132 | 2015

SIMON BAIER

Anne Collier: Albus / Ater

How exactly does this exclusion of historicity evolve? On the one hand, the photographs are geared towards making time itself stand still in the neutral space of the studio, where the self, the body, and the contemporary world are only allowed to appear as distanced and fragmented. Yet much of what appears there seems to speak of a certain past in particular: as demonstrated above, this involves obsolete media or obsolete forms of representation. The work “Two Photo Albums” (2015) is a prime example: it shows two photo albums from the outside, with the covers visible. These covers show lovers in an idyllic landscaped garden sharing intimacy as a couple. Yet in the case on the left, this intimacy is somehow disrupted in a strange way since the man is reading a book, while the woman nestles up against him. As commercial photography, the objects here go beyond conveying a certain feel—idyllic intimacy—that may either speak to us or else repel us as tasteless. Moreover, they reference their origins, a certain past, which through Collier’s presentation—very similar to the way in which commercial photography approaches the subject itself—is only present as a vague feeling. As documentation of a historical episteme of photography, its analytical value is close to zero. Collier’s title of the photograph does not add any information about when exactly these photo albums were made, or about which cultural context they arose from. Not only what is shown by these photographs is part of an industry producing generic affects—or, to state it concisely, sentimental material. In a certain sense,
Collier herself participates in this industry. She shows all of this as only a general past, as one that eludes any ascertainable historicity. It is simply removed from our present, and for this reason alone the taste of memories clings to it, memories that are not necessarily our own or aligned to certain content.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 132/2015, pp. 5–16.

MATTHIAS REICHELT

On the Scent of Upheaval: The Pictorial Narratives of Helmut and Johanna Kandl

In his novel Extinction, Thomas Bernhard has his narrator Franz-Josef Murau engage in a tirade about photography that culminates in an utterly exorbitant statement that ignores all real catastrophes: “Photography is the greatest disaster of the twentieth century.”¹ Interestingly, Murau then focuses on photographs of his family, using them as a reservoir for his subjective memory. And even if the subjectivity of photography, along with its inability to serve as compelling and reliable proof of reality, is sufficiently well known, the wealth of digital images has grown exponentially. Against this backdrop, the power of photography remains unabated and indeed shapes collective imagery and even sociopolitical positions through media-based dissemination.
Helmut and Johanna Kandl build on precisely this power of photography with an aim to challenge and upset existing pictures, to disrupt them using irony, or to compose their own unique narratives. From the very outset of their collaboration in the year 1997, many projects have been based on the artist duo’s travels together with a focus on shifts in reality within society since the political upheaval of 1989. The collapse of actually existing socialism and the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc gave rise to an unfamiliar sense of freedom, yet it also equally signified freedom from security in the social realm. The forceful conversion of an ailing economic system and the implantation of a neo-liberal capitalist system led to high unemployment, poverty, and to new ethnic tensions. Catching the eye of the Kandls are such changes in the boundaries of formerly antagonistic systems. The artist duo captures their subjective impressions through photography, video, and text: scenes rendering cities, villages, and streets, pictures of markets, emergence of shadow economies, urban decline, impoverishment of the population, memories of past history in the form of monuments, the failure of propagated utopias, and also the non-materialisation of the promised thriving landscapes. The topics and motifs presented here as catchphrases and examples play an important role in the Kandls’ “pictorial narratives”.

¹ Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (New York: Vintage International, 2011), p. 15.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 132/2015, pp. 17–28.

GUY MANNES-ABBOTT

Ala Younis: Figuring Lesser Baghdadis (One to Seven)

One. Mickey Mouse is not one of the bronze figures that grace
Jewad Selim’s “Nusub al-Hurriya” (“Liberty Monument”, 1961) in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square. However, the twentieth century’s favourite anthropomorphic mouse is one of seven miniature figures that Ala Younis gathered in her installation “Plan for Greater Baghdad” (2015). Four of the seven—Selim, Rifat Chadirji, Abdel Karim Kassem, and Saddam Hussein—are bound up with the monument.
“Plan for Greater Baghdad” was the title that Frank Lloyd Wright gave his reconceptualisation of the city as a Persianate fantasia in June 1957. He is not among the figures clustered around the model of a curiously formed structure here. Also absent are those that Wright conceived monuments to: Harun al-Rashid and Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp. The first was a mistaken identification with Baghdad’s actual founder, al Mansur, while the second refers to a translator’s addition to One Thousand and One Nights. Figured in the installation, if not Selim’s frieze, is the designer of the curiosity modelled: Le Corbusier.
The success of Mickey Mouse founded Walt Disney’s empire in 1928. In archive footage from Iraq TV, a masked Mickey figure is shown greeting a government official during celebrations inside Le Corbusier’s Baghdad Gymnasium: the building modelled here. It is 1990 and the official is a loyal agent of the traditionally costumed person looming above them: Saddam. Mickey is one of several Disney figures dancing to patriotic songs on that New Year’s Eve, an interlude between grinding war with Iran and Saddam’s raid on Kuwait.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 132/2015, pp. 29–40.

CECILIA FAJARDO-HILL

Teresa Burga: Open Work

Since the 1960s Teresa Burga has questioned traditional ideas about art, as well as the role and place that women occupy in society. Her idiosyncratic and critical position in relation to gender and art make Burga a key figure in the shaping of the critical and conceptual nature of contemporary art. In the world, particularly outside the European and North American mainstream, we know that hundreds of artists have, despite their invisibility in art-historical books, surveys, and key museum exhibitions, created some of the most radical and original art in the twentieth century—works that we are only learning about now. Burga is one of these artists, working within and outside the art world from Peru.
Teresa Burga’s statement that making art does not depend on the maker’s intentionality of actually making art can be understood as a refusal to conform to the idea that to be an artist is to function within a set of academic rules. Her concept of the “non-work” also went against the mandate of producing aesthetic objects with a market value determined through “subjectivity” and talent for producing beautiful things.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 132/2015, pp. 41–52.

CINENOVA FEMINIST FILM AND VIDEO DISTRIBUTOR

MADELEINE BERNSTORFF, SANDRA SCHÄFER: Luminous Grain, Flickering Lines, and Piles of Paper

London, 1986. Ruth Novaczek’s first film “Tea Leaf” was produced, and the Greater London Council—which was committed to generously supporting grassroots organisations and their diversity politics, including the women’s film distribution networks Circles and Cinema of Women (whence Cinenova was to later emerge)—was dissolved by the conservative government. Both feminist networks now fell under the jurisdiction of the British Film Institute, which in turn, due to severe budget cuts in the early 1990s, suggested that the groups merge and draft a business plan.

Since the mid-1980s, in the film department at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, film-makers like Sandra Lahire, Ruth Novaczek, and Isaac Julien had been countering the classic, puristic avant-garde of white men with their own vehement political statements and brilliant films. In 1983, the Sankofa Film and Video Collective was founded, and their film “Territories” was created in 1984/85, a polyphonic, political exploration of black British culture inspired by the Notting Hill Carnival. Then, in 1987, the programme “Black Women and Visibility”, organised by Circles, toured throughout England.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 132/2015, pp. 67–68