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EXHIBITION: THE IMAGE IN QUESTION. WAR – MEDIA – ART
curated by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki
Peggy Ahwesh, Kota Ezawa, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, William E. Jones,
Lamia Joreige, Allan Sekula, Wael Shawky, and Fazal Sheikh
October 21—December 23, 2010
panel discussion followed by the opening celebration
Thursday, October 21, 6 pm
Lecture by Lamia Joreige
Friday, October 22, 5 pm
Piper Auditorium, Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy Street
sponsored by the Aga Khan Program at the GSD and Club Medina
Peggy Ahwesh, She Puppet, 2001, video 15:20 min.
The airplanes, submarines and tanks of World War I could not be adequately drawn in ink, painted in oil or cast in bronze. The new weapons demanded new techniques to depict them: the verisimilitude of photography or the dynamics of film.
The weapons of our post-industrial age are computerized weapons and demand computer-generated images for rendition. Computer animation is not only an appropriate form of depiction, it is in itself part of the weapon system. Computer animation prepares the soldier for his deployment in the field. Computer animation is also used to cure returning soldiers traumatized by their experience of war: part of their therapy is the reenactment of key events in the field by means of computer animation.
Battles and attacks are initially simulated on the computer when strategy is discussed; operations that have been completed are archived in the program’s memory and become part of the simulation.
Our exhibition is a collection of art works dealing with the question: how can the wars of the present and the experience of war be adequately represented?
Can the military image be re-appropriated or how can it be countered?
What are different types of images capable of? – The Image in Question.
— Antje Ehmann & Harun Farocki
Thanks to the Otolith-Group for the title The Image in Question.
This exhibition is co-sponsored by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and the Goethe Institut Boston, and is made possible with support from the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Harun Farocki, Immersion, 2009
Artist Bios
PEGGY AWESH
Born in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1954, Ahwesh received her BFA from Antioch College. Ahwesh makes experimental films and videos that explore gender and cultural identities, themes of ritual, sexual exploration, and death utilizing a wide variety of tools and methods including Super-8 and 16mm film, narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, found footage, digital animation, and Pixelvision video. Retrospectives of her films have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Girls Beware!, 1997); Anthology Film Archives, New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University; Wexner Center for the Arts; and the Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York among others. Her films have screened in several Whitney Biennials, the New York Film Festival, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and festivals in Berlin, London, Cairo, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Creteil, France, among others. Certain Women (co-directed with Bobby Abate) was an official selection at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the opening night film at the New York Underground Film Festival in 2004. Martina’s Playhouse, The Deadman (co-directed with Keith Sanborn), Strange Weather, and Nocturne are in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Ahwesh has received Jerome and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, an Alpert Award in the Arts, and awards from the New York State Council on the Arts and Art Matters. She teaches in the Film & Electronic Arts Program at Bard College, and lives in New York.
KOTA EZAWA
Ezawa was born 1969 in Cologne, Germany, received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and his MFA from Stanford University. Ezawa re-presents iconic moments from the media, popular culture, and the history of photography in animated videos, slide projections, lightboxes, and prints. Ezawa meticulously recreates animated sequences using basic digital drawing and animation software; his source material includes the Zapruder 8mm film of the Kennedy assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, and clips from the films Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? and D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. His recent solo shows include Medley, Wexner Center for the Arts, 2009; Multiplex, Murray Guy, New York, 2008; Lennon Sontag Beuys, St. Louis Art Museum, 2008, and Matedero, Madrid, Spain, 2009. Group exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Berkeley Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the 5th Seoul International Biennale of Media Art and the 2004 Shanghai Biennale. His recent publications include Odessa Staircase Redux, (ECU Press/JRP Ringier, 2010), and The History of Photography Remix, (Nazraeli Press, 2006). He received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2003. Ezawa lives and works in San Francisco.
HARUN FAROCKI (see curator bios below)
JEAN-LUC GODARD
Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930 and studied at the Sorbonne. It was there that he met François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer with whom he would go on to form a new movement in French cinema in the 1960s, the New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague). He came to prominence as a critic, writing articles for the influential Cahiers du cinema, in which he attacked traditionalists and praised innovative filmmakers. As the lynchpin of French New Wave, Godard was arguably the most influential filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.
WILLIAM E. JONES
Jones is an artist and filmmaker who grew up in Ohio and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He has made two feature-length experimental films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997); several short videos, including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998); the feature length documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004); and many video installations. His work has been shown at the Cinémathèque Française and Musée du Louvre, Paris; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Kunsthalle Wien and Vienna International Film Festival; Sundance Film Festival; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. His films and videos were the subject of a retrospective at Tate Modern, London, in 2005, and at Anthology Film Archives, New York, in 2010. He was included in the 1993 and 2008 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and his work was on view in the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Jones has published the following books: Is It Really So Strange? (David Kordansky Gallery, 2006), Tearoom (2008), and Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (General Books LLC, 2008), Heliogabalus (2nd Cannons Publications, 2009) and "Killed": Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (PPP Editions, 2010). He is represented by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.
LAMIA JOREIGE
Born in 1972 in Beirut, Lebanon, Joreige received her BFA in painting and film from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. She writes, directs and produces works ranging from short videos to multimedia installations and documentaries, using archival documents and fictitious elements to reflect on the relationship between individual stories and collective histories, highlighting the gaps in history and memory and exploring the impossibility of accessing a complete narrative. Joreige’s practice encourages active participation from the viewer, adding another level to the notion of subjective histories. She has had solo exhibitions at the Galerie Tanit, Munich, 2009 & Espace Kettaneh Kunigk, Beirut, 2007; the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum 2006 & Townhouse Gallery, Egypt, 2005; Nicéphore Niépce Museum, 2003 & Galerie Nikki Diana Marquardt, France, 2000; and Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Beirut, from 1999 to 2004. She has screened her work at numerous film festivals and venues including the Images Festival, Toronto; Harvard University; Columbia University; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; La Cinémathèque française, Paris; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Festival International du Cinéma Méditerranéen de Montpellier; and La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona. Group exhibitions include The Storyteller, Parsons The New School, New York; 2009 Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan; Sharjah Biennial 09, UAE; Zones of Conflicts, Pratt Manhattan Galerie, New York; Archive Fever, International Center of photography, New York; The 4th Goteborg Biennial; 52 Venice Biennal (in Foreword, the Lebanese Pavilion); the 2nd Seville Biennale, Spain; Rumor as Media, Akbank Sanat, Istanbul; Coding Decoding, Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, Denmark; Out of Beirut, Modern Art Oxford, UK; Insa Art Space, Seoul, Korea; Present/Absence, Galerie Tanit, Munich; Laughter at the London International Festival of Theater; Possible Narratives in VideoBrasil, Sao Paulo; and DisOrientation, House of World Cultures, Berlin. Her publications include Time and the Other (Alarm Editions, Beirut, 2004) and Ici et peut-être ailleurs (H.K.W., Berlin, 2003). Joreige is a co-founder and co-director of Beirut Art Center, a unique non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art in Lebanon. She lives and works in Beirut.
ALLAN SEKULA
Born in 1951, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Sekula is a renowned photographer, theorist, historian of photography and writer. His work is concerned with the consequences of the economic changes arising from globalization and questions the function of documentary photography in the media, in art and in society. Sekula has a unique, intelligent, and formally rigorous perspective toward the tradition of social or critical realism, a photographic lineage that stretches back to Lewis Hine. Often depicting labor within the workplace, he has developed a visual language, which describes people both in their individuality and in a more human condition. Recent solo exhibitions include Ship of Fools at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in Antwerp, Belgium, 2010; This Ain’t China, e-flux, New York, 2010; Polonia and Other Fables, Ludwig Museum in Budapest in 2010; Rennaissance Society, 2009; and The Way Things Are, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, 2008. Selected group exhibitions include the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Taipei Biennial, and the 6th Seoul International Biennale of Media Art in 2010; documentas 11 and 12; the Istanbul Biennial, 2007; the Busan Biennale, 2006; and Whitney Biennial in 1993; as well as exhibitions at the Museum of Design in Zurich; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Barbican Centre; Hirshhorn Museum; BildMuseet, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Sekula lives and works in Los Angeles.
WAEL SHAWKY
Shawky lives and works in Alexandria. Shawky completed his BFA at the University of Alexandria in 1994, followed by an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. He has received many awards for his work, including an International Commissioning Grant; a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2005; the International Award of the Islamic World Arts Initiative, Arts International in 2004; an American Center Foundation Grant in 2004; and an Honorary Award, Rita Longa International Symposium, Bayamo, Cuba, 2001. In 1996 he was awarded the Grand Nile Prize in the 6th Cairo Biennial and in 2009 the Grand Prize for the 25th Alexandria Biennale. Shawky has participated in many workshops and projects in Egypt, Lebanon, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Belgium, Germany, the UK, Turkey, Thailand, Cuba and the USA. He recently took part in a residency programs in GCC, Gyeonggi, Korea in 2009, Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2008, Codra, Thessalonica, 2006 and in Istanbul in 2005 (based at Platform Garanti of Contemporary Art). His solo exhibitions include Clean History, 2009 and Al Aqsa Park, 2008 both at the Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Larvae Channel 2, Project Gentili, Berlin, 2009; Telematch Sadat, Telematch Market, Al Aqsa Park, at KVS, Brussels, 2007; The Forty Days Road, Wet Culture – Dry Culture, Galeria Sztuki Wspolczesnej, Krakow, 2007; The Green Land Circus, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, 2005; Losing identity, Ludwigsburg Kunstverein, Ludwigsburg, Germany, 2005; Sidi El Asphalt's Moulid, 2001, and Asphalt Quarter (representation), 2003, at Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo. His group exhibitions include In and out of context, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2010; Mart Museum Collection, Rovereto, 2010; 5th Forum Beirut, 2010; Medium Religion, The Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, 2010; Translation, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2009; Rites of Passage, Schunck-Glaspaleis, Heerlen, 2009; 3rd Riwaq Biennale, Ramallah, 2009; 3rd Marrakech Biennale, 2009; Disorientation II, Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, 2009; The Jerusalem Show, Al-ma´mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem, 2009; 7th Santa Fe Biennale, 2008; SCENES DU SUD II, Musée d'art contemporain de Nîmes, 2008; Medium Religion, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2008; 5th Meeting Points, 2007; 2nd Moscow Biennale, 2007; Fremd bin ich eingezoge, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2007; Choosing my religion, Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, 2006; October Art Salon Belgrade, Belgrade, 2006; No Man's Land (Part II), Hellenic American Union, Athens, 2006; the Istanbul Biennial, 2005; ADAM, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, 2005; Urban Realities, Focus Istanbul, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 2005; Normalization, Platform Granti of Contemporary Art, Istanbul, 2005; Mediterraneans, The Museum of Modern Art Rome (MACRO), Rome, 2004; and the 50th Venice Biennial, 2003. His work is held in the collections of the Tate Modern, London; Macro Museum, Rome; Darat Al Funun, Amman; Mart Museum Collection, Terento; Mudam, Luxembourg Museum of Modern Art; Galeria Sztuki Wspolczesnej, Bunkier Sztukim, Krakow; and APT Dubai.
FAZAL SHEIKH
Sheikh was born in 1965 in New York City. Since graduating from Princeton University in 1987, he has worked with displaced communities across East Africa, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, Cuba and India. In 1994 he was named by the New York Times as one of 30 artists, 30 and under, most likely to change the culture for the next 30 years. In 2005 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Additional fellowships include those from the J. William Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Mondriaan Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and the Mother Jones International Documentary Fund. Selected solo exhibitions include the United Nations, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley, MA; Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; Pace/Macgill Gallery and P.P.O.W Gallery in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Mapfre Foundation, Madrid, Spain; and the International Center of Photography, New York. Group exhibitions include TENT Center for Visual Arts, Rotterdam; the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC; the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sheikh is the recipient of the International Henri Cartier-Bresson Grand Prize, the Prix d’Arles, the Infinity Award, the Lucie Award, the Leica Medal of Excellence, the Ruttenberg Award, and the Ferguson Award. He is the author of eight books : A Sense of Common Ground (Scalo, 1996), The Victor Weeps (Scalo, 1998), A Camel for the Son (IHRS, 2001), Ramadan Moon (IHRS, 2001), Moksha (IHRS and Steidl, 2005), 2005), Ladli (Steidl, 2008), The Circle (Steidl, 2009), and Portraits (Steidl, 2010). Sheikh lives in Zurich, New York City and Kenya.
About the Curators
ANTJE EHMANN
Born in 1968 in Gelsenkirchen / Germany, Ehmann is an author, curator and video artist. Her recent publications include, Harun Farocki. Against What? Against Whom?, ed. with Kodwo Eshun, (Koenig Books, 2009), Amos Gitai. News from Home, ed. with Anselm Franke and Katharina Fichtner (Cologne, 2006) and Geschichte des Dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Bd. 2, Weimarer Republik, with Klaus Kreimeier and Jeanpaul Goergen, (Stuttgart, 2005). Her recent curatorial projects include Three Early Films, with Kodwo Eshun and Bart van der Heide at Cubitt, London, 2009; Harun Farocki. 22 films, with Stuart Comer and Kodwo Eshun, Tate Modern, London, 2009; and Cinema like never before, with Harun Farocki, Generali Foundation Vienna, 2006 and Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2007. She organized The Image in Question: War - Media - Art for the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts with Harun Farocki in 2010; an extended version of the show will travel to Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Germany, from March 27—July 24, 2011, and Ryerson Photography Gallery and Research Center in Toronto in 2013. Her recent video installations include War tropes (with Harun Farocki, 2011), Loud and Clear (2009), and Feasting or Flying (with Harun Farocki, 2008). Ehmann lives in Berlin.
HARUN FAROCKI
Farocki is an author, filmmaker and video artist. He was born in Nový Jičín (Neutitschein), in the then German-annexed part of Czechoslovakia, in 1944. He studied at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) in West Berlin from 1966 to 1968, and in 1968 he welcomed the birth of daughters Annabel Lee und Larissa Lu. Author and editor of the journal Filmkritik in Munich from 1974 to 1984, he co-authored (with Kaja Silverman) the book Speaking about Godard / Von Godard sprechen (NYU Press, 1998). Other recent publications include Rote Berta Geht Ohne Liebe Wandern, (Strzelecki Books, 2009); Kino wie noch nie / Cinema like never before, together with Antje Ehmann (Walther Konig Verlag, 2006) and Imprint / Nachdruck, (Sternberg Press, 2001). Farocki has directed over one hundred productions for television and the cinema including children’s television, documentary films, film essays, and narrative films, and participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries. Recent solo shows include Harun Farocki, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2010; Harun Farocki. Against What? Against Whom?, Raven Row, London, 2009; and Harun Farocki, Museum Ludwig, 2009. Recent films and installations include Deep Play in documenta 12 in 2007; Das Silber und das Kreuz (2010); umgießen (2010); and In Comparison (2009). He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1993 to 1999. A guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna since 2004, he was appointed full professor in 2006. Farocki lives in Berlin.