MADINAT JUMEIRAH CONFERENCE CENTRE DUBAI DECEMBER 7-14, 2016 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) is an annual eight-day event that takes place at the Madinat Jumeirah Conference Centre in Dubai. Sponsored by a myriad of local and regional partners, the festival has consistently pledged to showcase cinema from the Arab world since its inception in 2004. This year DIFF presented 156 feature films, shorts, and documentaries from fifty-five countries, including seventy-three premieres from the Middle East and North Africa region, twelve premieres from the Middle East, and nine premieres from the Gulf Cooperation Council region. DIFF also featured fifty-seven world and international premieres, with special programs such as Nordic Spotlight, a segment dedicated to films from Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway; Oscar Glory, which featured a selection of films that are official submissions to the Academy Awards; and Last Chance, dedicated to the late Abbas Kiarostami and Andrzej Wajda and featuring their respective films Take Me Home (2016) and Afterimage (2016), which were screened alongside Seyfolah Samadian's documentary 76 Minutes and 15 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami (2016). Aside from the usually stellar lineup of films, DIFF is also known for its nightly red carpet gala screenings and the scenic views surrounding its venues--one of which is at Jumeirah Beach, an open-air beach cinema open to the public at no cost. The DIFF also generates highly productive spaces for its participants. For example, each screening is followed by a lengthy QA and Hady Zaccak's Ya Omri (104 Wrinkles) (2016), a biographical feature about his aging grandmother, whose self-reflexivity and collaboration on the twenty-year project with her grandson makes for a compelling work exploring love and loss through her lapses of memory. Soleen Yusef's stunning film Haus ohne Doch (House without Roof) (2016), follows three siblings on their journey from Germany to bury their mother in her ancestral village in Iraqi Kurdistan. (The mother is played by Wedad Sabri, the director's mother.) Although Haus Ohne Dach is Yusef's first feature film, she masterfully captures the antagonisms between the siblings--who live very different lives in Germany--as they embark on a trip that forces them to confront questions of gender, identity, and belonging amid a highly volatile politicized backdrop, causing them at one point to lose their mother's coffin. An unsurprising yet intriguing theme at DIFF this year was that a number of films dealt with bodies of water in their narratives. As the migration crisis has escalated over the past couple of years, the Mediterranean sea has come to symbolize more tragedy than hope as hundreds of thousands of refugees attempt to cross it--often in unsafe and overcrowded rubber boats--on their journey to Europe's shores. …
{"title":"13th Dubai International Film Festival","authors":"Hend F. Alawadhi","doi":"10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.4","url":null,"abstract":"MADINAT JUMEIRAH CONFERENCE CENTRE DUBAI DECEMBER 7-14, 2016 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) is an annual eight-day event that takes place at the Madinat Jumeirah Conference Centre in Dubai. Sponsored by a myriad of local and regional partners, the festival has consistently pledged to showcase cinema from the Arab world since its inception in 2004. This year DIFF presented 156 feature films, shorts, and documentaries from fifty-five countries, including seventy-three premieres from the Middle East and North Africa region, twelve premieres from the Middle East, and nine premieres from the Gulf Cooperation Council region. DIFF also featured fifty-seven world and international premieres, with special programs such as Nordic Spotlight, a segment dedicated to films from Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway; Oscar Glory, which featured a selection of films that are official submissions to the Academy Awards; and Last Chance, dedicated to the late Abbas Kiarostami and Andrzej Wajda and featuring their respective films Take Me Home (2016) and Afterimage (2016), which were screened alongside Seyfolah Samadian's documentary 76 Minutes and 15 Seconds with Abbas Kiarostami (2016). Aside from the usually stellar lineup of films, DIFF is also known for its nightly red carpet gala screenings and the scenic views surrounding its venues--one of which is at Jumeirah Beach, an open-air beach cinema open to the public at no cost. The DIFF also generates highly productive spaces for its participants. For example, each screening is followed by a lengthy QA and Hady Zaccak's Ya Omri (104 Wrinkles) (2016), a biographical feature about his aging grandmother, whose self-reflexivity and collaboration on the twenty-year project with her grandson makes for a compelling work exploring love and loss through her lapses of memory. Soleen Yusef's stunning film Haus ohne Doch (House without Roof) (2016), follows three siblings on their journey from Germany to bury their mother in her ancestral village in Iraqi Kurdistan. (The mother is played by Wedad Sabri, the director's mother.) Although Haus Ohne Dach is Yusef's first feature film, she masterfully captures the antagonisms between the siblings--who live very different lives in Germany--as they embark on a trip that forces them to confront questions of gender, identity, and belonging amid a highly volatile politicized backdrop, causing them at one point to lose their mother's coffin. An unsurprising yet intriguing theme at DIFF this year was that a number of films dealt with bodies of water in their narratives. As the migration crisis has escalated over the past couple of years, the Mediterranean sea has come to symbolize more tragedy than hope as hundreds of thousands of refugees attempt to cross it--often in unsafe and overcrowded rubber boats--on their journey to Europe's shores. …","PeriodicalId":443446,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Technology Transfer and Society","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128308315","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While it has been nine years since her second feature film, Hounddog (2007), was released in theaters, filmmaker Deborah Kampmeier has been at the forefront of a movement to include more female directors in a male-dominated profession. With few exceptions, it has been difficult for women to penetrate the film world. In her 2015 New York Times article, "Lights, Camera, Taking Action," critic Manohla Dargis wrote, "Women in film are routinely denied jobs, credits, prizes and equal pay." (1) Kampmeier is no stranger to the struggles women face in the film industry. Her position as an established director with a star-studded film that premiered at Sundance did not make it easier for her to produce her third film, SPLit (2017). Perseverance on her part, as well as on the part of her supporters, paid off, and Kampmeier's striking and provocative new feature film is now on its way to the public realm. SPLit is, to quote film critic Matt Fagerholm, "An arrestingly raw howl of fury at the global stigmatization of female sexuality." (2) It tells the story of a sexually repressed stripper who lands the lead role in a play about the Sumerian goddess Inanna's descent into the underworld. Kampmeier's protagonist becomes so immersed in the play that she, in a sense, becomes Inanna. As Inanna, through her descent, finds herself slowly stripped of her garments, Kampmeier's protagonist finds herself peeling away the layers of sexual repression imposed upon her by our patriarchal society. As a member of the Film Fatales, a global organization of female filmmakers, and the creator of Full Moon Films, Kampmeier continues to fight for female directors while making films that provoke closer inspection into the sexual lives of women. The following conversation took place via email on January 25, 2017. EMMA EDEN RAMOS: You have spoken openly about your anger over how female sexuality is portrayed in film. You argue, and I agree, that women are too often depicted as the object of desire, instead of as beings who have sexual cravings of their own. Is one of your goals as a female filmmaker to dismantle the misconception that women are sexually passive by nature? DEBORAH KAMPMEIER: I wouldn't call it a direct goal, but I think the dismantling of all of the misconceptions that the male gaze and male fantasy impose on the true expression of female sexuality is a direct outcome of a woman telling her story instead of a man telling her story. I'm trying to give voice to my story. And a big part of my story is my relationship to my own sexuality. The journey I have taken to reclaim it and move from a performed sexuality for the male gaze or male fantasy, to an embodied and authentic sexuality that is in response to my own desire and my own pleasure, is revealed in stages through all three of my films. I think the fact that approximately ninety-three percent of feature films have a man behind the camera (3) means there is a constant perpetuation and reinforcement of a false repre
自从她的第二部故事片《猎犬》(2007)上映以来，已经过去了九年，电影制作人黛博拉·坎普迈尔一直站在一场运动的最前沿，在男性主导的行业中加入更多的女性导演。除了少数例外，女性很难进入电影世界。影评人玛诺拉·达吉斯(Manohla Dargis)在2015年《纽约时报》(New York Times)的一篇文章《灯光、镜头、行动》(Lights, Camera, Taking Action)中写道，“电影中的女性经常被剥夺工作、荣誉、奖项和同工同酬。”坎普迈尔对女性在电影行业所面临的困境并不陌生。作为一名知名导演，她在圣丹斯电影节上首映了一部众星云集的电影，但这并没有让她更容易制作她的第三部电影《分裂》(2017)。她的坚持，以及她的支持者的坚持，得到了回报，坎普迈尔引人注目和挑衅的新故事片现在正在走向公众领域。用影评人马特·法格霍尔姆的话来说，《分裂》是“对女性性行为在全球范围内被污名化的愤怒的一种令人震惊的原始咆哮。”(2)它讲述了一个性压抑的脱衣舞娘谁登陆在一个关于苏美尔女神伊娜娜的下降到黑社会的戏剧主角的故事。坎普迈尔笔下的主人公沉浸在戏剧中，从某种意义上说，她变成了伊娜娜。随着伊娜娜的降临，她发现自己慢慢地脱掉了衣服，坎普迈尔的主人公发现自己剥去了我们父权社会强加给她的性压抑的层层。作为全球女性电影人组织“电影蛇头”的成员和“满月电影”的创作者，坎普迈尔继续为女性导演而战，同时制作了引发对女性性生活的更仔细检查的电影。以下对话发生在2017年1月25日的电子邮件中。艾玛·伊登·拉莫斯:你曾公开表达过你对电影中女性性行为的愤怒。你认为，我同意，女人经常被描绘成欲望的对象，而不是她们自己有性渴望的人。作为一名女性电影人，你的目标之一是消除人们对女性在性方面天生被动的误解吗?DEBORAH KAMPMEIER:我不认为这是一个直接的目标，但我认为，消除男性凝视和男性幻想对女性性行为真实表达的所有误解，是女性讲述她的故事而不是男性讲述她的故事的直接结果。我想把我的故事说出来。我的故事很大一部分是我和自己性取向的关系。我所经历的重拾它的旅程，从一种为男性凝视或男性幻想而表演的性行为，转向一种体现的、真实的性行为，这种性行为是对我自己的欲望和快乐的回应，在我的三部电影中分阶段展现出来。我认为，大约93%的故事片都有一个男人在镜头后面的事实(3)意味着对女性经历的错误呈现不断地延续和强化。这在很大程度上是我们目前讲故事的语言，以至于作为女性的我们甚至不知道自己在努力模仿它。当我们不觉得自己活在自己的皮肤里，因为我们试图占据投射在我们身上的这些图像时，我们会立即认为自己有问题。我们有越多的女性，无论她们是什么取向，以任何形式分享她们的性经历，我们就有越多的机会来认同我们真正是谁，感觉被看到和被听到，也许还能发现更多关于我们自己的东西。埃尔:批评人士说女性在银幕上被物化了，性被压抑了。你编剧和导演《猎犬》的时候冒了很大的风险。你不仅向观众展示了真实的女性性行为，你还探索了一些更具争议性的东西:儿童性行为这一经常被视为禁忌的话题。是什么激发了你去解决一个被认为有悖常理的想法?…
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Pub Date : 2017-03-01DOI: 10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.15
C. Edgington
Bea Nettles rose to prominence at the beginning of 1970 with her autobiographical mixed-media and photographic work. During that year she had a solo show at the George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum, or GEM) in Rochester, New York, and was also included in the seminal exhibition Photography into Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 2014, the show was re-mounted at Hauser & Wirth in New York City as the retitled The Photographic Object, 1970 and was accompanied by a publication of the same name from the University of Arizona and the University of California Press. Nettles has been exhibiting her work for nearly fifty years and is included in the collections of MoMA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada; the Phillips Collection in Washington DC; the International Museum of Photography at the GEM; and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her newest book, Dante Enters Hell (2016), has sold out and is in nine special collections libraries including those of Yale, Duke, and Northwestern universities. In 2016, her early work began to pop up around the country in various exhibitions including at the Met, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art. The recent reappearance of Nettles's early work--from the single pieces of the late 1960s to her Mountain Dream Tarot card deck (1975) and her visual autobiography Flamingo in the Dark (1979)--in museums and galleries is neither happenstance nor anomaly, but rather evidence of her importance in the history of American art. This work is visceral, poignant, humorous, and multivalent--and is as indicative of the experimental approach by many photographers of the 1960s and '70s as it is striking to twenty-first-century eyes. In particular, the return to materiality and the autobiographical in photography by many contemporary artists, as well as the mixed-media and photographic approach of painters today, prove Nettles was both ahead of her time and firmly situated within a legacy of artists (from Pictorialism to Victorian collage and book-making to Dada) in the history of photography. Although today artists must contend with the digital revolution, either embracing it or reacting against it, the impact of Nettles's layered approach, particularly in her early work, cannot be underestimated. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I met Nettles in 2005 as an incoming photography student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was teaching photography and book-arts classes and is now professor emerita. I gardened for her in exchange for books and time from 2007 to 2008, which I count as a pivotal year in my growth as an artist and being. In August of last year, I reconnected with Nettles at her home in Urbana for a conversation about the recent exhibitions of her early work and Dante Enters Hell. COLIN EDGINGTON: I had a student who saw your work recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). I think it i
Bea Nettles在1970年初凭借她的自传体混合媒体和摄影作品而声名鹊起。在那一年里，她在纽约罗切斯特的乔治·伊士曼故居(现在的乔治·伊士曼博物馆，或GEM)举办了个展，并参加了现代艺术博物馆(MoMA)的开创性展览“从摄影到雕塑”。2014年，该展览在纽约市的Hauser & Wirth重新展出，更名为1970年的《摄影对象》(the Photographic Object)，并与亚利桑那大学和加州大学出版社出版的同名出版物一起展出。荨麻已经展出了她的作品近50年，并被列入现代艺术博物馆的收藏;大都会艺术博物馆;加拿大国家美术馆;华盛顿的菲利普斯收藏馆;GEM国际摄影博物馆;以及图森亚利桑那大学创意摄影中心。她的新书《但丁进入地狱》(2016)已经售罄，并被包括耶鲁大学、杜克大学和西北大学在内的9所图书馆特别收藏。2016年，她的早期作品开始在全国各地的各种展览中出现，包括大都会博物馆、费城艺术博物馆和波特兰艺术博物馆。最近，从20世纪60年代末的单幅作品到她的梦境塔罗牌(1975年)和她的视觉自传《黑暗中的火烈鸟》(1979年)，内特尔斯的早期作品在博物馆和画廊中重新出现，这既不是偶然也不是异常，而是她在美国艺术史上重要性的证据。这幅作品是发自内心的、尖锐的、幽默的、多重价值的——它代表了20世纪60年代和70年代许多摄影师的实验方法，因为它对21世纪的眼睛来说是惊人的。特别是，许多当代艺术家在摄影中回归物质性和自传性，以及今天画家的混合媒体和摄影方法，证明了荨麻不仅领先于她的时代，而且坚定地位于摄影史上艺术家的遗产中(从画面派到维多利亚时代的拼贴画，从书籍制作到达达)。尽管今天的艺术家必须与数字革命抗争，要么拥抱它，要么反对它，但内特尔斯的分层方法的影响，尤其是在她的早期作品中，是不可低估的。2005年，我在伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)遇到了荨麻，当时她是一名即将入学的摄影专业学生，当时她在那里教授摄影和书籍艺术课程，现在是名誉教授。从2007年到2008年，我为她做园艺，以换取书籍和时间，我认为这是我成长为艺术家和存在的关键一年。去年8月，我在她位于厄巴纳的家中再次与她联系，讨论了她早期作品和《但丁进入地狱》最近的展览。科林·爱丁顿:我有一个学生最近在费城艺术博物馆(PMA)看到了你的作品。我认为这些早期作品被年轻一代看到是不可思议的。45年后看到它被展出，对你来说意味着什么?BEA net荨麻:鹦鹉花园的妹妹，这是在PMA展出的作品，是1970年夏天在北卡罗莱纳州阿什维尔附近的彭兰工艺学校制作的。那时我刚从研究生院毕业。我仍然记得那首曲子，因为它很难做。当我把Rockland Liquid Light感光乳剂涂在织物上时，它非常脆弱;它会像指纹一样被处理，但如果它自己折叠起来，乳剂就会涂抹并脱落。从头到尾都很精致。通常一个混合媒体的作品会从实验开始，然后我就会看到其中的潜力，或者它会打开我的思维。我试着不害怕，也不把自己太当回事，但我可能会着迷，并坚持到底。这是我幽默和严肃之间的微妙平衡，我认为我的作品反映了这一点。…
{"title":"In Dream and Soil: A Conversation with Bea Nettles","authors":"C. Edgington","doi":"10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.15","url":null,"abstract":"Bea Nettles rose to prominence at the beginning of 1970 with her autobiographical mixed-media and photographic work. During that year she had a solo show at the George Eastman House (now the George Eastman Museum, or GEM) in Rochester, New York, and was also included in the seminal exhibition Photography into Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 2014, the show was re-mounted at Hauser & Wirth in New York City as the retitled The Photographic Object, 1970 and was accompanied by a publication of the same name from the University of Arizona and the University of California Press. Nettles has been exhibiting her work for nearly fifty years and is included in the collections of MoMA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada; the Phillips Collection in Washington DC; the International Museum of Photography at the GEM; and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Her newest book, Dante Enters Hell (2016), has sold out and is in nine special collections libraries including those of Yale, Duke, and Northwestern universities. In 2016, her early work began to pop up around the country in various exhibitions including at the Met, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Portland Museum of Art. The recent reappearance of Nettles's early work--from the single pieces of the late 1960s to her Mountain Dream Tarot card deck (1975) and her visual autobiography Flamingo in the Dark (1979)--in museums and galleries is neither happenstance nor anomaly, but rather evidence of her importance in the history of American art. This work is visceral, poignant, humorous, and multivalent--and is as indicative of the experimental approach by many photographers of the 1960s and '70s as it is striking to twenty-first-century eyes. In particular, the return to materiality and the autobiographical in photography by many contemporary artists, as well as the mixed-media and photographic approach of painters today, prove Nettles was both ahead of her time and firmly situated within a legacy of artists (from Pictorialism to Victorian collage and book-making to Dada) in the history of photography. Although today artists must contend with the digital revolution, either embracing it or reacting against it, the impact of Nettles's layered approach, particularly in her early work, cannot be underestimated. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I met Nettles in 2005 as an incoming photography student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was teaching photography and book-arts classes and is now professor emerita. I gardened for her in exchange for books and time from 2007 to 2008, which I count as a pivotal year in my growth as an artist and being. In August of last year, I reconnected with Nettles at her home in Urbana for a conversation about the recent exhibitions of her early work and Dante Enters Hell. COLIN EDGINGTON: I had a student who saw your work recently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). I think it i","PeriodicalId":443446,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Technology Transfer and Society","volume":"114 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123064959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-03-01DOI: 10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.34
Janina Ciezadlo
{"title":"Review: The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, directed by Bartek Dziadosz, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Roth, and Tilda Swinton","authors":"Janina Ciezadlo","doi":"10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.34","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.34","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":443446,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Technology Transfer and Society","volume":"33 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120982349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-03-01DOI: 10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.31
Daniel J. Worden
{"title":"Review: Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein","authors":"Daniel J. Worden","doi":"10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.31","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":443446,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Technology Transfer and Society","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115484204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-03-01DOI: 10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.10
Nicholas Gamso
Two years ago, off the coast of the small Italian island of Lampedusa, 368 people drowned. Their boat, which was headed north from Libya, ran aground offshore, capsized, and sank. Among the drowned were migrants from Somalia, Ghana, Eritrea, and elsewhere, fleeing violence and poverty. One was a woman who, officials concluded, had given birth at the moment when the vessel turned onto its side, her infant child still attached by an umbilical cord when she was found. The child's short life was ended--her body, with hundreds of others, caught beneath the upturned hull--before it had even begun. This ghastly image appears in a recent essay by Frances Stonor Saunders, published in the London Review of Books, which discusses borders and their centrality to worldly experience.' The implication--"the longest journey is also the shortest journey"--holds out the notion of a staggering alternative: Death is the easiest, fastest flight from the turmoil of a life between checkpoints, borders, and camps, a life without papers or visas. Death is the only escape from the worldly entanglements of displacement, isolation, and exposure, for these increasingly characterize what it means to be a living person: as our infrastructures are integrated and globalized, they are evolved, also, to catalog our fingerprints, scan our irises, and map our DNA. They are both, in this way, objects of an intimidating statecraft and passages from turmoil. They are necessary and intractable, sources of hope and fearsome specters of power and violence. These concerns find an exemplary grounding in the current crisis. Nearly two million migrants, moving into Mediterranean port cities and large metropolises as a result of the five-year Syrian Civil War and an array of other conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, have given form to longstanding fears over the vulnerability of global systems. The effects may take the form of a specific alarm or a generalized atmosphere of paranoia and dread. This became evident well before the "Brexit" vote, during the mediated panic over the closing of the Chunnel, and thus the vulnerability not only of England's own borders but the logics--free trade, free movement--of the new Europe. A more dominant strain of paranoid aesthetics appears in the use of aerial drone photography to document the "surge" and "swell" and "tide" of refugees in places like Cyprus and Lesbos, and to circulate images of the victims as they are washed ashore, unloaded from pallets and shipping containers. Even in popular mediations that seek to iconize migrancy, such themes are central. Artists who seem political, or for whom politics is a kind of general attitude or style--Banksy, M.I.A.--employ in their treatments of the crisis the simple reduction of migrant bodies to surplus objects, taking them as part of a new landscape of precariousness and abjection. The people are conflated with infrastructure in a great equivalency of matter. The scale of the individual is obscured, th
两年前，在意大利小岛兰佩杜萨岛的海岸附近，有368人淹死。他们的船从利比亚向北行驶，在近海搁浅，倾覆并沉没。溺水者中有来自索马里、加纳、厄立特里亚和其他地方的移民，他们逃离暴力和贫困。官员们得出结论，其中一名遇难者是一名妇女，她在船只侧翻的那一刻生下了孩子，当她被发现时，她的婴儿仍被脐带绑着。孩子短暂的生命还没开始就结束了——她的身体和其他数百人的身体一起被夹在了翻腾的船体下面。弗朗西丝•斯通或•桑德斯(Frances Stonor Saunders)最近在《伦敦书评》(London Review of Books)上发表的一篇文章中出现了这一可怕的形象，文中讨论了边界及其在世界经验中的中心地位。“最长的旅程也是最短的旅程”这句话的含意是:死亡是一种最简单、最快捷的方式，可以摆脱在检查站、边境和营地之间的混乱生活，摆脱没有证件和签证的生活。死亡是逃离流离失所、孤立和暴露的世俗纠缠的唯一途径，因为这些越来越多地体现了作为一个活着的人的意义:随着我们的基础设施一体化和全球化，它们也在进化，以分类我们的指纹，扫描我们的虹膜，绘制我们的DNA。从这个意义上说，它们都是令人生畏的治国之术的对象，都是从动荡中走出来的。它们是必要和棘手的，是希望的源泉，也是权力和暴力的可怕幽灵。这些担忧在当前的危机中找到了典型的依据。由于长达五年的叙利亚内战以及非洲和中东的一系列其他冲突，近200万移民涌入地中海港口城市和大城市，这使人们对全球体系脆弱性的长期担忧成为现实。这些影响可能会以一种特定的警报或一种普遍的偏执和恐惧气氛的形式出现。早在英国“脱欧”公投之前，这一点就已经很明显了。当时，人们对英吉利海峡(the channel)关闭感到恐慌，因此，不仅英格兰自己的边界很脆弱，新欧洲的逻辑——自由贸易、自由流动——也很脆弱。一种更为主流的偏执美学思潮出现在无人机摄影中，它们记录了塞浦路斯和莱斯沃斯岛等地难民潮的“涌动”和“涌动”，并传播受害者被冲上岸、从托盘和集装箱中卸下来的照片。即使在试图将移民形象化的流行调解中，这些主题也是核心。那些似乎带有政治色彩，或者对他们来说，政治是一种普遍的态度或风格的艺术家——班克西(Banksy, M.I.A.)——在处理危机时，简单地把移民的身体简化为剩余的物品，把它们作为不稳定和落落的新景观的一部分。人与基础设施在很大程度上是等同的。个人的尺度被模糊了，经验的棱镜被否定了。问题不仅仅是身体的移动或边界的安全，而是它们的表现和记录。对于许多生活在北方大都市的人来说，这是一件不慌不忙的事情。从远处看电视和读新闻，会自然而然地产生一系列关于外星人、外来者、威胁、风险的假设，因此也会对自己产生一系列假设。无论这些评论是惊慌失措的、草率的评价，还是对落差的文体表现，它们都肯定了(按照赛义德语的表述)欧美观众对差异幽灵的态度和偏见——尤其是当它以无国籍人士，尤其是无国籍穆斯林的形式出现时。在我调查的例子中，西方媒体已经将自己的创新神圣化了(这些创新几乎总是战争和征服的技术)，并将活着的人群减少到一个可操纵的物体世界。…
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KOCHI, INDIA DECEMBER 12,2016-MARCH 29, 2017 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With exhibitions spanning twelve venues and showing work by over one hundred regional and international artists, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is deservedly recognized as "the largest platform for visual arts engagement in Southeast Asia." (1) Artist Sudarshan Shetty curated the Biennale (his first curatorial project) and has sensitively and adroitly selected and positioned a compelling array of contemporary work across a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, video art, sound art, and performance art. According to Shetty, the Biennale--subtitled "Forming in the Pupil of an Eye--"is an assembly and layering of multiple realities" that offers the possibility for connections between the spaces of "immediate experience" and "multiple other consciousnesses." (2) This approach seems appropriate for the first and only biennial held in India, a country long associated with spiritual and meditative practices intended to facilitate such bridging of reality with higher consciousness. Aspinwall House, a sprawling sea-front compound that was originally the headquarters of a nineteenth-century English trading company, is the venue for the majority of the works in the Biennale and the location where most visitors will begin their experience of the event. A number of the artists represented at Aspinwall House have created works that respond to the site's historical associations and its orientation toward the fishing and shipping harbors of Kochi. The placement of Camille Norment's haptic sound installation Prime (2016) offers a particularly compelling example of this synergy. This deceptively simple piece consists of five wooden benches placed in a large, empty warehouse space with a view onto a pier jutting into the harbor. As visitors enter the room they are enveloped by a low, almost rumbling, chorus of voices--not singing, per se, but chanting and moaning, creating a sound that ebbs and flows like the water outside. When one sits on a bench, the experience of the work is completed as the voices' vibrations are transmitted through one's body, engaging the viewer physically with the hypnotic tones. The work becomes meditative, the viewer at one with the sound, the water, and the sensation. Another work that engages the sea-front location of Aspinwall House and its historical association with trade routes through both placement and content is Pedro Gomez-Egana's Aphelion (2016). This mixed-media installation is also placed in a room facing the harbor; yet rather than offering an immediate view of the water, as viewers enter and take their seats an attendant draws the curtains across the windows and turns out the lights, plunging the room into complete blackness. Slowly, a circular image is projected that morphs into sun and moon and appears and disappears in lapping waves. The soundtrack for the work speaks, in a low, rhythmic voice, of ships and water and sea. The voice intones, s
{"title":"3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale","authors":"Sabrina Deturk","doi":"10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.2","url":null,"abstract":"KOCHI, INDIA DECEMBER 12,2016-MARCH 29, 2017 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With exhibitions spanning twelve venues and showing work by over one hundred regional and international artists, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is deservedly recognized as \"the largest platform for visual arts engagement in Southeast Asia.\" (1) Artist Sudarshan Shetty curated the Biennale (his first curatorial project) and has sensitively and adroitly selected and positioned a compelling array of contemporary work across a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, video art, sound art, and performance art. According to Shetty, the Biennale--subtitled \"Forming in the Pupil of an Eye--\"is an assembly and layering of multiple realities\" that offers the possibility for connections between the spaces of \"immediate experience\" and \"multiple other consciousnesses.\" (2) This approach seems appropriate for the first and only biennial held in India, a country long associated with spiritual and meditative practices intended to facilitate such bridging of reality with higher consciousness. Aspinwall House, a sprawling sea-front compound that was originally the headquarters of a nineteenth-century English trading company, is the venue for the majority of the works in the Biennale and the location where most visitors will begin their experience of the event. A number of the artists represented at Aspinwall House have created works that respond to the site's historical associations and its orientation toward the fishing and shipping harbors of Kochi. The placement of Camille Norment's haptic sound installation Prime (2016) offers a particularly compelling example of this synergy. This deceptively simple piece consists of five wooden benches placed in a large, empty warehouse space with a view onto a pier jutting into the harbor. As visitors enter the room they are enveloped by a low, almost rumbling, chorus of voices--not singing, per se, but chanting and moaning, creating a sound that ebbs and flows like the water outside. When one sits on a bench, the experience of the work is completed as the voices' vibrations are transmitted through one's body, engaging the viewer physically with the hypnotic tones. The work becomes meditative, the viewer at one with the sound, the water, and the sensation. Another work that engages the sea-front location of Aspinwall House and its historical association with trade routes through both placement and content is Pedro Gomez-Egana's Aphelion (2016). This mixed-media installation is also placed in a room facing the harbor; yet rather than offering an immediate view of the water, as viewers enter and take their seats an attendant draws the curtains across the windows and turns out the lights, plunging the room into complete blackness. Slowly, a circular image is projected that morphs into sun and moon and appears and disappears in lapping waves. The soundtrack for the work speaks, in a low, rhythmic voice, of ships and water and sea. The voice intones, s","PeriodicalId":443446,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Technology Transfer and Society","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128229201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-03-01DOI: 10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.24
C. Swindell
What pervades Basim Magdy's artistic practice and his first United States survey exhibition on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) is an exploration of time, space, and the universe that addresses humanity's collective failures and arguably imprudent aspirations. Magdy engages each of these broad themes through a nuanced use of language and a carefully constructed approach to layering and manipulating materials. As a result, his works allow for seemingly infinite possibilities of interpretation, much like the conceptions of utopia and science fiction that piqued his interest as a child. Magdy's use of bright colors and pop art sensibility are realized through his representation of images of mass media popular culture including cars, structures, spaceships, and other technologies. These images, when paired with their pessimistic titles, demonstrate one of the ways in which Magdy critiques humanity's simultaneous obsession with progress and avoidance in resolving or making sense of its own history. Titles such as Time Laughs Back at You Like a Sunken Ship and Every Decade Memory Poses as a Container Heavier than its Carrier exemplify Magdy's poetic and humorous approach to complicating narratives for viewers. Basim Magdy: The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings was curated by MCA Manilow Senior Curator Omar Kholeif. The exhibition features Magdy's work in several media, including paper with gouache, acrylic, spray paint, and collage, as well as photographs, installations, videos, and slides captured from Kodak carousel projectors. Unlike a traditional chronological survey, this exhibition features a significant display of twenty-three of Magdy's works on paper set salon-style in the center of a small portion of a bright pink wall, the titles of which can be read from a corresponding wall label that is placed at the lower left. Next to this arrangement is an installation entitled The Future of Your Head (2008), comprised of a standing two-way mirror sign with an illuminated text displayed in capital letters that reads: YOUR HEAD IS A SPARE PART IN OUR FACTORY OF PERFECTION. At the center of this first central gallery space is a low pedestal with copies of two different posters accumulated in piles; a small written text on the floor prompts viewers to leave the exhibition with one poster of their choice. While at first glance the two poster images appear nearly identical, the text is what separates the work and provides a choice for the participant. In each poster a man stands on top of a car, his arm outstretched holding a pole, at the top of which appears a mannequin hand continuing the diagonal extension of the body. Both posters read "KNOWING HE COULD DIE THE NEXT DAY, A MAN DESPERATELY TRIES TO TICKLE HEAVEN" but one adds "BUT HEAVEN DOESN'T LAUGH. INSTEAD, FROGS START FALLING FROM THE SKY." This work, much like the exhibition as a whole, encourages viewers to look carefully and consider Magdy's constructed ficti
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Pub Date : 2017-03-01DOI: 10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.20
T. Walsh
{"title":"The Pregnant Avatar: Seeing Oneself in C-Sections, Surrogates, and Sonograms","authors":"T. Walsh","doi":"10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/AFT.2017.44.5.20","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":443446,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Technology Transfer and Society","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130446187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2016-11-01DOI: 10.1525/aft.2016.44.3.16
Bernard Roddy
In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006) Jacques Derrida remarks on texts by Rene Descartes concerning the animal. His attention is drawn to the look the animal returns. Standing naked before his cat, the philosopher sees it looking back at him. If now we introduce this mutual look into an account of screen work by Portland-based film and video artist Vanessa Renwick, the opportunity arises to think in terms of animality and women. I could not do her work justice if I were to attempt a survey of Renwick's practice, which I have been aware of for over ten years. Her name was familiar to me long before 1 saw anything she had made. Nor would it seem to me an improvement if I were to exclude from my remarks commentary on the work of other artists. What follows, then, is an attempt to substantiate a thinking about animality by means of a single work by Renwick. I try to do this in a way that also recognizes the achievements of two others working with the moving image: Benjamin Pearson and Shehrezad Maher. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A comparison of Renwick's 9 is a Secret (2002) with Pearson's Former Models (2013) will raise the question of our relation to death. In 9 is a Secret, Renwick describes the experience of being an assistant in a friend's suicide. Before removing the plastic from the head of his dead body, she hears herself saying, and we hear her repeat aloud, "You better be dead, motherfucker." It is as if we share Renwick's responsibility for his death, even bear the risks she took to assist hint. To be a survivor here is not to survive death oneself. Such a suicide commands a certain respect from the living, we who have not died, for we feel somehow humiliated by the departed, insofar as we agree to carry on in a world so decisively rejected by the friend. Renwick created a voiceover using a children's nursery rhyme, each line associated with a number less than nine. The lines of the rhyme number and characterize crows. Each line has the kind of significance for adults that such rhymes often do. Renwick shows us the young man who wants to die in beautiful black-and-white, high-contrast still images. They could be photographs, but there is often quiet movement. Like photocopies after several generations, the fragments consist of fixed poses cut from a strip of movement, a solitary black crow against a white ground. Carefully framed shots of a handsome young man, also in black-and-white, present a nude in parts, sculpted in the gray stone of what photographers would call, by comparison, images of greater latitude. Now immobile only because held in place, the fragments of the deceased before his death show signs of calculated movement. A viewer might be reminded of Chris Marker's La jetee (1962), in which subterranean victims of time-travel experiments are shown shell-shocked and fixed forever in black-and-white stills. The relationship between predator and victim in the animal world could be said to be a preoccupation in Renwick's screen work.
{"title":"Nude Animal: Vanessa Renwick and the Wild","authors":"Bernard Roddy","doi":"10.1525/aft.2016.44.3.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2016.44.3.16","url":null,"abstract":"In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006) Jacques Derrida remarks on texts by Rene Descartes concerning the animal. His attention is drawn to the look the animal returns. Standing naked before his cat, the philosopher sees it looking back at him. If now we introduce this mutual look into an account of screen work by Portland-based film and video artist Vanessa Renwick, the opportunity arises to think in terms of animality and women. I could not do her work justice if I were to attempt a survey of Renwick's practice, which I have been aware of for over ten years. Her name was familiar to me long before 1 saw anything she had made. Nor would it seem to me an improvement if I were to exclude from my remarks commentary on the work of other artists. What follows, then, is an attempt to substantiate a thinking about animality by means of a single work by Renwick. I try to do this in a way that also recognizes the achievements of two others working with the moving image: Benjamin Pearson and Shehrezad Maher. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A comparison of Renwick's 9 is a Secret (2002) with Pearson's Former Models (2013) will raise the question of our relation to death. In 9 is a Secret, Renwick describes the experience of being an assistant in a friend's suicide. Before removing the plastic from the head of his dead body, she hears herself saying, and we hear her repeat aloud, \"You better be dead, motherfucker.\" It is as if we share Renwick's responsibility for his death, even bear the risks she took to assist hint. To be a survivor here is not to survive death oneself. Such a suicide commands a certain respect from the living, we who have not died, for we feel somehow humiliated by the departed, insofar as we agree to carry on in a world so decisively rejected by the friend. Renwick created a voiceover using a children's nursery rhyme, each line associated with a number less than nine. The lines of the rhyme number and characterize crows. Each line has the kind of significance for adults that such rhymes often do. Renwick shows us the young man who wants to die in beautiful black-and-white, high-contrast still images. They could be photographs, but there is often quiet movement. Like photocopies after several generations, the fragments consist of fixed poses cut from a strip of movement, a solitary black crow against a white ground. Carefully framed shots of a handsome young man, also in black-and-white, present a nude in parts, sculpted in the gray stone of what photographers would call, by comparison, images of greater latitude. Now immobile only because held in place, the fragments of the deceased before his death show signs of calculated movement. A viewer might be reminded of Chris Marker's La jetee (1962), in which subterranean victims of time-travel experiments are shown shell-shocked and fixed forever in black-and-white stills. The relationship between predator and victim in the animal world could be said to be a preoccupation in Renwick's screen work. ","PeriodicalId":443446,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Technology Transfer and Society","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133838370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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