Camera Austria International
153 | 2021
- SABRINA RAHMAN
Invoking Voids in the Archive - BELINDA KAZEEM-KAMINSKI
- SABINE WEIER
On the Origins of Hate Speech - CHRISTINE MEISNER
- AZIZA HARMEL
“Not a Woman, Not a Plant, Not a Picture, Not a Drawing, Not a Body, Not a Landscape, Not a Photograph, Not a Sculpture, Not Stillness and Not Movement.”—A Reading of Rahima Gambo’s Work - RAHIMA GAMBO
- ANTHONY DOWNEY
Egypt’s 2011 Internet Shutdown: Digital Dissent and the Future of Public Memory—Heba Y. Amin, Abdelkarim Mardini, and Adel Iskandar in Conversation - HEBA Y. AMIN
- AÏCHA DIALLO
A Living Archive of Commoning - CHRISTIAN NYAMPETA
Preface
The artistic positions presented in this issue take very different approaches to dealing with opportunities for thematizing and reactualizing past experiences that also involve colonial or anti-Semitic violence, as well as to ultimately making them relevant to a contemporary context.
Read more →Camera Austria International 153 | 2021
Preface
The artistic positions presented in this issue take very different approaches to dealing with opportunities for thematizing and reactualizing past experiences that also involve colonial or anti-Semitic violence, as well as to ultimately making them relevant to a contemporary context.
In her films, photographs, and assemblages, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński explores the exposition and simultaneous invisibility of Black individuals in Austria. She traces suppressed histories that are kept hidden not only here, but in countless archives of the Western world: “In revealing the voids of the Eurocentric archive, the viewer enters an alternative world of possibilities, one in which racialized bodies of the past are conjured to make sense of the present,” as Sabrina Rahman writes about the artist’s work.
Since 2017 Christine Meisner has been investigating the archive of the anti-Semitic weekly Der Stürmer (The Stormer, 1923–45) in her extensive research project Unschärfe im Möglichen (Unsharpness in a Possible). She meticulously records and contextualizes the pictures sent to the newspaper’s editorial office by enthusiastic readers and raises the question of their complicity in the crime of the Holocaust. Sabine Weier, in her essay, points to the parallels between Der Stürmer and present-day groups that propagate anti-Semitism and hate on the Internet: “The senders of material were formulaically fueling a radical anti-Semitism extending centuries into the past, which since the mid-nineteenth century had been spreading rampantly in ever more threatening forms. Back then, the same myths were perpetuated as are being spread online today by QAnon members with their anti-Semitic world conspiracy narrative.”
Rahima Gambo is likewise concerned with vestiges of the past, which she assimilates associatively and as psychogeographic notes in her series A Walk (2018–ongoing). “The artistic practice of walking came to her while researching the rise of suicide-bombing incidents in North-East Nigeria. . . . Unsure how to face such horror, she followed a path of information that led beneath the surface of what her eyes could perceive,” writes Aziza Harmel. In Tatsuniya (2017–ongoing), in turn, Gambo encounters the landscape, as well as the terror inscribed in the land since the attacks by the Islamic terrorist militia Boko Haram in 2013, in a poetic project involving students from the graduating class of a girls’ school in Maiduguri.
The focus of the contribution by Heba Y. Amin is Project Speak2Tweet, initiated in 2011, which she now reexplores ten years after the Egyptian government shut down the Internet in response to the escalating political protests. Together with Anthony Downey, Abdelkarim Mardini (a co-founder of the communication platform Speak2Tweet, established spontaneously back then), and the media scientist Adel Iskandar, the artist talks about the revolutionary promise held by social media platforms around the year 2010. With an eye to the pandemic, they further discuss increasing forms of digital surveillance and censorship, as well as the impact of the evolution of communication technologies on freedom of expression and democracy.
Christian Nyampeta explores in his work the possibilities of living together in a world characterized by differences. In an interview with Aïcha Diallo, the artist discusses his project École du soir (Evening School), which he has carried out globally since 2009 in different places and in the most diverse contexts. He talks about the importance of collaborative engagement with the experiences of the African diaspora, about the accessibility of contemporary art, the relevance of practices of (new) restoration, and the possibilities of dealing with the legacy of colonial archives in ways that are poetic but not always direct.
Christina Töpfer and the Camera Austria Team
March 2021
Cover: Rahima Gambo, Amina and Zainab playing a clapping game, from the series: Tatsuniya I, 2017. Archival inkjet print, 68.5 × 101.5 cm.
Entries
Forum
Presented by the editors:
Elodie Grethen
Maik Gräf
Mihai Șovăială
Sethembiso Zulu
Corinne Futterlieb
Deanna Pizzitelli
Exhibitions
Sky Hopinka: Centers of Somewhere
CCS Bard Galleries, Annandale-on-Hudson, 17. 10. 2020 – 14. 2. 2021
HARLEY WONG
New Views on Same-Olds
Ausstellungsraum der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, 23. 10. 2020 – 13. 3. 2021
MARGIT NEUHOLD
Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive
K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 26. 9. 2020 – 10. 1. 2021
Centre Pompidou, Paris, 3. 2. – 7. 6. 2021
MIRA ANNELI NASS
Eva & Franco Mattes: Dear Imaginary Audience
Fotomuseum Winterthur, 23. 1. – 24. 5. 2021
JÖRG SCHELLER
1 Million Rosen für Angela Davis
Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden, 10. 10. 2020 – 30. 5. 2021
CHRISTIN MÜLLER
Die Sonne um Mitternacht schauen: Gegenwartskunst aus dem Lenbachhaus und der KiCo Stiftung
Lenbachhaus, München, 29. 9. 2020 – 1. 8. 2021
PAUL MELLENTHIN
Želimir Žilnik: Shadow Citizens
kunsthalle wien, Vienna, 24. 10. 2020 – 18. 4. 2021
MARINA GRŽINIĆ und MIKA MARUYAMA
Continent – In Search of Europe
Akademie der bildenden Künste, Berlin, 2. 10. 2020 – 10. 1. 2021
Kunsthalle Erfurt, 24. 10. 2021 – 23. 1. 2022
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Frankfurt am Main, 10. 2. 2022 – May 2022
MITCH SPEED
Fina Miralles: I Am All the Selves that I Have Been
MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 5. 11. 2020 – 5. 4. 2021
NATASHA CHRISTIA
Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop
Whitney Museum, New York, 21. 11. 2020 – 28. 3. 2021
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 1. 2. – 18. 10. 2020
NICOLAS LINNERT
Books
Jennifer Bajorek, Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa
Duke University Press, Durham and London 2020
DANIELA YVONNE BAUMANN
»Die Fotos sind wir« – Für eine Entsouveränisierung unseres Blicks. Eine zweibändige Publikation von Linda Hentschel zu fotografischen Gewaltbildern
Linda Hentschel: Schauen und Strafen, Band 1. Nach 9/11; Band 2. Gegen Lynchen
Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2020 und 2021
KATHARINA SYKORA
Face to Face: Seiichi Furuya & Christine Gössler
Chose Commune, Marseille 2020
EMILIE LAURIOLA
Eine Kritik zur Buchreihe der Digitalen Bildkulturen und ein kleines Plädoyer für eine Archäologie der Fotografie
Annekathrin Kohout und Wolfgang Ullrich (Hg.): Digitale Bildkulturen
Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin seit 2019
MAREN LÜBBKE-TIDOW
Daniel Rubinstein: Fotografie nach der Philosophie
Merve Verlag, Leipzig 2020
PETER KUNITZKY
Christiane Kues, Auto PhD – Bodies, Parts and Paint
Self-published, Berlin 2020
ANNA BARFUSS
Gerhard Paul, Bilder einer Diktatur. Zur Visual History des »Dritten Reiches«
Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2020
Christina Irrgang, Hitlers Fotograf. Heinrich Hoffmann und die nationalsozialistische Bildpolitik
Hoffmann and National-Socialist Image Politics] Transcript, Bielefeld 2020
FRIEDRICH TIETJEN
Talking Books
Erik van der Weijde in Conversation with . . . Ruth van Beek
Ruth van Beek: Eldorado
Van Zoetendaal, Amsterdam 2020
Ruth van Beek: Dancing Figures (The Manuals #2)
Centerfold Editions, Amsterdam 2014
Ruth van Beek: How to Do the Flowers
Art Paper Editions, Ghent; Dashwood Books, New York 2018
Imprint
Publisher: Reinhard Braun
Owner: Verein CAMERA AUSTRIA. Labor für Fotografie und Theorie.
Lendkai 1, 8020 Graz, Austria
Editor-in-Chief: Christina Töpfer.
Editor: Margit Neuhold.
Translations: Dawn Michelle d’Atri, Peter Kunitzky, Wilfried Prantner, Clemens Ruthner, Sabine Weier.
English Proofreading: Dawn Michelle d’Atri.
Acknowledgments: Akinbode Akinbiyi, Heba Y. Amin, Daniela Baumann, Tina Campt, Aïsha Diallo, Anthony Downey, Corinne Futterlieb, Rahima Gambo, Maik Gräf, Elodie Grethen, Aziza Harmel, Adel Iskandar, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Peter Kunitzky, Abdelkarim Mardini, Christine Meisner, Christin Müller, Christian Nyampeta, Eva Maria Ocherbauer, Deanna Pizzitelli, Sabrina Rahman, Anja Remmert, Sigrun Salmanian, Philip Schütz, Nina Schwarzenberger, Nicole Six & Paul Petritsch, Mihai Șovăială, Claudia Weber, Sabine Weier, Mareike Wenzlau, Sethembiso Zulu.
Copyright © 2021
No parts of this magazine may be reproduced without publisher’s permission.
Camera Austria International does not assume any responsibility for submitted texts and original materials.
ISBN 978-3-902911-60-5
ISSN 1015 1915
GTIN 4 19 23106 1600 5 00153