Rinko Kawauchi: Imperfect Photographs

The oeuvre of contemporary Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi is characterized by an approach that gives precedence to process over product and combines conceptual art with vernacular traditions, making her pictures happily imperfect. Starting with Kawauchi’s transmedial concept of the image, often positioned between word and image and mainly materialized through photo books, I propose that Kawauchi’s photographs are imperfect thanks to her experimentation with technical mistakes, the vernacular subject-matter of everyday snapshots, seriality, sequencing, and format variation, elliptical visibility, the aesthetics of color, and a non-linear temporality. Imperfection, furthermore, emphasizes the materiality of the medium, and removes photography from the referent-centered documentary domain by way of aesthetic, rather than semiotic, significance. Imperfection also activates different modes of reception, emphasizing emotional involvement and participant viewing.Clara Masnatta, ‘Rinko Kawauchi: Imperfect Photographs’, in Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 24 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 141-58 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-24_6

Grete Stern and Gisèle Freund: Two Photographic Modernities in Argentine Exile

The article examines the divergent photographic modernities, photo-collage and color photography, as practiced by German-Jewish women photographers Grete Stern and Gisèle Freund who, after fleeing Nazi Europe, relocated to Argentina. The analysis is focused on their photo-portraiture.Le texte examine les deux modernités photographiques divergentes (le photocollage et la photographie couleur) pratiqués en parallèle par Grete Stern Gisèle Freund, femmes photographes d’origine juive -allemande qui sont émigrés en Argentine, tous les deux fuyant l’Europe nazie. L’analyse se concentre sur leur photo-portraits

Rinko Kawauchi:Imperfect Photographs

Panel IIClara Masnatta, ‘Rinko Kawauchi: Imperfect Photographs’, talk presented at the conference Visual Noise: Wandering Artifacts and Aberrant Images, ICI Berlin, 17 June 2016, video recording, mp4, 29:57 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e160617_4

Imperfect Photographs

Clara Masnatta, ‘Imperfect Photographs’, talk presented at the workshop Margins of Error, ICI Berlin, 30–29 June 2015, video recording, mp4, 24:45 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e150630_10

Paradoxical Presence:Projecting Colors

Clara Masnatta, ‘Paradoxical Presence: Projecting Colors’, talk presented at the workshop Organization of Perception: Rhythm and Projection, ICI Berlin, 19 January 2018, video recording, mp4, 25:38 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e180119_5

Introduction

Clara Masnatta, Introduction to the conference Visual Noise: Wandering Artifacts and Aberrant Images, ICI Berlin, 17 June 2016, video recording, mp4, 10:51 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e160617_1

Visual Noise:Wandering Artifacts and Aberrant Images

What happens to images that appear haphazardly, are lost, or fall outside of the frame of (seemingly) familiar temporalities or visual regimes? Can cinematography revalorize roaming images and ‘uneventful’ time – or moving images that play with both promiscuity of detail and deficit in visual definition? Is there a ‘materiality’ to be reclaimed through photographic imperfection in the age of digital technology? Have the reconfigured capacities of manipulating and ‘finishing’ images within the larger conditions of digitalism effectively shaped our understanding of saving and archiving images – and, by extension, works of art? These questions urge an examination of artworks made to be abandoned rather than safeguarded, dispossessed works of art that evade the certainties of origin or provenance art historians have typically regarded as foundational. Bringing together art history, cinema, photography, visual archeology, and media studies, this conference explores the interdependence of distortion and revelation, identity and itinerancy in the visual, in order to move beyond the dichotomies of opacity and transparency, intention and interference in the production and circulation, that is, in the life of images.Visual Noise: Wandering Artifacts and Aberrant Images, conference, ICI Berlin, 17 June 2016 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e160617

Introduction

Clara Masnatta, Introduction to the workshop Organization of Perception: Rhythm and Projection, ICI Berlin, 19 January 2018, video recording, mp4, 09:55 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e180119_9

Freund-schaft: Capturing Aura in an Unframed Literary Exchange

This dissertation charts an intellectual history of collaborations centered on the beginning of socio-critical discourse on photography. I study the critically misread oeuvre of photographer and sociologist Gisèle Freund to reconfigure a transatlantic map of concrete personal, literary, and critical connections during the 1930s and ’40s. In examining Freund’s oeuvre, I suggest a crucial intervention on the notion of aura — Walter Benjamin’s trademark for understanding the dialectics of the original and its reproduction. I advance a reading in support of aura that challenges the canonical “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility” (1940) of Benjamin. The continuous coexistence of the terms aura, market, and photography is present in Freund – author of iconic photo-portraits of writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, André Malraux, Jorge Luis Borges or Benjamin. It contests the reduction of the original’s aura and its reproduction to mutually exclusive terms. My counter-reading in fact recovers the prior and wider aura integral to Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” (1931). It is this cardinal yet neglected piece that inaugurated together with Freund’s La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle (1936) the critical discourse on photography. Walter Benjamin’s presence is dynamically ingrained in Freund’s oeuvre. In addition to their friendship, two additional friends inform Freund’s career. Freund’s mentors were the leading cultural agents in Paris and Buenos Aires: Adrienne Monnier, the legendary French publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses, and Victoria Ocampo, the founding director of Sur, one of the key literary journals in Latin America. The network of cooperative interactions here deployed is conjugated under the critical metaphor Freund-schaft. Coined on Freund’s name, the term draws equally on the meaning of friendship and the creative making contained in the suffix –schaft (derived from the German schaffen, “to make”, “to create”, “to accomplish”). The framework hinges on the tension between history and theory. Freund-schaft brings to light omissions, conjunctions, and the debates that make up the larger structure of feelings, and makes particulars inextricable from a life-woven net

Impossible Archives, Infinite Collections

Between order and disorder, finite and infinite, dispersal and arrangement, accumulation and categorization, memory and oblivion, useful and useless, a tension pulses in recent mutations of collecting and archiving. Should this ‘archive fever’ be seen as an archive inflation expanding the reign of commodification? Is a new form of archival time emerging? What do the nonconformist collecting and archiving practices developed by contemporary artists say about the possibility of a different relationship to history, memory, and cultural heritage, that is, to the present and the future? An obsessive preoccupation with the archive pervades the arts, criticism, and curatorial practice. In everyday life, digital data storage has turned contemporary users into potential archivists, taxonomists, and collectors, relying on cloud services and social media networks as storage places for the safekeeping, sharing, and manipulation of even the most intimate facts and images of their lives. But the same technologies inspire a widespread archive dysphoria:  an exhaustive melancholic state that fuels the current efforts for ‘impossible archives’, that is, counter-archives that question the idea of an all-encompassing repository of personal and collective information and knowledge. The conversation will focus on archives and collections in contemporary art and takes its cue from the recent publication of Cristina Baldacci’s Impossible Archives: An Obsession of Contemporary Art (Italian edition, 2016). Carles Guerra is the Director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. He holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and a Master in Media Studies from The New School for Social Research, New York. He served as Director for the Primavera Fotogràfica de Catalunya (2004), the Virreina. Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona (2009-2011), and was Chief Curator of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2011-2013). Among his curatorial projects, Harun Farocki: Mit anderen Mitteln – By Other Means (with Antje Ehmann, 2017), and 1979. A Monument to Radical Moments (2011). His work and research investigate the dialogical aspects of artistic practice and the cultural policies of post-Fordism. Ina Steiner is a photographer who works in the fields of architecture, politics, and fashion. She was part of the Allan Sekula research project at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA). She was Allan Sekula&#8217;s assistant during the last decade of his life and helped prepare his show at documenta XII. Since 2012 she has taken care of his archive and arranged a number of exhibitions and publications.Impossible Archives, Infinite Collections, discussion, ICI Berlin, 19 October 2017, video recording <https://doi.org/10.25620/e171019