Seminario: ¿Qué es una imagen? Miradas contemporáneas a la fotografía
Miércoles 5 de diciembre de 2018
10 a.m. a 6 p.m. Entrada libre con previa inscripción, aforo limitado.
Coordinación académica: María Wills, investigadora y curadora independiente
Lugar: Teatro MAMM
Este seminario busca reflexionar y discutir sobre algunos de los aspectos que hoy enmarcan o liberan a la fotografía de sus definiciones originales. Abordará temas fundamentales de la denominada “crisis” de la imagen y ofrecerá a los asistentes distintas aproximaciones al universo actual de la fotografía. El tránsito de la imagen análoga a la imagen digital, por ejemplo, así como la apropiación de la imagen de archivo o de prensa por parte de artistas contemporáneos, hacen que el medio se reescriba no simplemente en función de la técnica, sino de categorías más amplias como la cultura visual. La retórica de las artes actuales ya no reconoce la perfección de una imagen en la exquisitez o calidad de una fotografía, sino más bien en su contenido conceptual, crítico y teórico, cuya veracidad además será constantemente puesta en duda.
Imagen: Óscar Muñoz. Retrato (Fotograma), 2004. Video mono-canal, 8 min.
Program
9:00 a.m. Registration
10:00 a.m. Presentation and Opening Remarks: María Wills Londoño (Colombia)
Art researcher and curator. Her main exhibition projects reflect on the unstable condition of the contemporary image. Her research has revisited the history of Colombian art in the 1970s and 80s to identify artists who, due to their experimental practices or political stances, remained outside the mainstream of official discourse.
10:45 a.m. Photography as a Strategy in Contemporary Art: Carolina Ponce de León (Colombia)
Independent curator, researcher, critic, and art manager. She was Director of Arts at the Banco de la República, curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York, and Visual Arts Advisor to the Ministry of Culture. A columnist for El Tiempo and El Espectador, she has taught in the graduate programs in visual criticism and curatorial studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She co-curated the exhibition “La Vuelta” with Sam Stourdzé at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival in 2017.
In this session, she will discuss the relationship between “documentary art” and photojournalism in the work of the artists featured in “La Vuelta,” as well as the new image cultures these artists are developing as a critical response to images in mass media and social networks.
11:15 a.m. Memory, Lies, Mist, and Reality: Constructions of an Editorial and Photographic Archive. Carla Stellweg (Netherlands)
She has worked as a director of museums and non-profit organizations. Her space in Soho, New York, has hosted artists, curators, collectors, and art professionals. She is the co-founder and editor of the journal Artes Visuales. Since 2005, she has been a professor in the Department of Visual Criticism and Art History at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Between 2015 and 2017, Stellweg contributed to the research and catalogue for the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, a project of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.
Artes Visuales was the first quarterly, hemispheric journal to focus, from a broad perspective, on our visual culture and to question the existence of a “Latin American art,” discussions that took place between 1972 and 1982. After reviewing its archives of more than 40 years, Stellweg will explore the themes addressed by this journal, as well as the critics and figures who contributed to it and who have been relevant to understanding the image and visual culture in Latin America. This exploration, both narrated and visual, will ask whether it is possible to speculate on the future of the “image-imaginary.”
12 p.m. Conversation with Speakers
Conversation moderated by María Wills with Carla Stellweg and Carolina Ponce de León. There will be time for questions from the audience.
12:30 to 2 p.m. Break
2 p.m. Glocal Territories Alejandro Castellote (Spain)
Curator, editor, essayist, and professor of photography. He was director of the photography department at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid from 1985 to 1996. He directed the project Spain Through Photography 1839-2010 for the MAPFRE Foundation and the Taurus publishing house (2013). In 2006, he received the Bartolomé Ros Award for best career achievement in Spanish photography. From 2014 to 2016, he was director of the Latin American Master’s Program in Contemporary Photography – Maldefoco – at the Centro de la Imagen in Lima, Peru.
Castellote will discuss how contemporary artists move beyond solely using self-referential imagery and instead create hybrid iconographies that borrow from canonical art models, reinterpreting them according to their own traditions and their relationship with the world.
2:45 p.m. Photographic Archives as Visual History? Juan Luis Mejía (Colombia)
A lawyer from the Pontifical Bolivarian University of Medellín, he served as director of the Medellín Public Pilot Library, the National Library of Colombia, the Colombian Book Chamber, and the Colombian Institute of Culture (Colcultura). He was Secretary of Education for Medellín and later Minister of Culture, and Consul of Colombia in Seville, Spain. Since 2004, he has been the Rector of EAFIT University.
He will share his experience in the process of creating one of the most important photographic archives on the continent: the Biblioteca Pública Piloto (BPP). Mejía, director of the BPP in the 1980s, will recount how the institution became the greatest champion of photography in the country and how this raised awareness of the photographic image as one of the pillars for constructing the country’s history.
3:15 to 3:30 p.m. Break
3:30 p.m. What is an Image?* James Elkins (United States)
He holds the E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Elkins researches and writes about artistic and non-artistic images. His work focuses on the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature. His most recent book, What Photography Is, examines the power of photography in an imagined dialogue with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida.
While concepts such as image, representation, and photography have been extensively discussed, little has been explored about visual objects and how they create meaning. This session will explore fundamental problems concerning the nature of images.
*Simultaneous translation
4:30 p.m. Iconophiles and Iconoclasts: Tensions in the Use of the Image Throughout History. José Alejandro Restrepo (Colombia)
He has worked in video art since 1987. His work encompasses single-channel video, video performance, and video installation. His activities include research and teaching. Some of his recent participations include: 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre (2011); Lyon Biennial (2011); Quai Branly Museum (2013); Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Laxart Los Angeles (2017).
The offensive and defensive role of the camera as a weapon in contemporary conflicts, the new technologies of vision, and their development in matters of political violence effectively shape what can be called a “war of images.” This session will trace the historical confrontation between iconophiles and iconoclasts to shed light on the present and reformulate the question: What is an image, and what is its purpose?
5 p.m. Conversation with speakers
Conversation moderated by María Wills with James Elkins, José Alejandro Restrepo, and Alejandro Castellote. There will be time for questions from the audience.