming on the other he says:"Since we’re looking at a journey, and the images were taken in chronological order, it was an obvious choice to apply the same sequence in ordering the book. I was left with around 4,000 35mm colour images, but had limited space. One by one, I carefully investigated the possibilities of the fragmentation, comparing each image to the following contender. Here, I decided intuitively on the basis of visual association and memory, exploring the potential of those images that stick with us throughout our lives.”

45 is part of a long-term project, which will accumulate into four books, collected in a slipcase. As Heinisch says: “This long-term project has occupied my mind for over ten years. The book transformed into something I really couldn’t have expected or hoped for. And now it’s out of my hands and can live a life of its own. For me, its narrative challenges questions of forced immigration, which has influenced the lives of countless families in Europe and the world as a whole, both in the past and the present. Looking beyond our own time, untangling the web of history, allows us to unravel the threads that force us to repeat past mistakes. We need to see things as they were in order to see them as they are.”

JOHN ERIK RILEY

February 12, 2020 by Nina Strand in Interview

The last decade has seen the publication of more photobooks than in the last 170 years put together according to the PhotoBook Museum. But a seminar at c/o Berlin last year, Photobooks: RESET, started from the premise that the photobook is in crisis. What do you think, is the photobook in trouble?

I certainly hope not, as I’ve just plunged into the field of photobooks myself. Det jeg var from Flamme forlag combines stories and short prose with colour photography, so if there is a crisis, I either didn’t get the memo or chose to ignore it.

In a broader sense, though, my response to the question would be ‘No’. Where is the evidence of a crisis? Doesn’t the sheer volume of publications – and their breadth of expression – suggest that we live in an extremely creative and expansive phase in the history of the book itself? I’m a collector of photobooks and a photography critic, and I find myself fascinated by the amount of imagination – and the sense of craft – reflected in many works today. With that comes an expectation of something more, an enhanced reflection on or contemplation of the role of the image itself. The simple photobook, with a foreword, afterword and collection of fabulous shots, doesn’t necessarily cut it anymore.

Midnight Milk, Marie Sjøvold. — *Midnight Milk,* Marie Sjøvold.

I see a willingness to push the envelope. A masterpiece like Midnight Milk by Marie Sjøvold is a good example of what I’m discussing here. It’s personal without feeling overly realistic. It’s smart, sometimes ethereal, but also full of emotion and wonder. And its use of materials and printing methods is nothing short of mind-boggling. In addition to containing wonderfully bewildering photographs, it makes use of various materials and enters into a dialogue with a children’s book classic by Tove Jansson. Her book is not only visual, but narrative, poetic, literary. This opens up new depths for the reader or viewer. Every time I page through the book, I find something new – not necessarily in a particular image, but in the connections that are established between various modes of expression and media.

Now, I come from the literary world, first and foremost. I’m a writer who also makes pictures, and in recent years, I’ve chosen to combine these approaches, hopefully in ways that are new to the reader. Or, if not new, then at least enticing or thought-provoking. Det jeg var (What I was) is the most recent manifestation of this exploration. I sense that I’m sounding more theoretical in my approach than I actually am. Øynene i ørkenen, which has long-form essays about photography in the digital age, and the Norwegian newspapers for which I write are more fitting places for that sort of thing. Det jeg var provides the reader with small flashes of poetry, comedy and tragedy. The photography included therein is meant to do the same.

The end result, if it works as intended, is like a network of pulsating narrative forms, whose organic interaction hopefully takes on a life of its own in the mind of the reader. Central to both text and image are senses of place and self, and my own experiences in places like Norway, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the United States. What is a meaningful story? What is worth saving, given that time erases everything? How do you deal with life’s multiple vanishing acts? These are questions that are central to photography itself, and I want to incorporate this interest into a literary context. Or rather, I want to use both a visual and a literary approach to see what happens when these languages collide.

Loosely translated, Det jeg var means ‘What I once was’, and the book reflects this interest. My story isn’t simple and straightforward, but more like the collision I’m describing, the intertwining of various emotions, memories and forms of meaning. I’m multicultural and multimodal. The form of my narrative is a reflection of function.

I’m actually surprised that so many writers are reticent to experiment in similar ways, given how easily accessible photography is today. The closest we get is a Sebaldian, quasi-documentarian approach, which was rampant in the early 2000s, in which photography is meant to add a tinge of lived history or authenticity to the literary work. This method is very specific, however – that is: only one among many. Although W.G. Sebald is an inspiring master, my work has very little in common with a novel like Austerlitz (some would say: to a fault). The only similarity between the two is that his and my books contain photography. The photographs themselves, however, and what they express, vary greatly.

Blind Spot, Teju Cole. — *Blind Spot*, Teju Cole.

There are books we keep coming back to, as references and because a second or third reading can give new insights. Is there a book (or are there books) that you keep coming back to?

I already mentioned Midnight Milk. Given that I’ve waded into a discussion about more literary photobooks, however, I want to mention two works that I’ve had the pleasure to review (for Morgenbladet, a Norwegian weekly). The first of these is Blind Spot by Teju Cole, who’s an acclaimed author, art historian, photographer, curator and critic. His book is a series of essay snapshots, each placed in conjunction with a photograph. The result is a combination of photobook, travelogue, autobiography and criticism. We visit Lagos, New York and various other locales, but the texts and photographs rarely concern themselves with obvious tropes. Instead, Cole writes about the things we sometimes ignore or forget to reflect upon. The title, Blind Spot, has several meanings. It’s specifically about an eye illness that the narrator suffers from, which may lead to blindness – tragedy for a photographer! But his work is also abstract and introspective. What do we miss?, Cole asks. What should we focus on?

Another contemporary classic is Sally Mann’s Hold Still, a heartfelt and honest autobiography, which is full of photographs and ideas about what a picture can mean. I’m stretching the idea of the photobook here, but I’m doing so on purpose, as I feel that the space between literature and photography remains relatively unexplored. What you often get is the great writer writing about a photographer – in a foreword or afterword, say – or a photographer making portraits of famous writers. Given this context, I was surprised to discover that Mann is not only a wonderful photographer, but a great author and thinker. I particularly like her ideas about photography and memory, how the photograph – and here she’s speaking about her own experience – ‘eradicates the memory of the moment’. She only remembers the result, not the event itself. In an autobiography, this has some interesting implications, which she explores throughout the text, in pictures and in words.

I don’t want to sound like I’m badmouthing more traditional photobooks, though. The classic volume of pictures, without the narrative accompaniment, has inherent value in and of itself. A recent discovery for me is The Castle by Richard Mosse, who’s perhaps most famous for his infrared photographs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His recent work is a series of thermal photographs of refugee camps, printed with silver ink on matte, black paper. His approach could have resulted in an arrogant aestheticisation of suffering, but to me it has the opposite effect. His pictures bring the world closer and evoke acute concern, in a way that’s both surprising and meaningful. On the other end of the spectrum, in the realm of the traditional image-making canon, I’ll always remain a fan of American masters such as William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander and Saul Leiter.

As a writer, how would you work with the photo book? What’s the purpose of the book for you?

The physical book is my main gallery and the way I most often curate my own work. One recent attempt – before Det jeg var, that is – was a collaboration with the Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen. My role there was more supplemental. He’d written a moving autobiographical account of his mother’s history and death, which also included – or sprang out of – a close reading of the Vigeland sculpture park in Oslo. I happen to publish Jacobsen’s work, so we ended up working together, with added help from book designer Stian Hole. It was an interesting challenge. Sculptures aren’t necessarily the most intriguing photographic subjects. Fortunately, we were pressed for time, which meant that I had to make the photographs in the dead of winter. This problem became a solution: snow, ice and the winter light became visual echoes of the content of the text. The form of the artworks is visible, but we also see that they’re exposed to the elements, as sculptures generally are in public parks.

The content of my new book, Det jeg var, is all mine, however. Early on, I made a few decisions that led me to the end result. I decided to work with an editor, Geir Nummedal, who has a lot of experience with visual content. And I chose to work with a design that places texts and photographs in a form that gives equal play to both. I didn’t want the book to look like a photobook with some random texts here and there; nor did I want to underplay the content of the photographs. The solution, in the end, was to construct swashes of texts and images. There are seven sections in total: four photo collections and three prose-fiction collections. Contrary to earlier books of mine, the pictures aren’t printed next to – or made an integral part of – the prose portions of the volume. Instead, they’re clusters of meaning, more akin to essays or stories or poetry cycles.

My hope is to make a beautiful book, of course, something that’s nice to look at, in and of itself. But I also want to illicit an emotional response, without being too overt about it. Gradually, as one pages through the volume, the reader will hopefully make connections – and find new forms of meaning – along the way. I already mentioned that Bosnia-Herzegovina and the United States are places that I feel connected to. With regard to the former, my wife happens to be an expert on sexual violence in war; much of her field work has been conducted in Bosnia. I’ve also travelled in the region and written about it, most recently in a long essay for Lithub in conjunction with a rather heated debate about Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize.

I find that our Bosnian experiences – like the present political crisis in the United States – are somewhat difficult to process. Half the time, all I want to do is throw things and yell. Instead, I’ve tried to approach our disturbing age with all my senses open. What is beauty, what provides solace, when things are as they are? What is my story? What is remembrance? And how do traumas infuse our lives, in ways both large and small? Can darkness sometimes be converted into light, a negative become a positive, as in photography? Are there experiences that are impossible to accept, and, if so, how do we deal with them in a literary form? Add to this a huge amount of gallows humour, and the occasional satirical piece, and you perhaps get a sense of the tone of Det jeg var.

Although I’m quite specific about historical context and the events themselves, I don’t want to be too blatant in my approach to trauma and memory. I’ll leave that job to photojournalists and documentarians, and stick to aesthetics. Integral to Det jeg var – at least to me – are a sense of empathy, an attention to detail and a love for fleeting moments. Photography captures moments that are behind us. A text describes something that only exists when the words are processed in the mind of a reader. The combination of grief, wonder and compassion – of absence and presence – that this entails is the wellspring of my work. Hopefully, the end result will be a source of pleasure, reflection and sustained emotional resonance for the reader.

MARIA KAPAJEVA

February 05, 2020 by Nina Strand in Interview

The last decade has seen the publication of more photobooks than in the last 170 years put together according to the PhotoBook Museum. However, a seminar at c/o Berlin last year, Photobooks: RESET, started from the premise that the photobook is in crisis. What do you think – is the photobook in trouble?

The photobook is for me a form of art that can reach a bigger audience than exhibited work. Thus, if we talk about crisis, we need to talk about the art-market crisis, to which photobooks also belong. It’s a form that’s accessible to artists with various levels of income, since you can make a small edition of hand-made books, or a larger edition translated into several languages. Unfortunately, there’s still little support available for the production of art books, which seem not to be fully recognised as an art form. There are exceptions, of course. Both my books (You Can Call Him Another Man and my upcoming Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear) were generously supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment. But this is one of very few organisations that recognise the importance of non-periodical artistic publications.

You Can Call Him Another Man, Maria Kapajeva.

I’d also like to see more support for the distribution of photobooks to a wider audience. The books often end up being circulated in professional photographic circles, and it’s very hard to reach a different reader, who might not be involved professionally in the art scene. I think people would enjoy reading and exploring art in the form of a book. But due to our education – how kids and young people are introduced to art – there’s a need to expand the boundaries of the art forms, so they can appreciate books too. How wonderful it would be to have school sessions with discussions about both the exhibitions they visit and the art books they read together.

There are books we keep coming back to, as references and because a second or third reading can give new insights. Is there a book (or are there books) that you keep coming back to?

It’s difficult to pick just one or two. I must confess, I have a poor memory and if I read critical texts, I can never rely on my memory to recall all the key points, so I always make notes. Then, when I’m doing research for my new work, I go back to my notes and see if something interests me in terms of that specific idea or question. Those notes often lead me to read the books again. Also, many books have importance at a certain time in my life – I read texts and books that I find relevant to the themes and ideas I’m currently exploring. Recently, for instance, I’ve read for the third time Tyranny of Choice by Renata Selecl and for the second time In memory of memory by Maria Stepanova.

However, Despite the Haze You Can Still Get a Concrete Feeling for the Surroundings, Erik Betshammar. — *However, Despite the Haze You Can Still Get a Concrete Feeling for the Surroundings*, Erik Betshammar.

As for photobooks, I try to buy them when I can afford them, and I proudly own the ones I love. These are always within reach (on my bookshelves) and I enjoy looking through them again and again and again. I really enjoy the first meeting with a book. It reminds me of unwrapping a present, when you have no clue what’s inside. Some books are full of surprises and they’re exciting objects for your intimate and personal discoveries. Reading a book is a very intimate act, isn’t it? For instance, one of my most recent purchases is a book by Swedish artist Erik Betshammar titled However, Despite the Haze You Can Still Get a Concrete Feeling for the Surroundings. It’s an absolutely joyful journey to go through Erik’s book and find all the connected points in it.

In your field, what’s the purpose of the book for you?

It’s another form of developing my practice, and a way of reaching an audience. I don’t treat books as illustrations of the work I’ve developed. For me, each book is a project, an idea and narrative, in itself. For instance, my upcoming book Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear (to be published this spring by Milda Books) is based on a previous body of work with the same title. The book aims to present a different experience of the works and materials I collected and produced at that time. As it’s based on interviews with and photographs of the former workers of a textile mill in Estonia that had closed, the book is an ideal form to share these stories with others who might have gone through similar experiences. In the book, I included more extracts from the interviews and more images that people had shared with me. They’re all presented together as a continuous piece of fabric, woven from collective, personal memories and my reflections on the community to which my family and I used to belong.

IRÈNE ATTINGER

January 27, 2020 by Nina Strand in Interview

Double page from: Fait: Koweit 1991, Éditions Hazan, 1992, Sophie Ristelhueber — Double page from: *Fait: Koweit 1991*, Éditions Hazan, 1992, Sophie Ristelhueber

From January to February 2020, Fotogalleriet will look more closely at the photobook as an exhibition space in Le Book Club, a show unravelling in five chapters over five weeks. In light of this, we reignite our interview series looking closely at book production. Here are the French photobook-expert Irène Attinger’s thoughts:

The last decade has seen more photobooks than the last 170 years together according to the PhotoBook Museum, a seminar at c/o Berlin last year, Photobooks: RESET, started from the premise that the photobook is in crisis. What do you think, is the photobook in trouble?

In the mid-1950s, two books created a new paradigm for the photobook, and began its golden age– two books featuring photographic works designed specifically for the format: William Klein’s Life Is Good & Good for You in New York (Paris, Seuil, 1956) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (Paris, Delpire, 1958), both of which are milestones in the history of photography. Each in its own way invents a new form of photographic writing. Far from being simple messengers of images, these books propose, through their layouts, a veritable reevaluation of images, which are arranged in sequences or in pairs. The impact of every photograph depends on how it relates to others through its format and as part of a succession of images. As in cinematic montage, an inter-imagery comes to the fore.

In the early 1960s, the deployment of a sequence or several sequences of photographs, whose meaning crystallises through images alone or with the aid of text and captions, became the paradigm for many photobooks. The photobook has become increasingly autonomous and has gained recognition as a work of art in its own right. This is underscored, starting in the 2000s, by the proliferation of works about photobooks.

Photography is facing an unprecedented mutation. The smartphone permanently allows everyone to produce images and disseminate them. The consequence of this multiplication is the trivialisation of the image. In such a context, the photobook is struggling to find an economy, but that doesn’t mean it’s lost its interest.

Trolly – New Orleans, 1955. From The Americans © Robert Frank.

There are books we keep coming back to, as references and because a second or third reading can give new insights. Is there a book (or are there books) that you keep coming back to?

While a book’s scarcity and its market value may arouse a collector’s interest, this has no bearing on its merits from the perspective of the development of the art of photography. While the publication of a ‘coffee-table book’ may signal the artist’s status, it’s clear that the majority of seminal books don’t belong in this category. Some of the most important books, such as Bernard Plossu's le voyage mexicain, have a very modest appearance.

As the founder, in 1996, of the library of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie(MEP) – one of the most important libraries in Europe dedicated to photography – I work daily with a large number of books. Today, among the books to which I return I’d like to cite Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (self-published, 1966), Ed Van der Elsken, Sweet Life (Harry N. Abrams, 1966), Hosoe Eikoh, Ordeal by Roses Reedited (Shueisha, 1971), Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus (Aperture, 1972), Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Aperture, 1986), Sophie Ristelhueber, Fait (Hazan, 1992), Anais Lopez, The Migrant (self-published 2018). Tomorrow the list could be different.

The Migrant, Anais Lopez, 2018. — **The Migrant,** Anais Lopez, 2018.

In your field, what’s the purpose of the book for you?

Books, particularly monographs, built around a distinct theme present an artist’s point of view, a personal universe, but also attest to a presence in the world anchored in time and space. The subjects covered may be of historical importance or reflect social phenomena in a given place and period, or reveal a singular and intimate space within. Nevertheless, every work has a relationship with the universal, since they all bear witness to the collective and individual consequences of the impact of the world on human consciousness, as well as to the photographer’s capacity to change our perception of the world. Dated and validated by the artist, such books allow the creation of archives. Whereas the internet is just a world of flux where dating and authority are easily lost, the library of the MEP is the living memory of fine international photography publishing from 1950 up to now; it currently holds over 32,000 volumes.

With my book, Une Bibliothèque: Maison Européenne de la Photographie co-published by Actes Sud, my intention was to show the richness and the diversity of photobooks published in different countries and representing various cultures, and thus to contribute to a historical survey of the photobook and, by extension, to a history of the development of the art of photography. My selection emphasises monographs built around a distinct theme, whether social or political, rather than exhibition catalogues or comprehensive publications devoted to a single artist. This relationship finds an expression in different cultural areas in Europe, Asia, North America, Latin America and Africa. The presence of Japanese photographers is important. To this day, many Japanese photographers privilege the book format, which they consider to be the ultimate vehicle for their work. I also wanted to showcase French publishing, which is very vibrant and, at least as far as the last sixty years are concerned, often overlooked in publications released in the United Kingdom and the United States. And I wanted to focus on the presence of women who are so often left out in the world of photography, which remains a very masculine field. In order not to approach these unique works through a singular prism, I wrote brief presentations about the selected books, paying ample attention to the protagonists of the books’ creation: photographers, writers, editors.

Finally I would also mention the book that Jörg Brockmann and I published on the occasion of the first edition of a new festival in Geneva (ARCOOP Wall Project, 2019) around the theme of Love(s). To me, it’s more than a catalogue because of the paper, the editing and the presentation of the series by the twenty-six photographers in the exhibition.

GAO SHAN

January 21, 2020 by Nina Strand in Interview

From January to February 2020, Fotogalleriet will look more closely at the photobook as an exhibition space in Le Book Club, a show unravelling in five chapters over five weeks. In light of this, we reignite our interview series looking closely at book production. We continue this series by talking to the Chinese artist Gao Shan, this years winner of First PhotoBook in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards for his book The Eighth Day.

The last decade has seen more photobooks than the last 170 years together according to the PhotoBook Museum, a seminar at c/o Berlin last year, Photobooks: RESET, started from the premise that the photo book world is in crisis. What do you think, is the photo book in trouble?

I really have no strong opinions about that, I think that’s beyond my thinking area as a photographer.

There are books we keep coming back to, as references and because a second or third reading can give new insights. Is there a book (or are there books) that you keep coming back to?

There are a couple books I really fond of, like the ones by Georges Bataille. I've read two books over and over again, L'expérience intérieue by Georges Bataille, and Joseph Brodsky’s On Grief and Reason.

As a photographer, how you work with the book? What is the purpose of the book for you?

Photobooks for me, that means a finish to a work, you keep doing and finally it ends, it’s a medium you show your work to this world.

And a last question, what are you working on now?

I’m working on a new project that is about human existence, around themes as labor, migration, power and more. It’s not an absolutely complete work yet, I am also including videos and sculpture. I am not using a clear narrative in my work this time, I trust the strength of every single photo instead.

A jury at Paris Photo selected this year’s winners. The jury included: Irene Attinger, curator; Osei Bonsu, curator of international art at Tate Modern; Emma Bowkett, director of photography at FT Weekend Magazine; Takashi Homma, artist; and also Nina Strand, editor and founder, Objektiv Press. This is what Aperture wrote about the winner: The Eighth Day (Imageless, Wuxi, China), winner of the First PhotoBook Award, was born out of his desire to connect with his adoptive mother, who he shares a roughly-seventy-square-meter apartment with. Shan was praised for the simple yet thoughtful and emotionally potent design and sequence. Takashi Homma observed that while the work appears on one hand to be straightforward documentary, it also employs “performative and conceptual approaches in a sophisticated way.” As Homma noted, “This is someone who seems to know their history of photography and photobooks. I would like to see his next book!”

EMILIE DEMON

January 16, 2020 by Nina Strand in Interview

Ricardo Rangel’s BB of the Rua Araujo, 1970. (after Brigitte Bardot). Courtesy the artist / AFRONOVA GALLERY. — Ricardo Rangel’s *BB of the* *Rua Araujo*, 1970. (after Brigitte Bardot). Courtesy the artist / AFRONOVA GALLERY.

From January to February 2020, Fotogalleriet will look more closely at the photobook as an exhibition space in Le Book Club, a show unravelling in five chapters over five weeks. In light of this, we reignite our interview series looking closely at book production. We continue this series by talking to the gallerist Emilie Demon about her relationship with the photobook.

The last decade has seen more photobooks than the last 170 years together according to the PhotoBook Museum, a seminar at c/o Berlin last year, Photobooks: RESET, started from the premise that the photo book world is in crisis. What do you think, is the photo book in trouble?

Indeed, there has been a noticeable explosion in terms of publications over the past years. Having collected photo books for 25 years, I do love to browse through the offerings of a network of book dealers and outlets around the world or the publishing sections of Paris Photo, for example. You can see a clear vitality. The internet doesn’t offer the same experience and satisfaction as paper and ink: the smell, the touch… As long as there are people like us around, there will be a solid market for beautiful photobooks.

John Liebenberg, Bush of Ghosts. — John Liebenberg, *Bush of Ghosts.*

There are books we keep coming back to, as references and because a second or third reading can give new insights. Is there a book (or are there books) that you keep coming back to?

In the context of African contemporary photography, there aresome key reference books, like the Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography published by Revue Noire under the curatorship of Simon Njami, even though it is now more than 25 years old. I would also mention the catalogue of the landmark exhibition In/Sight at the Guggenheim Museum in 1996 curated by Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe. More recently, there’s the outstanding series of books published by Steidl for The Walther Collection with a number of excellent contributors.

Amongst some of my most treasured photobooks is a signed copy of Ricardo Rangel’s Our Nightly Bread, documenting Maputo’s Red Light District over decades. Rangel was (is!) a monument of photography and we were privileged to work with him. I also have a rare first edition of Ernest Cole’s House of Bondage (1967) – an essential in terms of history and political understanding.

One of my personal favorite and most cherished book is Bush of Ghosts by legendary photographer John Liebenberg documenting life in a time of war in Namibia 1986-1990. It is virtually out of print and I would never let it go. John Liebenberg is a dear friend and an amazing storyteller.

As a curator, how would you work with the book? What is the purpose of the book for you?

I believe that it’s paramount for an artist to have his or her work featured in pertinent publications as much as in the media. Importantly, it’s about documenting and adding layers to the works. The cost of producing and circulating art books is a real limitation. Fortunately, we collaborate with museums and universities internationally who have a culture of books. We’re currently working on two monographs, but it’s too early to tell you about them!

Lebohang Kganye’s Ngwana o tshwana le dinaledi. Courtesy the artist / AFRONOVA GALLERY. From the Walther Collection/Steidl publication. — Lebohang Kganye’s *Ngwana o tshwana le dinaledi. Courtesy the artist / AFRONOVA GALLERY. From the Walther Collection/Steidl publication.*

MARIE-ALIX ISDAHL VOISIN

January 09, 2020 by Nina Strand in Interview

Karambolage by Arnold Odermatt, — *Karambolage* by Arnold Odermatt,

From January to February 2020, Fotogalleriet will look more closely at the photobook as an exhibition space in Le Book Club, a show unravelling in five chapters over five weeks. In light of this, we reignite our interview series looking closely at book production. We begin the new year by talking to the London-based Norwegian cultural theorist Marie Alix Isdahl Voisin about her relationship with the photobook.

The last decade has seen more photobooks than the last 170 years together according to the PhotoBook Museum, a seminar at c/o Berlin last year, Photobooks: RESET, started from the premise that the photo book world is in crisis. What do you think, is the photo book in trouble?

That's a lot of books for the photobook to be in trouble! Whenever a medium is declared to be in a ‘crisis’, my impression is that it often comes from a place of wanting to identify its significance. And as long as that intention is there, I guess everything is exactly as it should be. If the publishing industry is booming, the market for photobooks might become saturated, which is more of a problem for the individual publishers trying to keep a business going, rather than for the reader or viewer. To me, it seems like the interest in publishing might be related to another crisis: the crisis of photography post-Instagram. IG has proved that there are many great amateur photographers out there who challenge the professional image-maker to push beyond a body of work that simply looks like a juicy instagram account. Not to forget memes, and the excess of surreal, poetic human imagination. This is good. It means that we’ve become used to consuming photography en masse, as something that's ever-present, with porous edges leaking all over the place. The photobook is placing the photographic image back into some sort of canon. It’s pure (although hopefully the images might not be). A book also requires time from you. I do love a great photobook, but I’m equally into scrolling my unpure feed. I did come to photography through my smartphone, and not through a photobook, I have to admit.

There are books we keep coming back to, as references and because a second or third reading can give new insights. Is there a book (or are there books) that you keep coming back to?

When I’ve been doing practice-led research in photography – and to me, photographic practice is a way of theorising, and theory a way of practising – there have been certain contributions to photographic theory that I've come back to, such as Joanna Zylinska’s book on ‘nonhuman’ photography. The foregrounding of photography’s nonhuman qualities has been important for me to find ways to overcome the modernist split between the image and its material support and make sense of how the human and the nonhuman are entangled in photography. This is to reckon with the history of optical metaphors and imaging practices that make worlds where the human is in control of, yet separate from, nature.

But I'm still interested in the optical image. I think there are other ways to depart from the Cartesian distancing and pinning down of a subject than to deal with the materiality of an image. Simply emphasising the material aspect of photography appears to me at times an inversion of the problem: the optical is problematic, so let’s focus on the material. You’re still dealing with the same dichotomy, just in reverse. What I want to see is the pluralist coming together of the two and then add some myths and fiction and hopefully arrive at something unknowable and new – a ‘purification of a hybrid’, as Latour has put it, or a hybrid that wants to reveal the nature of hybridity. When I look at an image with my human eyes, the optical is always there. And to me, this is exciting because I don’t find that many strictly non-representational photographic practices interesting. So this is where the photobooks come in.

I’d like to see a photobook by artist Diane Severin Nguyen. I don't think she’s made one yet. And a handful of Instagram accounts. I'm not mentioning names, but at times I enjoy the IG stories of certain artists more than their actual art practices. There are images in books I come back to: the black and white double exposures by Torbjørn Rødland in Vanilla Partner; a few classics: Karambolage by Arnold Odermatt, Masahisa Fukase’s Solitude of Ravens and Andre Kertesz’ From my window, for the repetition and differences within the same theme, whether window, raven, or crashed car. Basically, images that question what the image can do, and photobooks questioning what a photobook can do, are the kinds of images I come back to.

As a curator, how would you work with the book? What is the purpose of the book for you?

I'm not technically a curator, although I have been involved in curating. And magazine publishing. But not at the same time. There’s a flexibility to the book or printed work that’s different from an exhibition. You can put it out there in the world and it travels. There is, of course, a difference between major publishing houses and artists and photographers putting out their own books and zines. I guess self-publishing can be a way to avoid the restrictions, logistics and market dynamics of contemporary arts culture. I'd like to see more fast low-fi digital books and photo zines. It's surprising that although the internet gives us unlimited freedom for zine-making or any other image-related output, you don't see that many initiatives. Flatness.eu is the latest one I came across, which is sort of a combined research project and exhibition space engaging with screen-based image culture.

Masahisa Fukase’s Solitude of Ravens . — Masahisa Fukase’s *Solitude of Ravens* .

Le Book Club is curated by Antonio Cataldo (Artistic Director, Fotogalleriet), Nina Strand (artist end Objektiv’s editor in chief) and Anna Planas and Pierre Hourquet (founders, Temple).

LUO YANG

December 18, 2019 by Nina Strand in Interview

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS...

An email-interview by Travis Diehl.

Artists rarely talk about timelessness. This although a sort of immortality is certainly a deeply seated drive for most artists, whether they admit it or not. Here is the figure, the human, posed in a way more efficacious than its subject’s flesh—here is the gesture that hangs in the air. Luo Yang is an artist of the timeless. Her photographs describe modern China, its young women in particular, with a clarity and warmth that reveals goals more ambitious than simple documentation. Interiority, beauty, universality; what changes around the apparently changeless: these are her themes, and so while the women she photographs are unique and varied, expressive, and contemporary, there is yet something universal running between them, connecting them—something inside each of them that makes them girls...

Travis Diehl When are your subjects “girls,” and when are they “women”?

Luo Yang I think all my subjects, or every woman, has a girl living inside them. This girl is what they originally are. They may be called women at a certain stage of life as time passes, like when they marry, have children, grow old. But they can still be girls inside their entire life.

TD What do you think are the limits of your self-expression, or of this kind of artwork—? What subjects or ideas are beyond the limits of this work? I know it’s a vague or very open question... but I’m thinking about how your subjects are typically alone, or in pairs—the way you photograph them excludes ideas of a wider community, for example.

LY I’ve photographed many girls, those photos are the honest record of their adolescence as well as mine, of my inner world at a certain stage. A girl’s world at that age might be limited by itself, it might be self-centered, lonely and stubborn. So the way girls always appear in my photos are not staged that way. I hope my expression of their world is real and honest enough.

TD How do you think about sequencing your photographs, whether for a book or for an exhibition?

LY There are no special sequences for my photos. Usually it’s organized by the emotional connections or visual similarities shared among my works.

TD Some of your earlier series include pictures of inanimate things among the portraits. Why did you include these? What drew you to these objects above others?

LY These things appear in the photos naturally, as they are naturally part of the subject’s life and are the very true elements of life itself. Perhaps these things were there for a certain reason we didn’t know, but they are worth being recorded as well.

TD How is it different photographing your subjects, sometimes in erotic or revealing poses, in public—versus in the privacy of their homes?

LY Girls are more relaxed in a private space, where what they need to do is to confront themselves; whereas in public places, it’s like girls use their small thin bodies to confront the entire world, an attitude of confronting all the traditions and limitations.

TD Which is more transgressive, or riskier— the act of posing for the photograph like this, or the photograph itself?

LY Posing for my photos is a bold decision, while the process of shooting is an adventure in which me and the models try to explore ourselves together, and try to present the real side of them. This process is presented by the photograph. They can all be risky to a certain point.

TD I wonder if you could give me an idea of how you see your photographs fitting in to a tradition of portrait or street photography—in the western tradition, but also in a particularly Chinese context?

LY Actually I never think in what ways I should present my photos, whether they should be traditionally western or they should be consistent with Chinese context. The people and things I shoot, they are already there, already embody the traditions and modernity of China, and I record all those with the eyes of a younger generation in ways I hope are the most authentic and natural.

TD Is there an idea of beauty that transcends cultures and contexts—and at the same time, is there also a kind of beauty in your photographs that does not translate? In other words, what about your photographs is lost on a non-Chinese viewer?

LY On the contrary. When my works are exhibited outside China, a lot of people tend to like my photos. Just like I’m always touched by foreign photos or movies, I believe that human emotions are connected, there is always some point that hits you, and that’s what my works are trying to convey: the very true emotions mutually shared by everyone.

TD With what photographers or artists do you consider yourself in dialogue?

LY I understand your point, but personally I never feel such dialogues have any special meanings. For photographers or artists I admire, I usually just appreciate the work in itself, appreciate their world. And I’ve been inspired by so many artists in this way, naming just one or several would be unfair to them all.

TD I wonder about the influence of Ai Weiwei, for instance. Your work is very different, but his photo of his wife lifting her skirt in front of the Imperial Palace and the huge portrait of Mao—that comes to mind...

LY I respect him and I also like that photo by him very much. But we are different generations, we grew up in different environments and have different interests. I don’t think he has a direct influence on me.

TD What is new about the way you see your subjects?

LY I see my subjects with a gentle, non-judgmental or non-critical perspective, without adding too much personal emotions. I think it’s the best and most objective way to present them.

TD What do you mean when you say that you’re interested in the mainstream? Do you think your subjects are average somehow, or representative of a mainstream (Chinese?) ideal? In what ways are these women stereotypical, and how do you play with those stereotypes?

LY I’ve photographed them for over a decade. Those once rebellious and edgy girls have all gradually become the “mainstream” nowadays. I have to say the girls I shoot are the ones more pioneer-like, independent and self-aware earlier than others. They don’t represent “mainstream” or “stereotypical,” but they take the lead of what’s mainstream.

TD One last big question: Why is photography your medium of choice? What can you show with a photograph that you couldn’t show another way?

LY I’ve always found real, authentic things touching and valuable. Photography is a very simple and direct way to record and preserve such things. Now I’ve also started to explore the medium of films/ videos for the same reason.

TD What do you wish people would ask you about your work?

LY Haha, perhaps no questions asked would be better! I wish they could just feel my works.

This conversation is from Objektiv #19. Objektiv is celebrating its tenth year in 2019, and this year's issues will look both backwards and forwards. For this issue, we've asked artists who have featured in our first eighteen issues to ‘pay it forward’, so to speak, and identify a younger artist working with photography or film whom they feel deserves a larger platform.

ANGELICA MESITI

May 13, 2019 by Nina Strand in Interview

For our ‘One Image’ online column, I’ve chosen the work of Angelica Mesiti, some currently on view at Palais de Tokyo in Paris in the exhibition When Doing is Saying, for which Mesiti and curator Daria de Beauvais have made a selection of her works from the period 2012– 17. The reason why I’m still thinking about this exhibition is because, when surrounded by her films, one experiences a feeling of in some way being protected by them, a pleasant sensation in the face of the image tsunami that surrounds us today.

Interview by Nina Strand

“I was thrilled to be invited”, Mesiti explains. “We started the conversation in June last year, and it was very interesting to plan a big new installation and new arrangement of the work, and also to think about what story we wanted to tell with the selection. It was a different way of preparing an exhibition.”

Mesiti and de Beauvais had a plan.

“As you move through the show, your physical interaction with the works will develop. It’s a full exhibition experience in that way. It was very much a collaborative approach; it was an exchange between the curator and me, and I like to work like that.”

Asked about what she draws her inspiration from, she answers that the streets of Paris are a major source.

“It’s often stuff that happens while I’m on the metro, the bus or just walking around. In this city, there’s always something interesting to look at, and I’m not talking about the typical postcard Paris. I enjoy this environment. There’s so much variation, someone from everywhere, a vast diasporic community all across the city. I’ll see something that will trigger something, and one thing leads to another, to the next. Sometimes it takes you somewhere interesting and sometimes its doesn’t.”

Mesiti couldn’t make new work for Palais de Tokyo, since she’s currently working on her installation for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, opening on 11 May.

“Here, I’ll show a three-channel installation called Assembly. I found the source for this work while walking through a flea market in Rome some years ago. I discovered a peculiar object, a small machine, which I later discovered is called a Michela machine, a 19th-century stenographic device, modelled on a piano keyboard.”

The machine is an Italian invention, used in the Senate for official parliamentary note-taking.

“When this instrument was invented, it was adopted very quickly by the newly formed Italian parliament. It had won many prizes at the World Fair in Paris in the 1880s and Guiseppe Garibaldi insisted that they used this technology to ensure transparency within the democratic process. It played an important role over the last century.”

In her research, Mesiti discovered that the inventor was inspired by the idea of musical notation as a universal language.

“It interested me, because it looked like an instrument, but is in fact a typewriter of sorts. And I thought it would be really interesting to see what would happen if you translated text into music via this machine.”

For her film, Mesiti chose the poem To Be Written in Another Tongue by David Malouf to be ‘translated’ into music.

“This poem reflects on the difficulty of translation and the linguistic disconnection between the speaker in the poem and an ancestor. I worked with a Sydney-based composer Max Lyandvert to arrange the poem into a musical score. You can have a potential physical experience with this work in the way that wave forms and sound enter the body through vibration. There’s so much work competing for your attention during the Biennale, and I was thinking about what things I responded to in previous events. I’ve seen how other artists work with sound, maybe as an escape from the very image- saturated experience of the world.”

As a last question, I ask Mesiti about what image she has on her mind at the moment.

“One I saw a couple of days ago really stuck with me. It’s from the newspaper The Australian. I ripped it out and kept it. I was in Dubai, transferring from Sydney, and it was just days after the Christchurch massacre. It’s a really great newspaper image – it grabs your attention immediately: the woman with her headscarf, the red rose poked into her vest, and the fact that she’s looking directly at the camera. Having just returned from Australia, where everyone was very shocked by this awful attack, this image spoke to me.”

Photo found online, credit to Alden Williams.

JONAS MEKAS

January 28, 2019 by Nina Strand in Interview

Remembering Jonas Mekas by reposting our interview with him during the 56th biennale in Venice.

Cinema was invented to celebrate life

Interview by Nina Strand

- We tend to forget this, what cinema can do, we don't pay attention to it and that's why a show like this might be important, the artist Jonas Mekas tells Objektiv outside Zuecca Project Space’s Venice gallery Spazio Ridotto. The gallery is dedicated to digital artistic projects in order to create a connection between the physical exhibition space and the digital world. In all the opening frenzy during the 56th Venice Biennale this small space offers a welcomed break from the overcrowded Arsenale and Giardini. And especially welcome is the opportunity to have a short conversation with the legendary Mekas whom independent film artists have everything to thank. In 1962 he founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative, and in 1964 the Film-Makers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema. During all this time he continued writing poetry, teaching and making films, many giving him credits for being the one who developed the diaristic forms of cinema. Since 2006 the web site www.jonasmekasfilms.com functions like a great multimedia diary where real life becomes cinema.

Jonas Mekas outside Spazio Ridotto, Venice. Photo: Nina Strand

In Venice, Mekas exhibits at two different places, one part of The Internet Saga features the work Birth of a Nation (1997) shown in the gallery. A piece composed of four simultaneous projections, displaying 170 portraits, appearances and glimpses of directors and friends who, along with the artist himself, have formed the history of independent cinema in the US. This because, according to the short manifest accompaning the list of participants: "The independents of cinema IS a nation in itself. We are surrounded by a commercial cinema Nation same way as the indigenous people of United States or any other country are surrounded by the ruling powers. We are the invisible, but essential nation of cinema. We are Cinema."

- These are friends of delicate taste and experiences, and every film is important, Mekas explains. - This is a collage where you do the editing yourself, you do your own selection. I have seen them many times, I know what's on every one, but different spaces give different reading.

As part of the show Mekas will perform a poetic decleration named To the Internet written especially for the occation.

- I believe this work will be important even in twenty years time as things change as documents.

Another part of the exhibition takes place at the Palazzo Foscari Contarini on the Grand Canal, now housing the only Burger King in Venice. For the next seven months the audience can experience previously unpublished work by Mekas. In an Instant it All Came Back to Me (2015) features monomeric vinyl on 32 windows facing the courtyard of the restaurant. The close to 800 frames are picked from Mekas' films with the intention to registrer the rythm of past times.

- I wanted to show art in an every day setting, and also look at what the film does to the space here in this well known eating place. We don't always pay attention to what's around us.

At Burger King the audience can also enjoy different videoes from Mekas' Online Diary (2006-2015) and in the courtyard they can enjoy their lunch with a back drop from the sound diary To Petrarca (2003).

- My films are made from daily life with my friends, they were not invented in darkness, they intend to celebrate the positive aspects of life.

The curator duo behind The Internet Saga, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, have high ambitions for this project and have stated: "This is not a normal pavillion of the Biennal and it is not an event. We are at the beginning of a grand narrative which is taking place in the real time of the internet." Their project is dedicated to Mekas, calling him an eternal experimenter, and they were extremely pleased when he accepted to take part of it.

- They came up with the idea and I came along for it. I liked the idea of doing something like this in these terrible times. Everybody is running from something, be it of politcal or religious reasons, people are set against each other, fighting and killing, it is a very demanding century we have embarked on, Mekas says, back in Venice after having exhibited here in 2003 and also in 2005 representing the Lithuania National Pavillion.

- It seems like everybody are pushed to the corner, and we are witnessing a destruction of the planet. Nobody really understands where we are at, and I think we forget that the disaster is close. We are running out of water, and I am sure that while we are doing this interview five species are dying.

Therefore, Mekas says, we must be awoken and this can be done with art.

Saying this, he shares the opinion with many others on this years biennale exhibition titled All the world's futures, curated by Okuwi Enwezor.

- There's no future to be seen in this years show. It is merely leftovers from the past. We must look further back in history for the groundbreaking shows where something happened, where something could be changed.

The Internet Saga might lead to something more as it also can be seen for those outside of Venice. Everyone can go online and see it wherever they are.

- We are in the beginning of a strong digital culture, and it is important to point out beauty, celebrate the little bits of paradise we have in order to maybe change things.

- One must never give up, Mekas says.

- It is our duty not to, we must not be destroyed.

SANDRA MUJINGA

January 27, 2019 by Nina Strand in Interview

Sandra Mujinga's videoart combine audio and image to highlight our presence on the social, digital grid, ultimately invoking a fear of Solipsism. By Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin.

Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin When I first entered Real Friends, on view this November at Oslo Kunstforening, I was struck by the constant shifts between physicality and immateriality through the initial video pieces He who was shared (2016) and Throwing Voice (2016). The former depicts the search and finding of a silverback gorilla in Virunga National Park, the latter a fullscale avatar being with audio excerpts of youtube tutorials running alongside it. How do the two intersect?

Sandra Mujinga I'm interested in ambivalence, specifically the underexposed kind in the ways we construct ourselves. The works you mention are indeed independent, but it made sense to put them alongside each other as they explore the same notion; what do we lose once we try to expose an image? Do we accept that?

LS The ambivalence we experience in your art is a study on how this inhabits us as subjects. How does your use of an audio/visual-dichotomy relate to this kind of loss?

SM The audio is the active communicator and forms the visual. He who was shared is the closest I've come to a visual narrative, my pieces are often based on loops in an attempt to avoid singularity or a finite narrative. But with He Who Was Shared, there's a story granting us access to our own perspective, and our confidence in it.

LS It starts violently, we follow a man cutting through the jungle with a machete, and ends with the tranquil contemplation of the silverback gorilla chewing leaves. It's a very human perspective. I mean, this is an endangered species, and the only way we are able to protect it is through our projection and recognition of our feelings towards it. At the same time, we're both objectifying it and subjectifying it.

SM Well, my main objective is to create that kind of ambivalence. The gorilla doesn't care if we're there or not, still it's there because we have decided to protect it from poaching. The work itself functions as a teaser to the portraits of the same gorilla futher into the exhibition, examining the notion of a hierarchy levelled.

Sandra Mujinga, Detail from Humans, On the Other Hand, Lied Easily and Often (1-3), 2016

LS On the other hand, other visuals you create are less narrated and have passive, screensaver qualities.

SM Visually, these are passive modes of experiencing something and they create a kind of aquarium effect or screensaver aesthetic. There doesn't have to be a climax. There's no start or finish, and it encourages the viewers to make their own narrative. The audio is a choroegraphic tool, and juxtapositioning audio and visual elements enable us to examine the discrepancy between the physical and the immaterial ways of existing as human beings. I loop the two elements but don't synchronise them, so the two can exist independent of each other, yet in the same framework. We live our lives more and more within the digital, I'm interested in what happens to subjectivity within that kind of structure. We have a highly developed sense of how to curate our selves in the digital, but how do we deal with the loss of complexity? It's a very violent thing, I think.

LS The more you designate an object, the less complex it becomes.

SM Yes. I'm mesmerized with how much you can strip the body of its subjectivity. In Throwing Voice I've created an avatar through a live model by deforming their facial features after filming them. It highlights their outer visuality, their pure physicality. The audio, consisting of youtube tutorials by black women on contouring, is trying to give substance to this digital object, or the other way around. Who's throwing their voice to whom? Furthermore, with the audio loop shorter than the visual one, the avatar that depicts a body survives without what we perceive as physicality. Can it be free of the physical, its pre-determinate narrative, and if so, can we be free of subjectivity?

LS Frightening. Do you think we're aware of this type of violence on our imaged selves? My impression is that we feel even more like subjects online, at least within the social platforms.

SM Sure, we are very much in charge of our digital selves, we choose all the time, both in our outputs and our inputs. I don't know if we're aware of this ambivalence, ultimately we still trust our perspective and our choices as unimpaired.

LS But with the mathematics of the Internet, our gaze is being led into the singular.

SM Or we choose the singular to avoid friction. Video is a very interesting medium, because it's all about capturing the essence of something. It has to be captured within the first ten seconds, otherwise the viewer loses interest. This is how we watch stuff online, if it doesn't captivate us straight away we move on to the next excerpt in our feed. How do these excerpts co-exist?

LS How do you experience this? Do you fear isolation?

SM Definitively. It's a fear of Solipsism.

LS Where existence is based on premises entirely set by yourself?

SM Exactly. I fear we're being overly saturated and one-dimensional, existing in a constant feedback loop, perfectly and thoroughly created by a singular self. The paradox is that a sense of not being so isolated also arises, because within the isolation you're constantly sharing your output with others. We have become polybodies.

Sandra Mujinga, ILYNL (It's Like You Never Left), 2016 — Sandra Mujinga, *ILYNL (It's Like You Never Left)*, 2016

Sandra Mujinga is based in Malmø, Sweden. Her exhibition Real Friends is on view at Oslo Kunstforening until November 13 2016.

MÖREL BOOKS

November 06, 2018 by Nina Strand in Interview

Spread from Bleu, Alix Marie — Spread from *Bleu,* Alix Marie

In the light of the seminar at c/o Berlin, Photobooks: RESET, this September, which started from the premise that the photobook is in crisis, Objektiv asks artists’ book publisher Aron Mörel, is the field really in trouble?

Aron Mörel As much as there are small independent publishers out there like Mörel, Oodee, Trolley Books, Akina, Self Publish Be Happy, it still seems as if the business or culture at times is more geared to the mainstream. Admittedly it is at times a bit frustrating as there is a celebration or interest in younger or fringe artists or independent publishers yet when you look how this scene is represented in some bookshops or libraries you don’t get that impression . It’s like the music scene: there’s a lot of music, but at times it feels like everyone’s selling Guns’N’Roses... or Ed Sheeran. There are a million other bands or labels out there that are far more relevant now - you just need to scratch below the surface.

In regards to the theme of ‘crisis’, I’m not so convinced. Maybe I’m in denial. At some point ‘Television killed radio’, ‘Photography killed painting’ and ‘Digital books are killing print’ - the latter being a question asked to every publisher! Television didn’t kill radio. Photography never killed painting. Painting is still just as relevant as it ever was. What there is at this point is a proliferation of publishing. When you look at the industry over the last 10 years there’s been a massive surge - from kids doing zines to major galleries opening up publishing offices. There’s definitely a lot of growth. But one also has to look at which books are written about? I get the feeling most broadsheets are In general not adventurous enough. Most Journalists/editors to be frank, are like dinosaurs. Having said that - there are still a few journalists that push their editors or do make efforts to write about material that’s a little off the beaten path. And then you have to add into that bookshops are at times not being innovative - you see the fall of some retails - but then others are flourishing - like Yvon Lambert or Photobookstore.co.uk.

There is still a strong market for books – at fairs the buzz and sales are there – but maybe bookshops aren’t thinking of new ways engage their audience.

Nina Strand Wouldn’t it be more interesting to feature the books we don’t know? To learn something new?

AM There are one or two institutions that I think really make an effort to showcase more emerging work. When Simon Baker and Shoair Mavlian were at Tate Modern, they made an effort to engage. I can imagine they had the opportunity to work with bigger publishers, but they wanted to bring in young blood and brought Off Print to the Tate - having an institution with a public square (essentially that is what the turbine hall is) have its audience engage in a whole culture of artists and small businesses is essential. The amount of people that ended up buying books and saying they had no clue about the event was wonderful!

NS Speaking of the commercialisation of photography, I was just in Stockholm, where there’s a big retrospective of Lars Tunbjörk at Fotografiska. The pictures are amazing, as always, but they were installed really weirdly: on a dark grey background, with a spotlight on every image and there was even background music. It was disturbing. And I thought while I was walking through it, ‘Is a strong piece of art not enough?’ Also, with really fantastic, independent, self-published books, people don’t dare to trust that the general public want to read it. Or buy it.

Spread from CTY, Antony Cairns — Spread from *CTY*, Antony Cairns

AM I was just speaking about that with Asger Carlsen and Genesis P’Orridge. There are a lot of books and publishers out there that make really clean, safe books. At the same time I recently re-published a surrealist facsimile by Jindrich Styrsky. Genesis mentioned that the current generation just don’t do that sort of art any more...I get the feeling a lot of work/books are relentlessly anesthetize and aestheticized...I suppose there are so many factors - a generation using social media a their main social space and platform - while at the same time that platform being infiltrated by commercial purposes and censorship... to the degree they ban 18th century paintings...Also, I get the feeling a lot of younger artists are in a Neutral space between creativity and commercial work...

NS What makes a good photobook and what’s the purpose of the photobook?

AM It’s so elastic and flexible. There are so many variables that make it interesting - but I guess once the strong content is present - it’s about the relationship between content and design. There are iconic photobooks that aren’t designed very well, and yet they’re absolutely fantastic. I think over-designed photobooks aren’t as interesting photobooks - over designed as in the classic Photobook - tipped in image, clean fonts etc... or just books with too much funky design...

NS When the design takes over, that could mean that the photographer doesn’t think the images are good enough. On the contrary, the images suffer from the design. You don’t see them because they’re blurred by all the design.

AM I don’t really care to have the book perfected or refined in that way. I think it’s nice to have something that isn’t obsessed with designer detail. That being said, everything should be produced really well. I guess I like a DIY approach. It’s also that way with a lot of music: music that isn’t over produced sound wise or even with covers when you look at certain album covers, where the artist has got into the whole design, I think it’s really interesting. A good example is Black Flag, where Raymond pettibibon would design all the covers and flyers. I think simplicity is really important.

In general I always push the artist to do their own designs - Alix Marie did her complete book and Antony Cairns has a history in making artist books - so their input is essential... or at times we’ve had no conventional approaches - like Rene Ricard doing our David Armstrong cover - or Pablo Ferro doing our Corinne Day cover after the film titles he did for Stanley Kubrick Dr. Strangelove.

Spread from I Am Not I, Boris Mikhailov — Spread from *I Am Not I*, Boris Mikhailov

NS Simplicity and also the purpose of the book: what we want to say with it.

AM The photobook is such an integral part of photographic practice – it’s not separate from it. It’s not a catalogue. It’s not a derivative. Photography has this incredible elasticity, vertically and horizontally. And it’s happy on a mug, or a t-shirt, on a flyer, on a poster or a billboard, on a cushion. It’s happy everywhere. And also, it’s socially really elastic. It’s happy to be on an advertisement, in an art gallery, in a newspaper, on a document, in a scientific instruction manual. And the artist’s book is as original as an original photograph.

But this thing of ‘Oh photography is in a critical place’ is a very dramatic way of thinking.

Publishers like me are seeing a crunch, but that’s because there are 800 other publishers out there. We’re not lacking an audience we’re just saturating an audience!. As for the the question ‘What is the role of the photobook?’ Maybe I’m lacking a true philosophical insight - it is strange, because there are a million different publishers with a million different messages. For example, Trolley Books had a very political message. It was founded in journalism and it was grounded in a very left-wing ideology. On the other side, Mörel will never really do a book like that because we’re grounded in a more sort of culturally humorous direction - I’d like to spill into dadaism. Retrospectively, dadaism is this perfect moment of absurdity in the middle of a historically absurd era.

NS It might wrong to say ‘crisis’ or ‘in trouble’, but, there are too many books. And for some, it seems the launch at the New York Art Book Fair is more important than the content of what they’re launching. I receive numerous review copies from different artists, and with many of them, I don’t understand what they want to say with the book.

AM One realisation I have is that when my generation was younger, when we were in our early twenties, a lot of my friends who are photographers, or artists, their main ambition was to have exhibitions. They were making and framing art, and at that time in London, we had a whole bunch of independent galleries. It was sort of like the publishing wave that’s going on now. I feel A lot of young artists today look towards the book more then the gallery... maybe there aren’t enough small and wreckless galleries as there are publishers...

Spread from Hardened, Jeff Mermelstein — Spread from *Hardened*, Jeff Mermelstein

NS The seminar at c/o Berlin looked at the economic aspects and the prospective future of photobooks. How can you survive? What will Mörel books do? What’s the future?

AM Financially, the landscape has changed. When I did a large book on Lucas Blalock in 2013 I was really putting a lot into production, I was able to sell most of them through bookshops and actually break even. Nowadays, I wouldn’t expect that, so I’ve started to do special editions. At the NYABF we launched a big Jeff Mermelstein book. We sold prints for a hundred dollars - only for the duration of the fair.

If the bookshop is your main outlet, then you’re going to go bankrupt - that model doesn’t work anymore. We now have access to direct clients via the internet, and via book fairs. I’ve been playing around with eliminating the the 40% bookshops get as a discount - but cutting it from the print run. Make 300 books instead of 500 - sell them at the same retail price and only sell direct to clients. A lot of publishers also as the artist to directly bring money into the book. That’s not how Mörel works.

NS I’m curious about the aspect of not taking money from the artists, because here in Scandinavia we have good funds for making books – we can get the book partly funded – whereas in the UK you don’t.

AM London is in a really fucked-up place. New York has private philanthropy. people put money into projects. And when they do I the case of non-profits, they also get tax breaks. They get benefits from that. In Scandinavia you have a lot of strong public funding. In Britain, we don’t have either: the public funding is diminished, so funding smaller things like publishers or books doesn’t really exist, there’s nowhere you can really go for that. Plus, there’s no private philanthropy culture.... we’re sort of in limbo.

NS So how do you do it then?

AM To be honest, a lot of my books are two years late because I’m trying to figure out where to get the money. As I mentioned, part of the idea now is to make a special-editions. With Jeff Mermelstein’s book, which is 300 pages, we’re making a special edition, a 1,000 page version, and we’re offering a copy to a Public Library. For Chris Shaw’s book, we sold an original maquette to a collector. For Alix Marie’s book, we sold a print to a collector. For Antony Cairn’s book, he printed ten special editions, which we sold. By all means These don’t pay for the full production, but they pay for part of it.

Spread from A Geological Index Of The Landscape, Benoit Jeannet — Spread from *A Geological Index Of The Landscape*, Benoit Jeannet

B-B-B-BOOKS

September 25, 2018 by Nina Strand in Interview

Objektiv want to look closer at book production in the light of the upcoming seminar at c/o Berlin Photobooks: RESET that starts from the premise that the photo book world is in crisis. Is the photo book in trouble? Founded in 2011, B-B-B-Books has published numerous books that have reached both Scandinavian and international acclaim, many projects that have been exhibited too, here are Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt’s thoughts:

We released our first self published book Gingerbread Monument in September of 2008. It was the same month as the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers happened. Ten years later, also in September, Photobook:RESET takes place in Berlin and the topic of conversation is that the photo book world is in crisis. Are there parallels that can be drawn between the world economic crisis of 2008 and the presumed photo book crisis of 2018? Currently we are experiencing the longest stock market upturn in history, but now experts warn for a financial decline. The photo book boom has been created over the past ten years but supply and demand are imbalanced. The range of books have grown tremendously but the audience hasn’t grown as much. There has been a flourishing era of experimentation but at the same time small producers seem to pay less attention to or ignore issues of how to maintain in the long run.

This year saw the opening of your gallery FG2 in collaboration with the architect Per Nadén, could you tell us about the move from page to space?

What first inspired us to make our own publications ten years ago and subsequently also the imprint, was to take control over the means of production. We thought about how to make affordable books on machines that weren’t necessarily used for printing art books.

The case with FG2 has some similarities. One year ago, we were contacted by Per Nadén, architect at Nadén Arkitektur, who offered us to be part in the creation of a small culture house in Gothenburg. Nadén Arkitektur is linked to a carpentry that has a computer-controlled CNC saw. The machine is usually used for large scale productions, but if you learn how to manoeuvre it, it allows for experimentation that is rarely possible to execute unless you have a very big budget. Getting to know a new tool resembles our experience from book printing where learning about how things are being made is central to our practice.

What makes a good book? What books do you keep coming back to?

A good book is a book of interesting content. A very good book is when there is a clear reason why this content became a book and not something else.

What I enjoy the most with the book fairs such as Cosmos in Arles is that the aspect of selling books seems less important than talking about books, could you talk a little about your experiences with taking part of the different fairs?

This community has grown to what it is today primarily because people that are involved in it are deeply engaged with the medium and its development. The fairs have become the place where content makers, collectors and readers meet and knowledge is exchanged. The talking aspect can sometimes be more central to this phenomena than the aspect of selling. Not rarely, the ones that have produced the work are also the ones that sell it; there is an intimate relationship between author and seller. It creates a certain atmosphere and it gives opportunities for both the author and the audience to meet and discuss.

SEBASTIAN HAU

September 17, 2018 by Nina Strand in Interview

Objektiv want to look closer at book production in the light of the upcoming seminar at c/o Berlin Photobooks: RESET that starts from the premise that the photo book world is in crisis. Is the photo book in trouble? After working in the Schaden bookstore, reviewing photo books for FOAM in many years, created the bookstore at LE BAL, and also published books himself, we would like to ask Sebastian Hau: what makes a good photo book? What should photographers have in mind the coming years?

There's not too many different answers to that, but the possible answers allow for quite a bit of differences. Of course a book has to be considered in it's entirety, but there is a wide range between classical definitions "integrity of form and content' and the experiments made by artists in and photographers over the last 60 years. Isn't it all in the sequence? Once you start turning the pages, and there's a strong feeling of relating to the images (relating in different ways of course), and a tension between the eye and the body and the sequence unrolling, not unlike when listening to a song, where you discover the melodical structure and lyrics at the same time. That's where the comparison stops, when the materiality and design of the book come in. There is no formal theory underlying the claim that the photography book is a medium, but intuitively it feels like the right approach. A visual medium where the part of the text and language also plays an important role. This abstract description is meant to be as inclusive as possible because the experiments in form have widened our understanding what such a book is and can be in such a way that no classical framework can do it justice. People from all over the world are producing and understanding photography and photography books as a serious medium and that movement is often overwhelming, but it's a fantastical evolution full of hope and new beginnings.

There are books I keep coming back to, as references and because a second or third reading can give new insights, is there a book (or books) that you keep coming back to?

I love a great many different books for different reasons, and when I work with students there's always a difficult question: should you concentrate on a small set of books to construct a framework or open up studies of as many books as possible ? Where as I can't answer this question I find myself drawn to showing as many books as possible, and find that often students chose one book for themselves that suddenly speaks to them, in the most unexpected ways. I can never get myself into the desert island discs frame of mind, what selection would I take on an island, because many of the books made today do not yet aim for or achieve canonical status. It's too easy to pick out some classics, but classics without a context don't mean a lot either.

What I enjoy the most with the book fairs you run, Cosmos and Polycopies, is the focus on events, exhibitions and talks - that the aspect of selling books seems less important than talking about books, could you talk a little about your strategies around the book fairs you’re organising together with the respective partners?

I believe in selling very much, because books, as a source of information, containers of art are exactly in their 'democratic' form meant to be sold and bought. The market aspect of books, often allowing to sail under the radar of high commerce is exciting. It creates a lot of precarity but it guarantees liberty. Both Cosmos and Polycopies are first of all places for people to discover and buy books. On the other hand I'll always remember being an intern in these gigantic festivals a long time ago, and together with my partners we want our places to be as open and welcoming as possible, and try to not have a price tag on everything. And of course our events take place in parallel to Paris Photo and the Rencontres, so there's obviously a huge discussion going on, and we just try to provide a setting where this discussion can take place. We are working with Laurent Chardon on Polycopies now, and a part from the difficult process of selecting participants, the main focus now is on creating a space where people can interact as much as they like, and stay as long as they like. The boat that hosts our event Polycopies is a little to small for that, but there's nothing more beautiful than to step out in the evening for a moment and see so many people in lively discussion!

MARYSIA LEWANDOWSKA

August 28, 2018 by Nina Strand in Interview

Coming up at Entree Bergen is the new film by Marysia Lewandowska, Rehearsing the Museum. A follow up to her film Museum Futures: Distributed, made in collaboration with Neil Cummings, that was commissioned by Moderna Museet Stockholm, Sweden, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2008. Taking the form of a centenary interview with Moderna Museet’s executive Ayan Lindquist in an imaginary June 2058, it explores contemporary art practice and its institutions by envisaging the future roles of artists, museums, galleries, markets, manufactories and academies. Art Museums of the Future takes this film as a point of departure. This ongoing project is a collaboration between Anne Szefer Karlsen, associate professor in curatorial practice at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen; Åse Løvgren, Project Developer at VISP, Production Unit for Visual Art; and Randi Grov Berger, curator at Entrée, a showroom for contemporary art in the centre of Bergen. Interview by Nina Strand.

Art Museums of the Future is still in an early phase, but the first part took place in January at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, where the group presented Lewandowska’s and Cummings’ film. The Art Museums of the Future group is now sending out a ques- tionnaire to institutions around the country.

‘Art Museums of the Future takes the film’s idea of freely speculating about the future art world further, and we’re inviting directors at several of Norway’s art museums to do this with us’, says Randi Grov Berger. ‘We wish to develop it into a more publicly available platform for discussion. When constructing future visions, one often seizes on and exaggerates the developments seen today, whether good or bad, so that this tendency becomes the dominant one in a future scenario. So we’ve created a questionnaire that we invite directors to fill out, and in that way create a story about their art institutions, seen from a future perspective – in the year 2068. It can be called a sort of science-fiction story about museums in Norway. In this way, by “forcing” all the museum presentations into the same format, we can maybe get a glimpse of some dividing lines and differences.’

The purpose of the project is to contribute to a discussion about what a museum is, and what it can be.

‘For me, it’s important to continually examine what curatorial practice is, what requirements are demanded of curators, and how a curator can lay the groundwork for a public sphere around artworks – both those that already exist, and new productions’, says Anne Szefer Karlsen.

The project also explores the difficulties that museums are facing today.

‘Museums are faced with many challenges when it comes to legitimising their existence and drawing an audience. Climate change; a growing youth population with higher education; demands for compensation for colonial-era transgressions; shifting migration patterns; an expectation of active participation in processes that are being played out in the public sphere; and digital and technological innovations – all this plays a part in creating a complex new society’, says Szefer Karlsen. ‘The old colonial values of a Western-centred modernity are being challenged from many quarters. If institutions wish to remain places that the public wishes to protect, old institutional models need to be rethought in order to handle these social, ethical and aesthetic challenges in a satisfactory way. I think protecting an institution doesn’t necessarily mean that it becomes a more restrictive public sphere – rather, the opposite.’

Szefer Karlsen uses the exhibition Gender Fluidity at Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, 2018, as an example of institutional failure to respond adequately to current debates.

‘It’s an exhibition that according to the museum took on “how gender and identity is conditioned by conventions and can relate to social and political processes of change”, but in short, the institution invited an artist who’s been involved in transphobic statements and campaigns to show their work, and in the process asked the artist to exclude the gravest element of their contribution, something that led to the artist pulling out of the exhibition project. For me, it’s clear that in this case the curator and the institution hadn’t done a sufficiently thorough investigation into the complex subject they wanted to present and discuss, and consequently the nuances disappeared. The important discussion that was to take place about identity, self control, markers, prosecution and more, becomes stifled by a public debate concerning the artist’s freedom vs. minority groups and censorship.

I think that the biggest responsibility of an institution, which of course is inhabited by a group of people with various opinions, feelings and viewpoints, is presenting the public with clearly formulated, thoroughly prepared and multiple projects, that succeed in making room for discrepancies. They must also be able to express themselves in the public sphere if their projects lead to debate. I’m not willing to support the artist we’re talking about here – that work is too much in conflict with my own positions – but if the institution and the curator had reflected enough on it, then it would have been possible to make room for several different positions inside the project.’

In February, The Waterfront Ideas organised an event at the Munch Museum called What Will Be the Netflix of Art. They wrote: ‘Technological advances make more art forms easily available for a large audience. Streaming services and new technology has made us able to see and listen to what we want, and where we want to see and hear it. Can art go in the same direction?’

‘Museums today have to present their collections so that they can be reinterpreted in the present time by new audiences’, says Berger. ‘One way of doing this is surely to give artists and other researchers from varied backgrounds a chance to think anew about objects, modes of display and the inner structures of their collections. The museums and the stories they tell must evolve in the way society does, to avoid becoming cemeteries for something that once was. There’s something alarming about being delivered what we’re interested in via algorithms, which results in more mainstream content. It’s great that the museums work to increase visitor numbers, but a pity if it’s only achieved through “blockbuster exhibitions”.’

Lewandowska's film acts as a kind of sequel to Museum Futures: Distributed. Rehearsing the Museum explores the relation between Western art museums and the evolution of private museums in China, and this work will be shown at Entrée next week. It combines the idea of financial speculation with ‘speculative’ fiction as an artistic tool.

‘Traditionally, speculation is associated with markets and defined as measuring investment against future returns’, Lewandowska explains in the introduction to the film. ‘In this age of ambition, marked by the power of collectors, the accelerated online flows and technologies of access, what many of the private museums in China offer is an architectural landmark, often itself not more than a ‘hollow’ signature structure.

The film’s script, written collaboratively with Zian Chen over the last two years, is performed by two fictional characters: a young girl whose aspiration is to become a future museum director and an older woman, a property developer who having built a museum in 2005 reflects on deeper historical traumas and warns against inter-dependence between art and branding choreographed by money. Filmed in Shanghai and Bergen, the dialogue introduces questions of property, ownership and belonging facing collecting institutions as many unresolved local histories are put under pressure by aggressive global expansion.

One of the key questions for this project is how can public attention shift from commercial acquisition to cultural reflection and critique? In the case of contemporary art, what are the necessary material and immaterial conditions needed to foster exhibitions, criticism, education and the business plans for the research-oriented sustenance of art institutions? These are some of the challenges facing the future Chinese museum directors and entrepreneurs.’

In anticipation of the film, the project Art Museums of the Future has also become an investigation into “How to mediate a work that does not yet exist?”.

‘I hope our experiment will give us more knowledge about the ways in which mediation programmes can be shaped, and lay the groundwork for museums to dare to put on more new art, or to develop complex exhibition projects.’ says Szefer Karlsen.

SHOAIR MAVLIAN PHOTOWORKS

July 09, 2018 by Nina Strand in Interview

Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, Tate Modern, 2018, Photo: © Tate (Andrew Dunkley) — *Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art,* Tate Modern, 2018, Photo: © Tate (Andrew Dunkley)

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

Through interviews with a wide range of people we investigate this year’s focus on exhibition practices. We have talked with Antonio Cataldo, newly appointed director of Fotogalleriet, Oslo; Diane Dufour, Le Bal, Paris; Florian Ebner, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Lucy Gallun, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Marta Gili, Jeu de Paume, Paris; Emma Lewis, Tate Modern, London; Shoair Mavlian, Photoworks, Brighton, England; Anna Planas and Pierre Hourquet, Temple Gallery and Editions, Paris; and Nadine Wietlisbach, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland. Every interview begins with the question: Why photography? Interviews by Nina Strand

SHOAIR MAVLIAN - Photoworks

The meeting with Mavlian takes place in a café in London, one month into her new job as director of Photoworks. Mavlian says she never had a choice when it came to working with photography.

- There is a long history of photography in my family. My uncle was a press photographer. I studied practice-based photography, and was in the darkroom a lot. I also worked in several photo-labs before I moved to working in museums. The language of photography has always felt very much part of my daily life and it was a language I always understood.

She has just finished work on Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, co-curated with Simon Baker, her final exhibition at Tate Modern, where she has worked for the past ten years.

- Seven of those years were dedicated to photography. I learned a lot from working in a big museum, building a collection and curating large- scale exhibitions, however one of the reasons I made the move to Photoworks was to work with early-career photographers and emerging artists. This is more difficult to do at Tate, although we have included three artists from a younger generation in Shape of Light.

Mavlian says she will miss the Tate building in the former Bankside Power Station.

- I’ve always been very interested in architecture and I’ll miss spending time in the iconic build- ing. However I do believe there are many fantastic buildings to show art in, and I’d like to think outside of the white cube, to look for something that’s site-specific, and to work with that space. I’m not interested in replicating a white wall environment, I’m more interested in thinking about other alternative spaces.

Last year, Mavlian got a taste of working in unusual spaces when she curated the exhibition In Flux, on the invitation of Monica Allende, for Gexto Photo in Spain.

- We installed the exhibition in a totally unconventional space at the beachfront, with one side completely open to the elements. This made me think about exhibition-making in a different way. There was also the negotiation of convincing the artist to go with the space. We couldn’t show hand-printed photographs; we had to waterproof everything and it was very interesting to go on that journey together, the curator and artist.

As a commissioning agency, Photoworks offers Mavlian the opportunity to support early career photographers.

- My vision for Photoworks is to be an organization that gives artists their first shows. To be in dialogue with artists and to work with them to help deliver exhibitions and new work. This is the core of what Photoworks is.

This is also what Mavlian finds interesting about working with younger generations.

- Photography is a huge part of our daily lives, and younger generations are able to read an im- age and immediately identify certain signifiers. That excites me – how we can communicate visually with photography now, this is a positive thing. We’re at this tipping point at the moment where we’re beginning to understand how this type of communication is affecting our daily lives and society on a broader level. And the artist and the art world have to be involved in this conversation, keep up with it, and contribute to this conversation as well.

Installation view, Ewen Spencer 'Kick over the statues', Photoworks/Fabrica Co-commission for Brighton Photo Biennial, October 2016. Photo Credit: Nigel Green

At the time of the interview, the museum has just listed positions to replace Mavlian, as well as Baker, who is leaving to direct La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.

- It’s obviously a very big change for the museum. I started at Tate when I was relatively young, and the amazing thing about Tate is that all curators work together in constant dialogue; there’s not one department for photography and one for paintings. I learned a lot from all of the curators and it was a great privilege to start my career at the museum. It’s healthy to challenge each other’s perspectives. And now I’m lucky to be able to implement my vision at Photoworks and see where it goes. The fantastic thing about my experience at Tate is that we did such a broad range of exhibitions, from Conflict, Time, Photography in 2014, where we examined how conflict is portrayed in photography, to the collection of Elton John, where we looked at the photograph as an object. It was great to showcase his vintage collection in these times when everything is digital. And then this last show, Shape of Light, crosses over between photography, painting, and sculpture.

Photoworks seeks and showcases emerging photographers through the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards; produces Photoworks Presents, a live talks and events programme, and the Brighton Photo Biennial, as well as publishing Photoworks Annual, a journal on photography and visual culture.

- The magazine is an important part of the organization; what form it takes we’ll have to see. The Jerwood/Photoworks award was one of the things that drew me to Photoworks because it’s such a great mentorship opportunity for early-career photographers. Three artists are awarded, and they receive mentorship, support with production, and then an exhibition which tours to three different locations. All artists are asked on the basis of a project they’re already working on, but they’re given the opportunity to make something completely new and different. This means that we don’t know the end product, which makes it even more interesting to follow.

After ten years at Tate, Mavlian is no longer responsible for an exhibition space or a collection.

- It’s easy to get institutionalized working at a big museum. You work in a very specific way, and think about exhibitions in a specific way, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But now that I don’t have a building, the idea is to think more broadly about the presentation of photography. We can insert photography into non-museum environments and reach a broader audience. Brighton Photo Biennial will move towards the idea of integrating photography into the city, making it part of the fabric of the city. It seems to be a human desire to collect, but I believe there’s a shift today towards something more experimental and more ephemeral than physical ownership. With Photoworks we have the opportunity to do something different. Not only do we not have a collection but we don’t have a permanent physical gallery space either. It gives us an enormous amount of freedom to think about photography in a different way.

Brighton Photo Biennial takes place 28 September – 28 October 2018 with a month of free photography exhibitions and events for professionals, enthusiasts, students and families alike. The theme for its eighth edition is The New Europe and the f… — Brighton Photo Biennial takes place 28 September – 28 October 2018 with a month of free photography exhibitions and events for professionals, enthusiasts, students and families alike. The theme for its eighth edition is The New Europe and the festival will be curated by the newly appointed Photoworks Director, Shoair Mavlian.

This interview is from our current issue. We have sadly made the mistake of placing Photoworks in Bristol in the printed version, although we know that Brighton is the correct city. Our sincere apologies.

TAI SHANI

May 07, 2018 by Nina Strand in Interview

As part of Laura Hennser’s ongoing series of interviews she spoke with Tai Shani, a London based artist whose multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. Shani creates violent, erotic and fantastical images told in a dense, floral language which re-imagines female otherness as a perfect totality, set in a world complete with cosmologies, myth and histories that negate patriarchy. These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect and the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism. By Laura Hensser for iheartwomen

I would like to talk to you about your on-going work, and probably what you are best known for, Dark Continent. As an expanded adaption of the fifteenth century feminist writer Christine de Pizan’s 1405 publication, The Book of the City of Ladies. I would like to ask a number of questions which reflect on this work but first, I’m wondering at what point you came across the publication, when and how did your ideas emerge after reading the piece, and do you see this work existing forever?

I think what had happened was, and I believe it’s quite common to most women artists of my generation, in my earlier work I was suppressing many aspects of feminist thinking, especially once I started making work publicly. It was seen as quite ridiculous to make work around gender at that time. It’s only now looking back on that work that I see it was always there, but I was definitely suppressing it as much as possible.

I wrote an adaptation of Blue Beard, so was quite familiar with the process of adaptations, for example, Fassbinder’s World on the Wire and an adaptation of Antigone. I think the process of adaptation was something I was always doing and something I was always on the lookout for. I was looking for sources that were interesting to me. Much of my counter-culture ideology came from my dad. I remember when I was living with him and his two wives, my mom and his third wife, together in a commune in Belgium they would take me to buy all the classics. My dad’s wife would give me feminist science fiction to read, like weird kind of things. There was never this idea that I was too young for these books. I would read Pamela Sargent’s feminist books when I was 12. One of them was called The Shore of Women, which is about a city of women.

Images from Dark Continent, Tai Shani — Images from *Dark Continent,* Tai Shani

I’m always looking for an interesting source. With classical sources like Antigone, there is always reinvention. My first extremely expressive piece of work, Blue Beard, contained a lot of violence. Much of my thinking was drawn from very personal sources. It was a subversive feminist piece in this sense. I was interested in psychoanalysis at the time with much of my inspiration deriving from many aspects of feminism. One of them being this idea or rule that women are not allowed to write about violence. That was honestly a critique I received. Someone asked me why I would inflict further violence on women’s bodies when it’s so prevalent in our culture. I think this idea of disallowing women to write about violence is not acceptable. Women aren’t the only ones responsible to be the good in the world. That’s part of the problem, women are not the ones to bear the responsibility of morality, everyone should basically. Everyone should bear the burden of morality. I don’t feel that women should always be good or the ones to question, we won’t do this or we won’t trespass. I think this idea of trespassing into territories that have been very male occupied and misogynistic was an interesting approach for me as a woman. With the first Blue Beard text, I wrote this for a death metal fanzine where all the lyrics were quite explicit and contained awful violence against women. I enjoyed living in their territory and kind of outdoing them in a way, but in a very different way to how they would do it obviously.

After a period of time, I had a studio visit with the Hayward Gallery. I can’t quite remember the chronology of discussions that took place, but basically I proposed Dark Continents for the Mirror City show. I was looking for structure within my work, especially in relation to my written work. This was a really exciting moment in my life. I was excited by it, and I’ll be honest, I was excited by the reception the work received as well. You know, people who had known my work for a really long time felt something had happened there, especially with the writing, which maybe hadn’t happened before. Although there was writing before, for example with the piece I did at Matt’s Gallery, all the writing follows on from the other. Thinking about it now, there was something about the one at Matt’s Gallery, which also contained elements of violence, but I think it was distanced; it focused on the actress and her mannerisms. Again, I’m not always clear on the chronology, but as I said previously, something exciting was happening. My writing became very exposed. I remember someone saying in reference to the Blue Beard work that it was a really poised bit of writing. My work was being activated. It was exciting.

I then started to look at medieval mysticism and feminist re-readings. I came across Christine de Pizan’s book and thought, wow, this is it. Unfortunately, after reading it I was quite disappointed, mainly because a large part of the content is about being pious and what it is to be a good wife. I mean, I don’t really know what I was expecting, it was written in the fifteen century. There were still really radical things about it; I think I just had very high expectations and wanted it to be a crazy science fiction book, which it basically wasn’t.

Could you talk me through the importance of writing in your work, and maybe a sense of how you imagine or come up with some of your scripts?

It’s quite interesting because I feel writing is what I’m good at, though I don’t find it easy at all. I actually find it really torturous and quite arduous; it takes a lot out of me. I can’t just sit and write. I have to inflict discipline with myself. I’ll have the laptop next to me and be like, you’re not leaving bed until you finish this. No peeing, no water or anything. I don’t want to frame it in a confessional or therapeutic way because I feel that women are often invoked under those circumstances, but it definitely is. I don’t necessarily believe that male artists are invoking the beyond and women are invoking their biographies, we all are, to a certain degree. I think there’s an emotive register or intellectualised ideology that comes out. I think we’re so constructed, but the idea that you’re not invoking the personal, it’s ridiculous. That’s why it’s important that my writing process is not seen as therapy. Though, if I’m being honest, in a way somehow it is. I’ve decided to finish with this writing now. I want to move on to a very different way of doing things after the Dark Continent: SEMIRAMIS project. I do feel like I’ve reached an end.

You mentioned earlier that maybe this work could go on forever, I don’t feel that way anymore. It could theoretically, but I don’t necessarily want that. It could, in a way, evolve or become something different but these really intense, internal monologues are painful and exhausting. I want to try different ways of writing now. I’ve started writing a fictional four-part film about the women in my family. It’s called, Tragodía, which means tragedy in Greek. I don’t have children. I won’t have children. I have a very strong bond with the women in my family. These people are all I have; there are no men in my family. My whole family line is now my mom, my aunt and I. That’s it. I have no siblings. I’ve got no one apart from these two really exceptional women that once they die, I have no bloodline. I have no cousins either as my aunt never had children. On my dad’s side, it’s more complex. My mom and my aunt are all that I have left and I think I’m already very anxious and horrified by the idea that they won’t be in the world anymore. I’m writing this film to maybe exorcise some of these feelings and obviously to delve into the nature of these very close, very intimate female relationships that I’m interested in. In the film the daughter would die, so I would invert it. There are three sisters, of which one is fictional, who really embodies my grandmother. My mom lives with my aunt, shared with a household of many cats. They often say to me, ‘we are only living for you now’; it’s really hard knowing and hearing this. My mom will say things like, ‘I’ve kind of had a good life and I’m done’. It’s not said in a depressed way, but it’s very hard to hear. In the film they will commit suicide together because they are older. They will kill the cats as well.

It’s an emotional process for me. When someone close to you dies there are these weird days afterwards that are quite psychedelic, you can still sense that person is still there. I remember when my dad died, I remember looking at the tree and the shaking of leaves and feeling a sense of his presence, like an animism, a diffusing of that person’s essence into the ether. It’s a weird thing. You have moments where you laugh, which are quickly followed by moments where you feel absolute devastation. It’s a mix of honouring and remembering that person. It’s like the impossibility of seeing a cigarette butt, which you know was smoked 24 hours earlier. It’s fascinating how objects continue to be in the world and remain possessed by the person that has now departed. I want to address these feelings of loss within the film.

It’s very interesting how you approach the subject of death. It sounds only right that the women die together.

Yes exactly, it couldn’t be any other way as otherwise there would be that one person who would remain and have the burden of it all. I’m Jewish and tend to have crazy conversations about death. I always say to my aunt, I want you to know that if mom dies before you, I’ll take you, I’ll take care of you and won’t leave you. She’s an artist and has experienced mental health problems in the past. I don’t want her to feel that the connection is via my mom. I really want to do something with that, you know. I have these really expanded ideas around loss that are universal.

It’s tough when dealing with death and my family, mainly because even though we’re so close I’ve lived in a different country for 17 years. It has never been an expectation for me to live near them. I guess that’s the thing I really love about them, sorry that was very tangential. These women in my life are incredible, they have always wanted me to be self-realised. There has never been pressure to have children or to come and live at home. They are amazing people.

For them it’s all about the full experience. I think that’s the one nice thing I’d say about the whole hippie parents aspect, is that they have this kind of philosophical edge on how they conceptualise life or what it is to be alive. They see it as an experience to be fulfilled.

Would you say this film is your most personal work to date?

Yes and no, because I think my writing has been an unravelling of trauma in a way. I’ve put a lot of myself in the work. I’ve always done this. I think a lot of people, including myself, have quite a violent imagination. It’s less so now, but when I was younger I’d always have these visions of a child falling and a motorbike running over its head, or whenever I would see someone crossing the road I would have this constant vision of something terrible happening. They were quite violent visions. I don’t know why this happened, but much of my writing contains a recounting of these visions. For example, one of the last characters I wrote for Dark Continent was a spiritual medium. She was a bridge between the living and the dead, and was actually communicating a vision. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I guess they are able to travel in time and in different ways. Within the piece, they’re invoking this person called Rachel; she’s a conflation of two people that exist. One of them is a little girl, well she’s my age now, but I grew up with her. I remember finding her in Goa, India, which is a tough place for kids. People would give these children LSD; to two year olds, it was very weird. This young girl had difficulties. I think her parents were junkies. I remember finding her in extremely dirty conditions and very alone. I would take her to our house and wash her. I was like a mother to her, but also a kid myself. I really remember it. It’s a very strong memory. The other person is this character who embodies a woman which I had a very inappropriate love affair with when I was really little. As I mentioned, a lot of my writing is from these past experiences. Again, I don’t want it to be like therapy because it isn’t just that but really what else can I draw from?

In your work and across your practice you navigate through gestures, representations and myths as a way to excavate issues of feminism and objectification through these fantastical and psycho-social worlds. Could you talk me through your thoughts on the representation of women artists nowadays, and if this is something you have thought about, what the arts sector needs to do to represent women fairly?

I recently collaborated on an exhibition with artist Florence Peake at Wysing Art Centre. As part of the show we hosted a Q&A. The person who was chairing the Q&A asked if it was a feminist work. This was my first confrontation with the many ludicrous areas of my claims, because I said of course it is, it couldn’t be anything else. All of the thinking and ideas behind the work are completely rooted within feminism. Is it an activist work? I can’t say. The art world is a very rarefied space and people that are part of the system are often privileged, including the women. It’s also a world that very few people outside of it interact with.

In terms of how much women are treated, I mean, I think there has been a change definitely. I say that to students as well, that we do have to take heart from the changes. When I see women doing well, I still very often see beautiful, young, white, women doing well. It doesn’t seem to be very diverse if you look closely. I think that topics or subjects of work that are being allowed or that are now palatable are more diverse, let’s put it that way, but I still feel that the types of people doing well are young and attractive. I think that this libidinous economy in the art world is rife and for me, it’s hard to talk about and quantify. It’s hard because when looking at the people who are succeeding in their careers, it’s not that I think they don’t deserve the recognition. I don’t feel like they’re not good enough, but so are many other people who don’t seem to be as successful as they do. This idea that people who succeed happen to succeed because of some kind of absolutism, it’s ridiculous. They succeed because of a network of privileges that put them in that position. The privilege of attractiveness is massive in the art world. It’s something people do not talk about. I genuinely have had many experiences where I’ve gone to these dinner parties and it’s only if someone vouches for you that you are treated nicely, otherwise you’re really treated as an interloper. Your presence at these dinners is questioned because you’re not palatable, basically. I think that it’s a massive thing, and you have to accrue so much in the way of power to navigate the art world as seamlessly as a good-looking artist doesn’t have to. You have to be a fearsome curator or a more prolific artist; there isn’t this kind of like desirousness around you. It’s like you are constantly pushing, and constantly doing all the legwork. No one is delighted by your presence just because of the way you look, you don’t have that currency. I think that’s a big issue.

It’s interesting because it really doesn’t apply to men. There are loads of ugly guys that do really well. What happens then is that you don’t even think of them as ugly because they are good, successful artists. I mean, we are talking different levels here and I think when you’re younger and operating freely, it’s different, but when you get to that higher end of your career it’s more noticeable. I think as unreasonable as many male artists are, I don’t think that they’re framed that way. It’s really quite breath taking actually. They are really vilified for demanding things that people wouldn’t bat an eyelid at. Again, it’s that expectation for a woman to be good and understanding and moral and put other people first, which yes, we all should do, but only if everyone is on-board with that way of thinking and not just a certain group of us.

Your practice stretches across a number of mediums, performance, film, installation, photography and text. What is the relationship between live work and the static objects—do they inform one another, are they seen as props within the work or do they live as objects?

I want them to now. It’s a new thing for me. I really do want the objects to live outside of the performance work as I’m really interested in object making. I always have been. I’ve always justified the object making as part of a performance and I’m really now much more interested in them being autonomous. I very rarely have the opportunity where I’m asked to do an exhibition rather than a performance. More often than not, I am asked to do performances but I think that’s now changing and definitely with this project in Glasgow, it will exist most of the time as an installation. At Glasgow International we staged an opening weekend of performances, however for the remaining time it will exist as an installation. When it travels to The Tetley it will be an installation, no performances but with films shown separately of how it was used as a performance space. I’m really interested in pushing my practice more towards object making. I feel like the show at Wysing, which wasn’t performative at all, was a turning point. The role of performance in my work is tied into the slightly overly ambitious idea of what I want things to be, alongside an intensity that you have with liveness. I love it when a performance makes you cry, when everything’s working and when there’s this immersion that happens. I like the demand of it. There’s so much I love about performance, when it works, there’s really nothing quite like it. When I started working with professional actors they would read these texts live. The audience would become really immersed in the work. These moments of stillness, of a group of people coming together and experiencing something live, I find it really magical. It’s all in the intensity. I think that is a hangover from my earlier practice when I was more interested in rituals and collective experiences.

I remember a particular performance by Gisèle Vienne at the South London Gallery; it was called Jerk and was one guy with two puppets. It was a really heavy piece. It was about a gay, serial killer and was incredibly graphic. I felt as if I was going to faint. It was on the hottest day of the year. There was a fire close by in Peckham where six people died. It was a very odd experience. There was something about this collective demand where you couldn’t leave or physically move from the space. I’ve tried to craft that over the years. The first time I did a performance, it was not successful at all. I remember it was at Shoreditch Town Hall. It was a huge production. There were around 40 people in the performance and it was an anti-sacrifice. There were 12 dead virgins that were being resurrected instead of being put to death. I don’t know why it happened; someone said it was like seeing a Bowie concert just fizzled out completely. I hadn’t really accounted fot the two guys that were carrying the virgins to the high priestess, they would become exhausted after carrying the first three women. I also didn’t have any narrative with the piece. Suddenly it was just like another one goes up, another one gets put on the table, you know, the pacing having meant to be really high intensity just became awful. I remember running to the back stage and bumping into a friend, he said, what happened? I promised to ensure that never happened again.

Could you talk to me about your work at Glasgow International – a coming together of all the characters across the Dark Continent work? How do you see this piece, is it your most ambitious works to date?

It’s a weird thing to talk about because at 42, I’m really not that old, but at the same time I’ve been quite ill for the last year. I had pneumonia and have not really been able to completely get over it. I don’t think I’d have the energy again to do something like this of my own for volition. I raised the money for it, I wrote it, I built it. I don’t think I’d have the energy to do something of this scale again. The only way would be if someone offered me a budget, and organised someone to get stuff fabricated. It would have to be a bit of a different context. I really don’t think I can push a project of this scale again. I mean of this scale when using materials, the making of a film is quite different.

The work brings together the 12 characters, eight that already exist and four new ones. I am placing each of them in the same space. This installation is quite architectural and sculptural, with large objects placed on the floor and hanging from the ceiling. There is a narrator that speaks into a microphone on one side of the objects, and a floating head on the other narrating the story. I’m working with 12 performers in Glasgow; each one embodies one of the characters. I am filming it with a drone and set of cameras as well. I quite like how drones are often used to film landscape vistas. There is this amazing band called Let’s Eat Grandma, they are a group of young women doing the sound track for the work, they are brilliant.

I Heart Women is a new platform by Laura Hensser dedicated to championing the work of women artists, curators, and arts professionals highlighting important stories through interviews, discussions and conversations. Full interview of Shani here.

SARA ELIASSEN

April 19, 2018 by Nina Strand in Interview

Sara Eliassen’s project The Feedback Loop explores how screen technology and the moving images we surround ourselves with affect our thoughts, gazes and movements. Eliassen invites the viewer to a film program with invited guests, a public screen intervention and an exhibition. Interview by Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin.

Lisa Bernhoft-Sjødin Can you talk a little bit about these stills and how they fit in to the overall project The Feedback Loop?

Sara Eliassen The photos are digital stills from a 16mm filming of digital screens in NYC. The analogue distance pointing to the relation between screens, screen material and humans, as well as the image itself examplifying for me a totalitarian aspect of dominant screen language.

LBS In what way is «collective memory» a prerequisite to understanding your work?

SE I'd rather say that my work points to how moving images and film history takes part of shaping our collective memory. My work explores how moving images and the multitude of screens surrounding us (and our interaction with both material on screen and screen technology) is part of the production of memory and subjectivity. And further, part of presetting our future actions.

LBS The Feedback Loop is a three part project shown consecutively at three different spaces, The Munch Museum, Munch Museum on the Move - Kunsthall Oslo and Oslo Central Station. What are the three projects?

SE The starting point for the project was the public screen intervention. In June, I will feed new produced and appropriated material into commercial public screens centered around Oslo Central Station. The Feedback Loop vignettes are meant to function as slippages, entering in-between the other material displayed on the public screens.

Programming and looking at other filmmaker's strategies have become central to my work, as one of my overall interests is examining what kind of works produced with moving imagery could open up questions rather than force truths running the risk of becoming propaganda itself. So when discussing the project with curator Natalie Hope O’Donnell, the screening series grew naturally out of our conversations. I have become increasingly interested in creating a dialogue by screening the work of others, and there are so many amazing artists and filmmakers out there. Sometimes the work you want to see and make, already exists. I wanted to screen works and invite guests from both my network from working abroad, as well as works that are pertinent to the research I'm doing now. Also, bringing the works of e.g Lynn Hershman to Oslo feels very important to me, she is such an important filmmaker, artist and pioneer thinker- who deserves to be introduced in a Norwegian context.

The exhibition is thought of as a final iteration; to display the research and 16mm works that has been part of the overall exploration of the topic. The art space gives room for the project process and allows for subtleties that 30 seconds vignettes in a public space not necessarily does. I am also working on some collaborative film works that I hope will be part of the exhibition.

LBS In principle, propaganda films and tourist films has a similar agenda, nation building and romanticising the collectively national, right? Historically speaking though, propaganda films, and especially from the decades you’re exploring, has proved devastating. What makes this constellation interesting to work with?

SE I am particularly interested in the tourist and branding films of the era, and looking at how these films employ the exact same tropes as the national branding films of today. They use similar techniques and imagery, showing a clear division between what is inside and outside national borders and in that way stimulating a desire for the national and creating a fear for the outside and of not belonging etc. It's the same principles that ads use, though the branding of ideology is here more outspoken. Films like Iconic Norway, Welcome: Portraits of America (Produced by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of State in partnership with Walt Disney), México en tus sentidos and many others. They are all pretty similar, though Iconic Norway stands out because of its whiteness.

LBS Film has been quite influential all through our latest century to the present day, at which the US cultural expansion and Hollywood is a prime example. In your upcoming project at The Munch Museum you look at European tourist and propaganda films from the 1920s and 30s on nationalism and how certain elements influences us today. What similarities have you found between then and now?

SE Propaganda films of the 20s and 30s were extremely powerful, and through the use of montage, morphing, music, strong imagery and affective close up’s- these films worked to create identification with ideological goals. And then since the late 20s and sound-sync cinema, identification with characters became possible in a different way, and ideology could be presented not as overt as earlier. But my initial question was: can aesthetic strategies and filmic techniques in itself carry ideology, and has this become part of a dominant cinematic form that cannot be separated from its origin and early days.

For this particular project, I've been looking at films from a period in Norwegian film history; Norgesfilmene, beautiful nation building films showing Norwegian nature, but also the growing industry in the country etc. I was curious to the fact that these films were made in the same period as nation building was happening throughout Europe. Introduced to films like Symfonie des Nordens, a German-produced ‘Norgesfilm’ from 1938, I saw a much more 'dynamic' cinematic language than the other Norgesfilmene. This film was the Norwegian contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1939, and points to an interesting linking moment in Norwegian film history and history. So, I appropriated extracts from Symfonie des Nordens for a piece that will be shown on commercial screens in and around Oslo Central Station in June. Appropriated material will be mixed with newly filmed material of a spectator's interaction with the very same site-specific screens in Oslo. The vignettes will function as a multi-channel public piece, pointing to the material, but also to the relations between different screens, and human/ screens.

LBS How has the different spaces impacted your work? Ex. public space (Oslo S) vs institution (The Munch Museum)?

SE I always think about communication in my work. The site where it is to be displayed, and the anticipation of a specific audience is always part of it. Making a work for a public space affects the work a lot, as in this case I can't conceptually separate distribution and production. I have in previous film works placed my own cinematic form quite close to a dominant cinematic language that I have aimed to critique, and I'm thinking the same for this, that the vignettes I am producing need to play with the very language of the material it will screen next to. I have between 20-30 seconds for each vignette, and contrary to the other works played on these screens I am not trying to convey a message, but rather open up for reflection and that's tricky in such a short format. I have no control of the material coming before/ after my own vignettes, so there is also that element of chance, which I somehow try to take into consideration when developing the work.

Sara Eliassen, installation photo, Screens. ISCP, NYC, 2016. — Sara Eliassen, installation photo, *Screens.* ISCP, NYC, 2016.

The Feedback Loop. 19 April–16 December 2018. The Munch Museum, Oslo Central Station and Munchmuseet on the Move – Kunsthall Oslo.

IAN GILES

March 19, 2018 by Nina Strand in Interview

Entrée – one of Bergen’s leading non-profit, independent spaces – has this year made a decisive commitment to showing single-screen film and video works in the most optimal conditions possible. “After eight years as a white cube, which can create really harsh conditions for video and film, I thought it was time to adjust the space and devote a full year to these media”, says Entrée’s co-founder and curator, Randi Grov Berger. “Together with my artist colleague Andrew Amorim, I started planning how to rebuild Entrée to present moving-image works in more ideal conditions.” By Helena Haimes

From mid-March, the gallery is devoting its entire programme to artists’ moving-image works, converting its exhibition space, located in the very centre of Bergen, into a small but impeccably equipped movie theatre. The programme promises to be rich, varied and globally relevant, and includes a mixture of commissioned and existing works by international and Norwegian artist filmmakers. It kicks off with three works by emerging Berlin-based Chinese artist Yafei Qi that investigate the growing feminist movement in her native country. Later highlights include a collaborative project with curator Ingrid Haug Erstad that presents Anton Vidolke’s widely-praised Immortality For All, a film trilogy exploring the lineage and legacy of Russian Cosmism; an Entrée-commissioned work by Marysia Lewandowska that continues her research-led exploration of archives, collections and exhibitions; as well as screenings of works by Goutam Ghosh and Jason Havneraas, Johanna Billing and Jon Raffman, among others.

Screening at Entrée between 29 March and 8 April is British artist Ian Giles’s film After BUTT. Grov Berger first met Giles during her curatorial residency at New York’s ISCP in 2014, and she and Amorim reconnected with him when they were back there last year. “When he started telling us about his work in progress it aroused our curiosity”, she tells me. “When he later sent us the finished work we were stunned: there are so many layers of information, and so many things going on at the same time in his work, which makes it complex and simple at the same time.”

Giles’s film is a meditation on the impact and legacy of BUTT Magazine – the iconic, pink-paged magazine made by and for gay men between 2001 and 2011. The film’s fulcrum is a series of interviews that the artist conducted with the publication’s founders – Jop Van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers – as well as other contributors, including arts and culture journalist Alex Needham and curator Stuart Comer. Giles compiled and edited this material into a script with a narrative structure that loosely tells BUTT’s story in chronological order, which was then performed by a selected group of younger gay men in a filmed series of workshops.

The resulting work is both a cross-generational celebration and incisive critique of the magazine and its authentic representations of gay culture at a crucial point in its history. The late 90s and early 2000s saw the introduction of combination therapy for HIV, and with it a renewed wave of sexual freedom and a new sense of the multiplicity of gay identity rather than the preened and polished “muscle marys” who had previously been so dominant in gay publishing. It showed that, as one of the interviewees puts it, “there are many ways to be gay”.

Giles first came across BUTT when he was a student at Chelsea College of Art, London, in 2005. “I initially liked it as an object”, he tells me. “The black images, the pink paper, this zine quality. Every other magazine on the shelf was shiny and just looked like Vogue, whereas this stood out.” Ten years later, he was reintroduced to the magazine when staying with a friend in Amsterdam who was working for Van Bennekom and Jonkers, and had a collection of BUTT issues in her spare room. Freshly intrigued, he started flicking through them while filming on his phone – a gesture that he repeatedly recreates in the final film as a nod to the publication’s design.

After BUTT gently reflects the magazine’s aesthetics and seductive objectness, though Giles was careful to keep these references subtle. “I think what I have continued to do is employ BUTT’s sense of a natural but published conversation – my film expands approaches to publishing by representing the interviews I carried out and translating them into the medium of film.”

Older viewers are likely to feel a twinge of shock at the ease with which the film subjects such a relatively recent era to creative historicisation. Again, this was an artistic decision that was grounded in the magazine itself, and its distinctive approach to gay history and culture. “They interviewed a lot of people who’d been hugely influential on gay culture in the forty-year period before the magazine was founded”, Giles explains. “They didn’t want to teach people about gay histories, but record their histories – they’d interview John Waters or Don Bachardy, who was an amazing painter, and Christopher Isherwood’s partner. They identified this catalogue of men who’d been through a lot themselves, so it was easy to historicise it because of that. Plus, the design of BUTT looks old in a way, which strangely means it sort of hasn't dated either.”

Another thread running through the film is a constantly shifting and intentionally nebulous sense of authorship. The artist-author, for example (handing out scripts, instructing the session’s participants) is himself played by a young actor. This is reinforced in the film’s script – available at Entrée as part of an accompanying publication – which refers to interviewees as numbers rather than names. “I wanted to make it more of a collective voice, and initially it was to protect the honest way that people had spoken in our interviews”, said Giles.

Though obviously seen as crucial to the creative process of most conventional films, the use of a pre-written script as a structural device reflects a new direction for Giles. He explains that he’s moved closer to a more traditional, planned approach in his recent work, having previously made many of his creative decisions in the editing room. “Some of my previous projects definitely influenced that process”, he recalls. “Essential Rhythms, a film loosely based on the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, was the first time I worked with other people’s words – I did a workshop with people, recorded their words and re-narrated them as a voiceover.”

His influences also extend into theatrical territory. A Caryl Churchill play, Pigs and Dogs, exploring events leading to Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2014, which was at London’s Royal Court in 2016, proved especially inspiring. “The play spliced quotes from lots of different people, it’s performed by three actors who walk around in a triangle and recite quotes in single sentences, and the audience has to piece them together.”

The set of contemporary visual and performance practices that theorists have come to call ‘participatory art’ provided the artist with another fruitful source of inspiration, though their impact is purposefully oblique and intelligently referenced. This participatory element is reinforced by the lasting friendships forged during After BUTT’s production, which the artist sees as crucial to the final film’s intimate atmosphere. “I’m constantly alluding to and borrowing from the aesthetics of participation”, he says, “and the script and the making of the film were great ways of getting this group of people together”.

Ian Giles, After BUTT, Entrée, Bergen, Norway, 29 March - 8 April 2018. The program is curated by Randi Grov Berger & Andrew Amorim. One project with Anton Vidokle this fall is curated by Ingrid Haug Erstad.