Photographer Lily Bandak on art and disability in the Arab world

Lily Bandak, Beirut, 1982


Photographer Lily Bandak speaks about her career in photography and disability.

Elizabeth Taylor in Iran

Currently on view at LTMH Gallery, NYC.

Opportunities!

CFP: Great Exhibitions in the Margins, 1851-1938
Great Exhibitions in the Margins, 1851 - 1938 University of Wolverhampton,
26-27 April 2012 Research has for a long time focused on world fairs, great exhibitions or
expositions universelles in the capitals of Europe and in the large cities
of the USA. Their crucial role in communicating ideas about the identities
of the exhibiting nations (and their relation to other cultures) and in
showcasing contemporary art and design has been examined in detail.
However, in the heyday of these spectacular events - in the second half of
the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century - smaller
cities and regional centres, such as Liege, Poznan, Edinburgh or
Wolverhampton, staged their own 'great exhibitions' modelled on those held
in the national (or imperial) centres. Their goals, although executed on a
more modest scale, were often the same and involved the promotion and sale
of goods but also communication of ideas, ideologies and identities. These
smaller shows usually had large ambitions and tried to engage not only the
local population but also national and international audiences and
exhibitors.

This symposium turns attention to the exhibitions of arts and industries
in the regions outside the capitals and to the assumptions that lay behind
them. Its main focus will be placed on their ambitions, originality,
relationship to the ��greater�� exhibitions and, in particular,
their engagement with visual culture. The questions explored may include:

- what ambitions motivated the idea of staging an exhibition in the
particular location and what were its objectives

- what was the long-term impact of the show on the region, nationally
and internationally

- how were the arts displayed at the exhibition and what role they
played

- what specific influence did exhibitions like the Great Exhibition or
Expositions Universelles in Paris have on the exhibitions in the margins?


The symposium encourages an inter-disciplinary approach to the topic and
papers are therefore welcome from scholars in a wide range of disciplines,
including the history of art and design, history, politics, anthropology,
ethnography, cultural studies etc. A network of researchers interested in
the subject of exhibition cultures will be created through the symposium
as further academic activities on the theme are planned (a publication and
a research network). News about the symposium and the research network
will be posted at http://greatexhibitions.blogspot.com.

Please send your paper proposals of up to 250 words to Dr. Marta Filipova
at Marta.Filipova@wlv.ac.uk by 1 November 2011.
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Monday, August 15, 2011
LAST CALL FOR NOMINATIONS
Ames Prize for Innovative Museum Anthropology

The Michael M. Ames Prize for Innovative Museum Anthropology is awarded annually to individuals for innovative work in museum anthropology, which is understood to entail outstanding single or multi-authored books, published catalogues, temporary and permanent exhibits, repatriation projects, collaborations with descendant communities, educational or outreach projects, multimedia works, and other endeavors. Individuals can be nominated by any member of CMA. A letter of nomination and any supporting material should accompany a copy of the evidence of the work under consideration. The CMA President will appoint a prize committee of three people at the CMA Board of Directors meeting held at the AAA Annual Meeting. The prize committee will review the works and the prize-winners will be notified in advance of the annual AAA meetings so that they can consider attending. The prize winner will be announced at the AAA Annual Meeting and presented with a certificate of the award.

Nomination:
• Deadline: SEPTEMBER 1, 2011
• The nominator must be a current CMA member in good standing
• Self-nominations are allowed
• Hard copies or electronic copies of nomination packets and materials must be sent by the nominator to each of the three prize committee members
• Nomination packets should include a cover letter and the work under consideration (or evidence of it), as well as any supporting materials, such as letters of support, media coverage, DVDs, etc.
• Nomination packets will not be returned

Evaluation Criteria:
• Creativity: Is the project a unique and creative exploration of museum anthropology’s central themes, tensions, and histories?
• Timeliness: Does the project say something important about museum anthropology’s current predicaments and unknown future?
• Depth: In what ways does the project penetrate into the complexity of material culture and the study of it through novel methods and theories?
• Impact: Does the project have the potential to make broad and lasting impacts in museum anthropology?

Process and Rules:
• A three-person prize committee of CMA members, headed by a committee chair, will be constituted by the current CMA President at the annual AAA Board of Directors meeting each year
• The committee will be formally announced by January 15 annually, with the addresses of each committee member publicized
• All nomination materials must be received by September 1, although incomplete nominations may still be considered based on the materials provided
• If no qualified nominations are made, the prize committee may elect to refrain from presenting the award for that year

Instructions:
For the 2011 competition, send one copy of the nomination packet to each committee member:

Jennifer Kramer
Curator of the Pacific Northwest
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
UBC Museum of Anthropology
6393 NW Marine Dr.
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
Canada
Email: Jennifer.kramer@ubc.ca

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh
Department of Anthropology
Denver Museum of Nature & Science
2001 Colorado Boulevard
Denver, CO 80205
USA
Email: Chip.C-C@dmns.org

Kathleen Adams
Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
402 Coffey Hall
Loyola University Chicago
1032 W. Sheridan Road,
Chicago, IL 60660
USA
Email: kadams@luc.edu

Any questions should be directed to the prize committee chair at jennifer.kramer@ubc.ca.
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NYC-based photographers who are interested in volunteering to shoot for Open House NY should contact me! October 15-16.

OPEN CALL/CFP: FOLK ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE RESIDENCIES

reposted from the Philadelphia Folklore Project -
OPEN CALL: FOLK ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE RESIDENCIES
Show and share your work in our gallery

The Philadelphia Folklore Project announces new exhibition opportunities for people working in local communities and addressing social change. (For a pdf of this page, click here.)

If you are directly creating folk and traditional arts or doing documentary work about local grassroots community experiences and expressions, we invite you to apply. Propose a project that can have meaningful impact, both for you and more widely. Residencies offer stipends of $1,000 - $3,000 as well as an exhibition in our gallery between September 2011 and August 2012.

Who: We invite proposals from Philadelphia-area residents who work in community artistic traditions/folk arts or who conduct grassroots or ethnographic documentation. By folk arts, we mean community-based arts: traditions rooted in shared and evolving heritage or experiences. We see folk arts as collective traditions: arts that represent more than an individual vision.

What: Projects that can be done for $3,000 or less, and installed over 1-3 months at PFP are possible. In addition to the stipend and space*, we provide a public opening reception, publicity and interpretive materials, and technical assistance as needed. PFP staff will support exhibition planning and production, develop publicity and interpretive materials, and support community outreach and public programs. Artists chosen for residencies are asked to present at least one public event sharing or talking about their cultural or documentary work and the issues it addresses, and to participate in several meetings with PFP staff and other residents. We expect to support up to 5 different projects.

When: Application deadline, July 1, 2011. Residency projects will be on display for 1-3 months between September 2011 and August 2012. (Exhibition durations will vary depending on proposed projects).

Where: Exhibitions will be installed at PFP, 735 S. 50th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19143

Why this program? People working in folk and traditional arts create meaningful alternatives for their communities, but lack many kinds of resources to sustain their practice. We value folk arts: the spaces they claim, the relationships they embody, and the possibilities they offer. We invite you to bring your arts and concerns into our gallery, and to consider how our space and support can help you take next steps in work that matters.



Read more about the CFP here.

Iranian Photographer: Newsha Tavakolian

Here's an excerpt of a paper I presented last weekend at BEND!, a symposium on photography, gender, and feminism at Princeton. To see Tavakolian's work, click here.

Tavakolian's series Maria consists of several black and white photographs of a woman going about her daily life in her apartment and the streets of Tehran. Tavakolian’s text around these images shares that Maria was born as a male, named Asgar, and underwent a sex-change operation sanctified by the Iranian government. After the operation, when Maria informed her wife, the two told their children that Asgar had died in a trucking accident and subsequently introduced Maria as a distant relative. However, Maria's children disowned her after reading her true story in a gossip newspaper. She now lives alone in downtown Tehran, unable to work as no women work as truck drivers (her former profession), and with no family. Tavakolian's sensitive portraits of Maria capture the difficulty of living in her space, both urban and psychological. The first portrait in the series shows Maria holding up the gossip paper that resulted in the loss of her family. Half of Maria’s face is obscured but matched by the photograph of her on the front page of the paper, wearing a scarf and heavily made up. The symmetry of her face on the paper and in the photograph is Picasso-esque; it is also noteworthy that Tavakolian encourages us to look closely, revealing layers in her photograph that includes another photograph within it, akin to a hall of mirrors. She implies that more readings and stories are there beneath the initial surface of the image. The second image is of Maria's masculine hand, nails painted, over her brassiere. Here, the viewer reads conflicting gender codes within one image, and is not offered an easy solution as Maria’s face and gender exist outside the photographer’s frame. Another image shows Maria’s hands holding out a photograph of herself as Asgar; however, no other details appear in this photograph of a photograph, creating a distinct separation between Maria’s identity and Asgar’s identity. In another, Maria rides alone in a bus, with two younger women wrapped in black headscarves conversing behind her. Their presence, and their active conversation, as evidenced by the blurs of motion, highlights Maria's loneliness and her tenuous, liminal position as a woman without family in Iran. This photograph complements the next in the series, in which Maria is foregrounded in a pool of light, sitting at a restaurant alone with crowds of diners at the darkened tables behind her. Again, Maria is part of the urban scene and simultaneously distinct from it.

Other images in the series show Maria dressing in her Tehran apartment: in her undergarments, posing fully dressed, or applying makeup. The final image in the series displays a pile of suitcases, bags and boxes stacked against a wall: a testament, perhaps to Maria's portability and a sense of mobility, of being able to depart immediately if necessary, again reinforcing her fragile position. Tavakolian forces the viewer to see Maria as an individual in this series, complicating easy ideas of gender binaries. She also pushes at stereotypical Western attitudes of Iran being Islamic and very conservative. This series appears very documentary; Tavakolian’s decision to use black-and-white to capture Maria’s story is also noteworthy. This choice renders the series more akin to photography that appears in the newspaper, and thus more documentary and serious; however the use of the binary black-and-white could also be a playful poke at the habit of binaries that Maria’s situation collapses.

In Tavakolian's series May your wish come true, the veil and chador are re-presented as powerful and haunting symbols of women's agency and choice. In these images, Tavakolian takes full-body portraits of women participating in Moharram, a commemoration period for the 3rd imam in Shii' tradition. During the height of the celebrations, women are forbidden to speak until they visit 40 houses and in each light a candle to Imam Hussein. As the women traverse the streets to perform their visits, they are fully chadored. The first image is of three women in full-length black chadors, with red bands of Persian script around the tops of their heads. Only their hands are visible. The second image, of a woman alone, displays nothing but her face, and barely visible under a lace face-covering as she stands against a graffiti-covered city wall. Here Tavakolian playfully juxtaposes a stereotype of the modern urban (graffiti) and a stereotype of the backward non-urban (woman in chador); however, like the woman barely visible through the lace of her niqab (face-veil), it is clear there is a deeper story underneath the stereotypes. Another image in the series shows a woman chadored with a child next to her, pulling on her sleeve: the child’s veil is brightly patterned and orange, a splash of vibrant color and movement next to her mother’s silent, unmoving form. The fourth image in the series is particularly jolting: a woman with a blue headscarf stands with her face close to the camera, a colorful flag decorated with emblems behind her. The very top of her forehead and hairline are visible, but her face is covered by a thin, tightly stretched black cloth that reveals the ghost-like outline of her eyes, nose and mouth. The photograph is unsettling as it hints at her humanity, personality, and likeness but does not satisfy the viewer looking for her face; the viewer is left unsatisfied, wanting more. The final image in the series is of a woman in a full flowing black chador, with a ghastly neon green gauze face cover. The green face veil is ghastly in being opposite of normal hue for a human face. In these images, the women possess full control over their image, refusing to give in to the pressure of the viewer. As anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod notes, women “decide for whom they feel it is appropriate to veil.”[1] In this construction, the veiled women demonstrate agency, choice, and power in controlling the gaze of others. The women in the images could see everything while their images were being captured, but the photographer (and subsequently the viewer) is the one with a limited perception. Also, this series is captured in color, despite the muted tones of these women’s clothing that would have lent themselves well to black and white. Perhaps Tavakolian has done this to purposefully underscore the contemporary, alive nature of these images. Further, do viewers read these works differently knowing also that the women are silent as they perform their visits? Rather than affirming that silence implies consent, the women in these images retain all power over their images and voices, whereas the photographer and viewer are kept at a distance.

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[1] Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” American Anthropologist 104: 3 (Sept 02): 786.

BEND! Conference at Princeton - April, 2011

I am delighted to be presenting at the below symposium at Princeton next month. I'm going to be discussing the explorations of gender and identity in the work of Iranian photographers Shadi Ghadirian (below) and Newsha Tavakolian (above). More soon!

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BEND! Photography, Gender, & the Politics of Representation

An Interdisciplinary Symposium
Princeton University, April 22-23, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Professor George Baker, Department of Art History, UCLA

The past decade has witnessed widespread institutional and scholarly efforts to historicize the relation between art and feminism, and between art and identity politics. These efforts unfold in a present that is often characterized as “post-gender” and/or “post-racial.” Just as categories of identity seem to lose traction in cultural discourse, so boundaries between artistic media become unfixed. Yet photographic representation is increasingly pervasive, and increasingly bound to the performance of subjectivity.

This symposium aims to consider the interrelated production of gender and photography, along with their dissolution as stable categories of inquiry. An interrogation of photography today requires looking within as well as beyond the boundaries of traditional art-historical frameworks. It compels us to account for the political and social dimensions in which photography participates, and demands that we re-consider the mise-en-scène of photography’s production as art.

How has the evolution of photography—from b/w to color, from analogue to digital, from mass media to social media—served to articulate or blur aesthetic and subjective differences? What politics of representation emerge when the individual can be both agent and object of photographic voyeurism, exhibitionism, and surveillance? Might photography's expanded field offer the potential for reshaping feminist politics today?

We invite participants to explore historical, existing and possible relationships between photography and the (re)production of gender, from the perspectives of visual culture, philosophy, (art) history, and art practice. Papers might consider photography in relation to:

gender bending - histories and politics of sexuality - performance and/or portraiture - the construction of masculinity - women artists - representations of gender, race, and class - advocacy, activism, and political practice - feminist politics, ethics, and aesthetics - medical and biological discourses - capitalism, terrorism, and war

Frances Jacobus-Parker / Elena Peregrina-Salvador / Mareike Stoll
PhD Candidates
Departments of Art & Archaeology / Spanish & Portuguese / German
Princeton University

Mythologizing the West

originally posted on the delighted observationist, 11/18/2010


From San Diego/Los Angeles, CA


Paul Theroux notes in the beginning of The Patagonian Express that travel feels very different when it is undertaken overland, that there is something particularly important in understanding how the land progresses and changes and evolves as one goes across it, rather than just landing in a plane, experiencing the earth as disjointed territories and pieces rather than a slow evolution.

On the East Coast, it’s easy to get anywhere – the cities are fairly close together (100 miles or so) and the land is contiguous, interwoven with packed freeways. The East Coast itself (at least the Northeast, where I have now lived for over 2 years) has a sense of being together, being intimate, in that it’s difficult to ever get out and get lost somewhere without running into a housing development, civilization, freeways, stores. There are a few nature preserves, such as the Delaware Gap, but even that is a narrow strip of “wilderness” and when you kayak to the end of it, the end is signaled by crossing under a freeway overpass. East Coast cities are vertical – New York built upwards, creating a constellation of skyscrapers. They are beautiful, monuments to greatness in many cases, and illuminate the night sky. But the sky becomes so hard to see in New York, too many buildings obscure the broad arc of the sky.

The sky is so much bigger here, on the West Coast. You can see the sky, no matter where you are. It is blue and deep and light. It is not heavy, dense, dark. My experience of space in California is completely different than my experience in New York: in California, I want to be outside, to smell the orange and eucalyptus trees. To sit by the tiger lilies while looking at the mountains in the haze of the distance. The buildings here are closer to human scale, they are not imposing physically. As a result, the distance you travel horizontally on the West Coast roughly equal the distances you travel vertically on the East Coast. It’s just a very different way of being.

More people have cars here, because these distances are greater, and things are more spread out. There’s more space in the West, more room to expand. More freedom, more air. The spaces are more stark, there is more contrast. There are mountains, valleys; the East has rolling hills, no sharply contrasting landscapes in texture and size (excepting Maine).

The West has a long history of being mythologized as a space of freedom, for pioneers, for dreamers, for the sons and daughters of families that didn’t have important last names or dynasties…the place where the American dream stands, where anyone can make their future and fortune. The exhibition at LACMA, “The Modern West,” looked at the ways that artists mythologized the West and created a visual language to explain the sense of possibility and creative opening they felt here. The West is also rough: it is a ragged, demanding place to live that. Los Angeles, as a city, should not exist; there is no water to sustain it, so it had to be stolen from elsewhere (see Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert). Anyone who has visited Yosemite understands the awesome and awe-inspiring intensity of living in a landscape so beautiful but dangerous. The history of the West includes lawless vigilantes, cowboys, and rough “Wild West” towns, people who wanted to live outside strictures of society. Perhaps this epitomizes the inherent danger in freedom: if you are constrained, there is little risk; if you are free, you are also free to make the wrong choices and take yourself down a path of no return. The wide open spaces of the West open that opportunity.

I know that I play into this, that I fall under the lure of the “wide open West” idea. I know I idealize Los Angeles, because I was doing interesting work with the Getty <here's one of our projects, I did the video for this> and my two best friends from Seattle U were living there to attend USC (still reside there). So for me, LA was a place where I had fulfilling, stimulating work, I got to travel, and I had great friends. In my memory, it has become something so mythic it could never have been real. I have edited out the traffic, the eating disorders of the women I saw in Whole Foods, the odd surreal nature of living in a place you recognize, deja-vu-like, because you’ve seen it on tv somewhere. I’ve redacted the unreal relationship to the land and water, the beautiful topiary and manicured lawns that depend on siphoning water to render the city livable, beautiful, vibrant. In my mind, even though I know these things to be true, they have melted away.

I have to admit a predilection towards the desert, too. Perhaps this is vestigial from my childhood in Albuquerque, but the desert feels like home. My childhood weekends were filled with visits to Mesa Verde, Pueblo National Monument, Santa Fe. The mesas and brush of the desert, long brown and ochre expanses dotted with the occasional cacti or magnificent tree, with imposing stark peaked mountains in the distance, feels comfortable. My cousin, who has spent 20 years in Seattle, can’t imagine living in the desert; to her, it is beautiful in its way but not bearable past a few days. The lush verdant greens of the Pacific Northwest are home to her; the desert alien. In a way, I am biased towards the desert, it is inescapable the way I feel at home here. I cannot make it not feel this way. Tennyson was right, “I am a part of all that I have met.” And I met the West when I was so young, and fell in love with her, and have never managed to fall out of love with her again.

Contemporary Iranian Art: Shadi Ghadirian

Photographer Shadi Ghadirian lives and works in Tehran. Her series of Qajar photographs, mimicking standards of 18th and 19th century Qajar court photography, is framed in "Veil" as a thoughtful and witty retort to ethnographic Orientalist portraits and in "Unveiled" as subversive art worthy of a second look. Responses to her work vary. In an exhibition review, critic Olivia Hampton writes, “Qajar is a recreation of the photographic compositions and styles of the studio portraits that flourished in the Qajar dynasty, who ruled Iran from 1794-1925... But clear intrusions of modernity surface in the work, in the form of ghetto blasters and television sets.” Here we see a European art critic reading the work to be about modernity, and an “intrusion” into an idealized and Orientalized past. In a similar vein, “Unveiled” curator Lisa Farjam writes, “Ghadirian, who is influenced by Qajar traditions in Iranian photohistory, does not bow to the standard image of the darkly-clad Muslim woman; these veils are full of color and life.” Here, Ghadirian is presented as drawing from a traditional and Islamic past while infusing a modernity and vibrance. Farjam frames Ghadirian as breaking stereotypes of “the Muslim woman,” whose form, voice, and sexuality are cloaked and disappear with the veil. To counter these views, fellow artist Jananne Al-Ani intervenes to clarify multiple readings by varied audiences, rather than assuming a homogenous and Western audience. She notes, “For an Iranian audience, the contemporary props are seen as ordinary objects in an extraordinary costume drama, whereas for a Western audience – with no knowledge of the history of Iranian dress – the contemporary props disrupt what appears to be a timeless ethnographic portrait of an Other culture.” Here, Al-Ani broadens the debate and the discussion of the work to include multiple perspectives, rather than presuming the work’s audience(s) will be culturally homogenous. Moore writes that Ghadirian's inclusion of Western electronics "raise pointed questions about the provenance of commodity culture and the different forms of fetishism that impact upon women transnationally.” Moore thus creates a productive channel into discussing how women’s bodies in representation have been historically used across many cultures for varying reasons. This call to a broader audience and shared commonalities reappears in Ghadirian’s more recent work, the “Like EveryDay” series, which highlights the quotidian nature of many women’s lives and the roles they perform. Ghadirian’s gallery labels the series, which was featured in the “Unveiled” exhibition, as “depicting anonymous chador-wrapped figures with kitchen utensils instead of faces. This simple, ominous collision of potent symbols – the veil and domesticity –parodies stereotypical understanding of women of the region and universally.” Most viewers imagine the veiled figures to be human, and Muslim women, given that resemblance to variations of the Islamic veil, but there are no discernible people in these photographs. The immediate association for Western audiences is the equating of women as tools, implements, and as invisible as the household items of daily use; women are reduced to sexual tools in wearing the veil, could be an interpretation. In the photographs, there is no trace of a person visible except for one figure in a gingham flowered veil with a strainer over her face; here, the viewer can see traces of skin, a nose, and the tip of a finger, presumed to be feminine by the veil. Otherwise, the series portrays tools and veils, but not people. Ghadirian works within Iranian political constraints, despite the potentially difficult interpretations of some of her works. According to Iranian law, “All images of women in Iran must be shown in hijab and instead of trying to escape this or seeing it as a constraint, Shadi Ghadirian has made it her theme as she continues to investigate the condition of women in her home country.” Much as Sedira pushes viewers to interpret, hold, and gather multiple viewpoints at once, Ghadirian works within and through her sociopolitical situation to create works that challenge easy assumptions and classification.