The Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture (KU Leuven – Université catholique de Louvain) and M HKA – Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen kindly invite you to their scientific conference.
This international conference takes the US artist, theoretician, critic, teacher and poet Allan Sekula’s Ship of Fools/ The Dockers’ Museum (2010-2013) as its point of departure. At the very end of his life Sekula produced this unfinished, multifaceted and variably installable work of art, which contains ca. 1250 objects. Focusing on dock workers and seafarers, Sekula’s Ship of Fools/ The Dockers’ Museum paid tribute to all the joined, past efforts of human labor now irretrievably lost in history – a struggle he identified as “Sisyphean.” In doing so, Sekula wished to provide a message of hope: his last work contributes to imagining possible forms of solidarity in a globalized economy confronted evermore with its own limitations. The conference’s participants will discuss both Sekula’s oeuvre and works by other contemporary artists whose approach dialogues with his seminal legacy.
The conference is organized around three thematic sections:
- Collecting Folly
- Maritime Failures and Imaginaries
- Critical Realism in Dialogue
Each forms a separate session that opens up to contemporary art engaging with Sekula’s influential method of making artwork as “disassembled plays” – a term he connected to the work of Bertolt Brecht, and which served to indicate that he demands a substantial productive and temporal input from the spectators who are experiencing his works.
The keynote speakers of this conference will be W.J.T. Mitchell (University of Chicago) and Marco Poloni (artist, Berlin).
The conference will be held in English. Participation is free and open to all, but prior registration is mandatory. For more information, the conference schedule, and the registration form, please visit:
http://lievengevaertcentre.be/highlight/disassembled-images-contemporary-art-after-allan-sekula
To download the leaflet, please click here.
If you travel to Granada this Spring, don’t go to one of the flamenco shows that litters the touristic areas of the city. Forget about them, and go immediately to the Alhambra; more precisely, the photography exhibition curated by Concha Gόmez (professor at the Carlos III University in Madrid). This exhibition offers an amazing retrospective of the work of Colita – artist name of Isabel Steva (°1940) – one of the first professional female press photographers in Spain who has always been fascinated by the world of the gypsies and flamenco. Speculations on the misrepresentation of real and authentic culture immediately vanish when entering the exhibition, which is a model of great photography as well as curatorial intelligence. What makes the experience so strong is the complete coincidence of the various levels of mediation. One witnesses for example the intimate knowledge of the culture the artist wants to represent (the photographer is not an outsider of the flamenco culture). Furthermore, the curator has built a strong personal relationship with the photographer, as shown by a wonderful filmed interview in the exhibition which refrains from overloading the images with all kinds of didactic captions. There is a strong awareness of the historical and political complexities of flamenco, a longtime marginalized art, created by marginalized people. One cannot therefore simply document flamenco from the outside or by detaching it from the rest of a living culture where current ideas on art prevent us from seeing and feeling what is really happening. An additional level of mediation is the perfect capacity of disclosing the “duende”, the epiphany (?), with an economy of means that is shared by the flamenco artist, the photographer and the curator, and finally, the desire to not only focus on the exceptional value of masterpieces (although neither Colita nor Gόmez tend to hide the empowering presence of exceptional figures).
Virtual introduction to the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry by Norman Denzin, conference chair of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.
Mats Alvesson is Professor of Business Administration at the University of Lund, Sweden, and, part-time, University of Queensland Business School, Australia and Cass Business School, London. He has done extensive research and published widely in the areas of qualitative and reflexive methodology, critical theory, organized culture, knowledge work, identity in organizations, gender, organizational change, management consultancy etc. He has published 20 books with leading publishers and hundreds of articles, many of which are widely cited and used on higher levels in university education. Recent books include Understanding Gender and Organizations (Sage, 2009, with Y. Billing), Reflexive Methodology (Sage, 2009, with K. Sköldberg), Interpreting Interviews (Sage, 2010), The Triumph of Emptiness: Consumption, higher education and work organization (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Constructing Research Questions: Doing interesting research (Sage 2013, with J. Sandberg)
Maggie MacLure is Professor of Education in the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI) at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). She leads the Theory and Methodology Research Group in ESRI. Her most recent research projects have centred on early childhood education, and the issue of ‘behaviour’ in school. Maggie is the founder and director of the Summer Institute in Qualitative Research. Her book, Discourse in Educational and Social Research, won the Critics’ Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association.