Look Book: Close Reading Photobooks
Sunday 8 September
Lena Lindgren reads Lay Her Down Upon Her Back by Róisín White
Hanna Asefaw reads 22 Days in Between by Salih Basheer
Saturday 14 September
Sara Eliassen reads #Ingrid by Zoé Aubry
Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson reads Wolfen by Tobias Zielony
* Both Saturday readings are part of the seminar
Through close readings of selected photobooks that are part of this year’s exhibition, the intention is to activate the books and create space for talking about them. Four authors/artists have been invited to do a lecture-style presentation of one book each, based on its theme, shape, and way of telling its narrative(s).
About the contributors
Lena Lindgren has worked in the weekly newspaper Morgenbladet for twenty years, as cultural editor, political editor and in recent years as a commentator. Lindgren is a literary scholar with a background from both Klassekampen and Dagens Næringsliv. In 2014, she was editor of the journal Samtiden; a special issue on contemporary diagnoses with Lotte Konow Lund as picture editor. In 2021, Lindgren published the book Ekko. An Essay on Algorithms and Desire (Gyldendal). The book received The Brage Prize for non-fiction and was nominated for The Deichman prize.
Hanna Asefaw (she/her) is a social geographer, activist and writer/performer from Oslo who, through experimentation with various forms of expression - including poetry, music and new circus - conveys stories about identity, liberation and the memories that we carry. With intersectional and interdisciplinary perspectives as her natural starting point, she portrays in a strong and vulnerable way the connection between the private and the political - the personal and the structural - the intimate and the big picture.
Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson is a visual artist living in Oslo, Norway. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig and graduated in 2009. Jóhannsson works with photography, sculpture, curated projects and artist books. Several of his works are based on the collection of materials or processes that develop over a long period of time before they come into their own as works of art or end up where they came from. In 2012 he started the publishing house Multinational Enterprises as a platform for his publishing.
Sara Eliassen is an artist/filmmaker based in Oslo. Eliassen’s projects move between exhibition spaces, cinemas and sites in the public sphere, and she also programs films, lectures and conversations; inviting and commissioning other artists in relation to her own research and projects. Her work has been exhibited both locally and internationally, and films have screened extensively at film festivals, such as Venice Film Festival, Int. Film Festival Rotterdam and Sundance. Site-specific projects include Not Worth It (2007), Under The Park (2021) and The Feedback Loop (2018) with The Munch Museum in Oslo. Eliassen participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a studio fellow after completing her MFA in the film department at San Francisco Art Institute (2008–2010).
A Seminar on Holes
A Seminar on Holes will be held on Saturday, September 14.
* Please note that the lectures will be held in Nordic languages.
In 2019, the first photograph of a black hole was presented. The telescope that "saw" the black hole was not singular, but a network of eight telescopes in six locations worldwide, a sort of virtual telescope with an aperture as large as the Earth itself. An entire infrastructure of knowledge - political, social and technological - was needed to capture this picture, and it shows the black hole as a giant eye with the event horizon as its pupil. At the event horizon of a black hole, space and time change so that everything that moves past it disappears forever, including light. And here the image-realism in the image of the black hole collapses; the telescope and the black hole compete for photons. The image of the black hole represents a form of anti-photography; an image of that which devours light. The black hole is thus a kind of camera itself. Or even better; an archive of past, present and future.
Using the above topic as a point of departure, we will speculate on the future of photobooks and photography. What does it mean to work with photography when the ontological conditions of the medium are changing by different technologies? How will artists publish in the future? How should one deal with production and distribution in a future where locality and reuse are key? Is the artists' book a subversive force or what will it take for it to become so? What is the photo book of the future? In what way can photobooks relate to the digital ecology with a distributed and immaterial photograph? What gaps/holes exist at the intersection of past, present, and future; historical, ideological and technological?
About the contributors
Cecilia Grönberg is an artist, researcher and editor of the journal OEI, which she runs with Jonas (J) Magnusson. Her doctoral thesis from 2016, the book Händelsehorisont || Event Horizon. Distributed Photography, explores the enduring effects of analogue photography within digital ecologies. Here, the “event horizon” is used as an image and a concept, as a projection surface and an interface that allows us to reflect on the different ways we encounter and relate to photographic images in digital production, publishing and circulation contexts. Grönberg will address how interactions between images and image systems, technologies, books, people, animals and software, can offer new and undefined forms of photographic existence.
Sara Eliassen is a visual artist with a practice that centres around moving images. She recently completed her doctoral project Mediating Uncertainties at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. Her project examined how today's screen culture perpetuates strategies from propaganda films from 1920s and 30s Europe. Eliassen will do a close reading of the book #Ingrid by Zoé Aubry, which refers to a media campaign in the aftermath of the murder of a young woman in Mexico and is a contribution to the debate around femicide and the media's coverage of this phenomenon. For the presentation, Eliassen will draw from her own research in connection with the project Images [and Talking Back to Them], (2016-2022), which explored the close ties between violence and images within a Mexican context.
Jonas Enander has a PhD in physics and has previously researched dark energy and dark matter. Currently, he works as a science journalist will publish the book Mörkret och människan - om svarta hål och vår plats på jorden in August 2024. Enander will discuss how it is possible to photograph black holes and how such space images challenge both our visual way of thinking and the status of photography.
Marit Paasche is an art historian, museum curator and art critic. Paasche's latest book Søvn og lykke. Norsk kunst og det moderne gjennombruddet sheds new light on how social conditions have affected the opportunities to work and express oneself as an artist and intellectual. Paasche will talk about gaps in the art historical canon and how we can work to illuminate history from different perspectives.
Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson is a visual artist who works with photography and installation and has published several books. Jóhannsson will do a close reading of the book Wolfen by Tobias Zielony. The book is a historical, biographical and physical investigation of Agfa's film factory Wolfen. In the age of analogue photography, all photographic material had to be processed in dark rooms. Zielony attempts to illuminate this darkness with the story he tells in the book.
Organiser
Forbundet Frie Fotografer
Møllergata 34, N-0179, Oslo
Contact
Project manager:
Bjørn-Henrik Lybeck
bjornhenrik@fffotografer.no
Venue
Gamle Munch
Address: Tøyengata 53, 0563 Oslo
Organiser
Forbundet Frie Fotografer
Møllergata 34, N-0179, Oslo
Venue
Gamle Munch
Address: Tøyengata 53, 0563 Oslo
Contact
Project manager:
Bjørn-Henrik Lybeck
bjornhenrik@fffotografer.no