The Brighton Photo Biennial Conference

BRIGHTON PHOTO BIENNIAL 2008 CONFERENCE
Date: Saturday 15th November
MEMORY OF FIRE: the War of Images and Images of War
www.bpb.org.uk

Introduction
Programmed by Julian Stallabrass, Brighton Photo Biennial 2008 Guest Curator, organised by Brighton Photo Biennial and supported by the University of Brighton, this important event brings together internationally renowned photographers, media theorists and art historians to discuss the production, exhibition and distribution of images of war, referencing historical and contemporary photography.

This is a serious opportunity to explore BPB 2008 through a range of related disciplines and with a focus on photojournalism and contemporary photographic practice.

The conference, Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War, like the Biennial sets out to examine the vast changes that have taken place in the making and use of images of conflict since the last great 'media war', in Vietnam.

Conference Themes and Key Questions/Issues
Among the major themes are:
• What changes are brought about in the use and memory of images by their new ease of making and circulation?
• How do these images change when seen in so many rapidly changing and antithetical contexts?
• Does the plethora of conflict images in the new media realm work against the emergence of highly memorable key images that seem to summarise an event (as famously pictures by Nick Ut, Eddie Adams and Philip Jones Griffiths did for Vietnam)?
• How have artists responded to the changed media landscape, particularly in placing large-format images of conflict on museum walls?

Saturday 15th November

9.30am - Convene

9.45am - Welcome address – Helen Cadwallader, BPB Executive Director

9.50am - Julian Stallabrass (Courtauld Institute of Art and BPB 2008 Guest Curator) introduces the themes of BPB 2008 Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War and the conference.

10.00am - Paper presentations: Hilary Roberts (Head of Collections Management, Imperial War Museum, London) and Eyal Weizman (architect, writer and curator)

11.15am - Break

11.45 - Artist Presentations: Simon Norfolk (artist, BPB 2008 exhibiting at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea), Broomberg and Chanarin (artists, BPB 2008 exhibiting at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea) and Harriet Logan (artist, BPB 2008 exhibiting at the Independent Photographers Gallery, Battle) present and discuss their work.

1.15pm - Lunch

2.45pm - Paper presentations: Iain Boal (Historian of technics and the commons and a member of the Retort Collective) and Stefaan Decostere (multi-media and online producer CARGO, curator and artist)

4.15pm - Break

4.45pm - In Conversation: Tom Hickey (Course Leader for the Cultural and Critical Theory MA at University of Brighton) and Julian Stallabrass explore themes of the Biennial.

Conference Chair: Mark Waugh, Executive Director The A Foundation and Co-Founder International Curators Forum.

Conference Venue:
Sallis Benney Theatre
University of Brighton
Grand Parade
Brighton

The Dilemma Of Collecting Live Art In Times Of Dematerialisation

A discussion that raised many questions about collecting and it's influences on the position and intentions of the artist.

2nd November 2008
Goethe Institute
Neue Schönhauser Str. 20
10178 Berlin
Germany
Organised by The DNA Gallery and Valerie Schwarz.

Speakers: David Elliot, artistic director of the Sydney Biennial 2010, Jan Hoet, director of MARTa Herford museum in Herford, Fumio Nanjo, director of Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Berta Sichel director of audiovisuals at Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sophia in Madrid, Mark Waugh exective director of the A Foundation in London and Liverpool. The panel was chaired by Mark Gisbourne, who is based in Berlin and is part of the editorial board at ART.ES.


DNA Gallery
Auguststraße 20
10117 Berlin
Germany
www.dna-galerie.de
Tel. + 49 (0)30 28 59 96 52

photos © Julia Waugh.

The British Art Show 7 & The New Art Exchange

The British Art Show & The New Art Exchange
31st October 2008

...The ICF has been invited to curate a discussion on the issues underpinning the evolution of The British Art Show. Like Documenta this will evolve over a 5 year period, allowing new configurations and diverse approaches to the challenge of presenting a national survey.
What is strategically significant is that the exhibition tours to partner cities that raise the resources to host the exhibition.

For BAS7 one of the host cities is Plymouth, which has not previously benefitted from an exhibition of this scale, raising the question of how infrastructural challenges impact on curatorial choices. These and an array of questions will aim to navigate a path through issues that have, perhaps, been left unanswered since the last
exhibition.

Speakers include: David A. Bailey, Andrea Schlieker, Jason Bowman, Claire Doherty, Alex Farquarson, Hew Locke, Sandy Nairne, Mark Nash, Roger Malbert.

Jason Evans & The ICF - A Salon - The Brighton Photo Biennial

JASON EVANS DISCUSSES THE INCIDENTAL AND THE ARCHIVE WITH DAVID A BAILEY ORGANISED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE INTERNATIONAL CURATORS FORUM (THE ICF) AND THE BRIGHTON PHOTO BIENNIAL.
www.bpb.org.uk
4th Oct 2008

Reconciliation

Jason Evans
www.jasonevans.info

The Permanent Gallery
20 Bedford Place
Brighton
BN1 2PT
UK
www.permanentgallery.com


In this new show created specifically for Permanent Gallery, Jason Evans debuts his ongoing Reconciliation project. In this series of outputs he revisits his own diverse back-catalogue and the recurring themes of his practice.

For the Brighton Photo Fringe exhibit, the theme of Street Photography is his focus, and he presents new selections from 4 quite different bodies of work from the last 8 years in order to facilitate speculation about the nature of the discipline.

Where is 'the street'? Where is chance in the 21st Century? Is 'the street' a state of mind ? Have we come to the end of the road?

Also on display are objects collected on location whilst these works were made, as is an especially commissioned limited edition Reconciliation Scarf, made with long-time collaborator Alex Rich. The Gallery has also been re-decorated to bring its location into the equation and interrupt the institution of 'the white cube'.

A small publication designed by Alex Rich and Jason Evans accompanies the show.

The 4 bodies of street-work are :

The New Scent 2000-05
Black and White analogue photographs made with misleading visual imperative in mind. www.thenewscent.com

The Daily Nice 2004-ongoing
Colour digital captures from the web-based project www.thedailynice.com where a positive agenda is brought to 'the everyday'.

NewYorkLondonParisTokyo 2005-07
Black and White, analogue, multiple-exposure photographs, which relocate the decisive moment onto the film plane, inviting chance to combine scenes influenced by the visual precedents of these 4 major sites of street photographic history.

The End of the World is Fine 2000-ongoing
Black and White and Colour still lives and documentary style pictures. Scenes of personal wonder recorded for posterity with considerable pathos, juxtaposed with studies of pieces of things that used to be something else.




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Bighton Photo Biennial is the UK’s leading festival of photography offering an ambitious celebration of international photographic practice.


The Biennial is committed to stimulating debate on photography in all its forms: new and historic, digital and analogue, still and moving. The Biennial presents the work of international artists, from a range of cultural backgrounds, commissioning new work, premiering recent work and exhibiting historical work in new contexts.

The Biennial includes exhibitions, participatory programmes, publications, conferences, talks, portfolio reviews and outdoor events. An extensive education programme develops local audiences through which the Biennial aims to reach the widest possible audiences and creates exciting opportunities for participation and engagement.

Entitled Memory of Fire: the War of Images and Images of War, Brighton Photo Biennial 2008 will explore photographic images of war, their making, use and circulation, and their currency in contemporary society.

The provocative writer and critic Julian Stallabrass will curate ten exhibitions presenting photography, film and online material produced and circulated in time of war, and analyse how images have been shaped by the changing social and political conditions from the Vietnam era to the present. The exhibitions will include images produced by photojournalists, artists and non-professionals.

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Julian Stallabrass on Brighton Photo Biennial 2008
The title is borrowed from Eduardo Galeano’s extraordinary book, Memory of Fire, an epic literary account of 500 years of Latin American resistance to imperialism. The book consists of numerous self-contained episodes which can be read in isolation but also combine with their neighbours to produce a larger picture of the book’s subject. Similarly, BPB 2008, which covers a long stretch of the South East England coastline, comprises many exhibitions and events, each of which stands alone, but which may be enriched when other elements are seen.

Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War takes on various issues as its main themes: first, it examines the production and dissemination of images in time of war, especially the changing conditions from the Vietnam era to the present. Images made by photojournalists, both as prints and as published in magazines and newspapers, are shown alongside presentations of online image displays, either on screen or made into wall-bound objects.

Memory of Fire will also illumine through an examination of the media the conditions of conflict, imperialism and expropriation, historically and into the present. By taking in views of the different sides of the various conflicts, radically different perspectives will emerge.

Memory of Fire seeks to frame and inform new imagery with old, and vice versa. In looking at historical imagery alongside the photography of current wars, the Biennial elicits intimations of the collective and individual memory of such images, their forgetting and revision, and their rebirth at times of crisis and war.

Finally, the Biennial looks at the place of the art world in the production of images of conflict, particularly the making of large-scale images of destruction on the scale of the history paintings of old (and like them sometimes commissioned by the state).

www.flickr.com/photos/brightonphotobiennial

photos © Julia Waugh.

Manifesta7 - A navigation with Axel Lapp

Manifesta7
www.manifesta7.it
19 July - 02 November 2008

Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art will be hosted by the Trentino – South Tyrol Region from July 19 to November 2, 2008. For the first time it will take place in Italy and will stretch across an entire regional territory – one hundred and fifty kilometres of crossroads of different cultures and intersecting traditions, rich in historical monuments and in sites of industrial archeology. It involves four cities which together create a single connecting route along the Brenner axis between the north and south of Europe: Fortezza (Bressanone), ex-Alumix factory in Bolzano, the Palazzo delle Poste in Trento, Manifattura Tabacchi and ex-Peterlini factory in Rovereto.


"Manifesta is a pan-European nomadic platform for the contemporary visual arts that is run by the International Foundation Manifesta in Amsterdam. The first Manifesta was held in Rotterdam in 1996. Since then, this European Biennial of contemporary art moved to Luxembourg, Ljubljana, Frankfurt and San Sebastian. Manifesta 6 in Nicosia was cancelled, and Manifesta 7 is the first that is held across an entire region..."

Read the rest of the article...
here...


Axel Lapp is a writer and curator based in Berlin.
www.axellapp.de
Axis is an online resource for information about contemporary art.
The website features profiles of professional artists and curators, interviews, discussions, art news, debates and showcases the artists to watch.
www.axisweb.org

The ICF & The European Biennial Network at the A Foundation - The Liverpool Biennial

The ICF & The European Biennial Network at the A Foundation.
www.afoundation.org.uk

The European Biennial Network has initiated, with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union, the Biennial Exchange and Residency Programme: a two-year cycle of workshops, residency and traineeship programmes, research visits, and networking events. These activities are designed to reflect the diversity of different approaches to contemporary art, and to create opportunities for research, exchange of ideas, and creative partnerships.
www.europeanbiennialnetwork.org

The Liverpool Biennial is the UK's largest festival of contemporary visual art. Established in 1998, this year will see the fifth festival take place. Since its inception, this international exhibition has commissioned well over 100 new works, many for the streets and public spaces of Liverpool, by established contemporary artists from around the world.

European Biennial Network & The International Curators Forum.
Is it appropriate on the opening day of Liverpool Biennial to look at the long-term results of biennials? Or is the primary role of biennials to provide a short-term injection into the bloodstream of art and city.

Can they do both? Since the expansion and proliferation of biennials in the 1990s, can we now begin to detect accumulative benefits within their local arts ecologies? If so, why does criticism focus mainly upon the reception of authored curatorial strategies in an ever-expanding global art world?

This debate brings a number of European biennials together to focus the spotlight behind the scene and looks at different approaches of biennials to connect curatorial models with the cultural infrastructure in their cities. An expert panel of invited international curators, artists, commissioners and writers will represent those responsible for the organisation of the biennials.

Chaired by Paul O'Neill, Research Fellow Situations, University of the West of England; with Kerstin Bergendal, artist, and author of Kunstplan Trekoner; Paul Domela, Programme Director Liverpool Biennial; Annie Fletcher, curator van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; Bige Orer, Director Istanbul Biennial; Renate Wagner, Berlin Biennale; Augustine Zenakos, founder and co-director Athens Biennial; and others and Jan Verwoert, contributing editor at Frieze.

We all experience artworks at different velocities and much has been said about the need for artworks to engage us in both the spectacular flash of first impact and the slow retinal aftershocks of perception.

This vertiginous moment is perhaps most precarious within the context of the international biennial when as the curtain rises the accumulation of ideas is exposed and the work becomes a spectacle in an international melee of artworks.

Hosted by David A. Bailey, Director of ICF and Senior Curator at Autograph, with contributions from Lina Dzuverovic, Curator of Nordic Biennial 2009, co-founder and Director of Electra; Cedar Lewisohn, Curator of Tate Modern Street Art and Tate Triennial, Axel Lapp, Contributing Editor Art Review, publisher and curator; Jiyoon Lee, Director of SUUM and Curator of Fantasy Studio Project; Ed Linse of Artists Anonymous, an art collective based in Berlin and writer and critic J.J. Charlesworth.

The Liverpool Biennial
20 September - 30 November 2008
www.biennial.com

photos © Julia Waugh.