Allan Sekula. Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum

Allan Sekula. Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum
Author: Hilde Van Gelder
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2015-02-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9462700052

Sekula's final work dedicated to labor solidarity in and around the docks Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum is the project on which the US artist and writer Allan Sekula worked during the last three years of his life (2010–2013). The work consists, first, of a corpus of thirty-three framed photographs and two slide projections of in total over one hundred images, all made by the artist (Ship of Fools); second, it contains a gigantic collection of various objects, graphic images, postcards, and prints which the artist purchased, mostly online (The Dockers’ Museum). Sekula dedicated this work to both historical and contemporary labor solidarity in and around the docks. At the time of his sad passing in the Summer of 2013, Allan Sekula was in the midst of collaborating on this publication with all four contributing authors: Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Alberto Toscano, and Hilde Van Gelder, each of whom he had asked to write essays. This volume, which includes a representative ensemble of images and objects that are part of Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum, follows as closely as possible the instructions given by the artist and is the first substantial scholarly analysis of this impressive project. It contains a preface by Jürgen Bock and Bart De Baere, who both curated exhibited installations of the work during the artist's lifetime. The volume also includes draft text materials written by the artist himself, as well as selections from the multitude of unpublished interviews, public debates, and lectures that Allan Sekula delivered between 2010 and 2012. Finally, this publication includes a moving essay on the project by the artist's widow, Sally Stein.

Ground Sea

Ground Sea
Author: Hilde Van Gelder
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 739
Release: 2021-09-15
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9462702659

Imagine a world in which each individual has a fundamental right to be reborn. This idle dream haunts Hilde Van Gelder’s associative travelogue that takes Allan Sekula’s sequence Deep Six / Passer au bleu (1996/1998) as a touchstone for a dialogue with more recent artworks zooming in on the borderscape near the Channel Tunnel, such as those by Sylvain George and Bruno Serralongue. Combining ethnography, visual materials, political philosophy, cultural geography, and critical analysis, Ground Sea proceeds through an innovative methodological approach. Inspired by the meandering writings of W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías, and Roland Barthes, Van Gelder develops a style both interdisciplinary and personal. Resolutely opting for an aquatic perspective, Ground Sea offers a powerful meditation on the indifference of an increasingly divided European Union with regard to considerable numbers of persons on the move, who find themselves stranded close to Calais. The contested Strait of Dover becomes a microcosm where our present global challenges of migration, climate change, human rights, and neoliberal surveillance technology converge. Read more on the book's dedicated website: www.groundsea.be

Museums Inside Out

Museums Inside Out
Author: Mark W. Rectanus
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1452962073

An ambitious study of what it means to be a museum in the twenty-first century In Museums Inside Out, Mark W. Rectanus investigates how museums are blurring the boundaries between their gallery walls and public spaces. He examines how artists are challenging and changing museums, taking readers deep into new experiments in exhibition making. Along the way, Rectanus offers insights about how museums currently exemplify the fusion of the creative and digital economies. Exploring contemporary museum practices, initiatives, and collaborations, Rectanus analyzes projects like the Collective Museum, which foster land-based museum ecologies by co-curating with local communities. The Schirn Kunsthalle, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, and Tate Modern reflect museums as cultural zones for performance, inside and outside the museum. In addition, he studies a joint project between the Van Gogh Museum and the investment firm Deloitte Luxembourg, extracting insights on the transfer of expertise from museums to the financial sector. Wide-ranging in its case studies, and boldly putting museum studies and art into conversation, Museums Inside Out delivers vital insights into the ideas and places that museums are creating in contemporary culture.

"Disassembled" Images

Author: Alexander Streitberger
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2019-05-31
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9462701717

The canonical legacy of Allan Sekula in contemporary visual art “Disassembled” Images takes as a point of departure Allan Sekula’s productive approach of disassembling elements in order to reassemble them in alternative constellations. Some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as human labor in a globalized economy or the claim for radical democracy, are recurrent themes in Sekula’s oeuvre and are investigated by a wide range of experts in this book. Addressing a variety of artworks, both by Sekula and other artists, the collected essays focus on three crucial aspects within recent politically engaged art: collecting as a tool for representing folly and madness, the confrontation of the maritime space of ecological disasters and geopolitical processes with alternative models of solidarity, and what Sekula named “critical realism” as a reflective method in search of new social agencies and creative freedom. A text–image portfolio by Marco Poloni completes this profound reflection on Sekula’s influential legacy within contemporary visual art. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content). Contributors Anthony Abiragi (University of Colorado), Barbara Baert (KU Leuven), Edwin Carels (School of Arts KASK/HoGent/M HKA), Ronnie Close (American University in Cairo), Bart De Baere (M HKA), Stefanie Diekmann (Hildesheim University), Carles Guerra (Fundació Antoni Tàpies), Clara Masnatta (ICI Berlin), W. J. T. Mitchell (University of Chicago), Marco Poloni (Berlin), Anja Isabel Schneider (KU Leuven/ M HKA), Stephanie Schwartz (University College London), Jonathan Stafford (Nottingham Trent University), Alexander Streitberger (UC Louvain), Hilde Van Gelder (KU Leuven), Benjamin Young (Parsons School of Design) Assistant editor Federica Mantoan

Maritime Poetics

Maritime Poetics
Author: Gabriel N. Gee
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2021-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839450233

In the past fifty years, port cities around the world have experienced considerable changes to their morphologies and their identities. The increasing intensification of global networks and logistics, and the resulting pressure on human societies and earthly environments have been characteristic of the rise of a »planetary age«. This volume engages with contemporary artistic practices and critical poetics that trace an alternate construction of the imaginaries and aspirations of our present societies at the crossroads of sea and land - taking into account complex pasts and interconnected histories, transnational flux, as well as material and immaterial borders.

Ubiquity

Ubiquity
Author: Jacob W. Lewis
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2021-12-15
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9462702896

From its invention to the internet age, photography has been considered universal, pervasive, and omnipresent. This anthology of essays posits how the question of when photography came to be everywhere shapes our understanding of all manner of photographic media. Whether looking at a portrait image on the polished silver surface of the daguerreotype, or a viral image on the reflective glass of the smartphone, the experience of looking at photographs and thinking with photography is inseparable from the idea of ubiquity—that is, the apparent ability to be everywhere at once. While photography’s distribution across cultures today is undeniable, the insidious logics and pervasive myths that have governed its spread demand our critical attention, now more than ever.

Industries of Architecture

Industries of Architecture
Author: Katie Lloyd Thomas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317366883

At a time when the technologies and techniques of producing the built environment are undergoing significant change, this book makes central architecture’s relationship to industry. Contributors turn to historical and theoretical questions, as well as to key contemporary developments, taking a humanities approach to the Industries of Architecture that will be of interest to practitioners and industry professionals, as much as to academic researchers, teachers and students. How has modern architecture responded to mass production? How do we understand the necessarily social nature of production in the architectural office and on the building site? And how is architecture entwined within wider fields of production and reproduction—finance capital, the spaces of regulation, and management techniques? What are the particular effects of techniques and technologies (and above all their inter-relations) on those who labour in architecture, the buildings they produce, and the discursive frameworks we mobilise to understand them?

Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present

Coding and Representation from the Nineteenth Century to the Present
Author: Anne Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2021-05-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000383652

An exploration of trends and cultures connected to electrical telegraphy and recent digital communications, this collection emerges from the research project Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary 1866–1900, which investigated cultural phenomena relating to the 1866 transatlantic telegraph. It interrogates the ways in which society, politics, literature and art are imbricated with changing communications technologies, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Contributors consider control, imperialism and capital, as well as utopianism and hope, grappling with the ways in which human connections (and their messages) continue to be shaped by communications infrastructures.

The Handbook of Photography Studies

The Handbook of Photography Studies
Author: Gil Pasternak
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 737
Release: 2020-08-13
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1000213072

The Handbook of Photography Studies is a state-of-the-art overview of the field of photography studies, examining its thematic interests, dynamic research methodologies and multiple scholarly directions. It is a source of well-informed, analytical and reflective discussions of all the main subjects that photography scholars have been concerned with as well as a rigorous study of the field’s persistent expansion at a time when digital technology regularly boosts our exposure to new and historical photographs alike. Split into five core parts, the Handbook analyzes the field’s histories, theories and research strategies; discusses photography in academic disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts; draws out the main concerns of photographic scholarship; interrogates photography’s cultural and geopolitical influences; and examines photography’s multiple uses and continued changing faces. Each part begins with an introductory text, giving historical contextualization and scholarly orientation. Featuring the work of international experts, and offering diverse examples, insights and discussions of the field’s rich historiography, the Handbook provides critical guidance to the most recent research in photography studies. This pioneering and comprehensive volume presents a systematic synopsis of the subject that will be an invaluable resource for photography researchers and students from all disciplinary backgrounds in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Victor Burgin’s Parzival in Leuven

Victor Burgin’s Parzival in Leuven
Author: Stéphane Symons
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2017-05-22
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9462700990

In-depth analysis of Victor Burgin’s video installation Parzival (2013) In commemoration of the destruction of the University Library of Leuven (Belgium) in August 1914, the projection work Parzival, created by Victor Burgin (°UK, 1941) in 2013, was installed within the rebuilt Library. The installation uniquely marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, which left its profound traces on both the consciousness and physiognomy of the city of Leuven. Burgin’s reflection on Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal (premiere 1882) combines the artist’s computer modelled images (a bombed out street, a sunset meadow, a Venetian palazzo, …) with citations from Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) and references to works by Milan Kundera, W.G. Sebald and Philip K. Dick. This publication provides an in-depth analysis of Parzival, a work that is inspired by the period of seven months that Wagner spent in Venice (1858-1859). Burgin’s Parzival raises questions about some of the most fundamental elements in Wagner’s operatic work: the longing for a savior, the complex connection between violence and catharsis, and the presentiment that destruction awaits humanity in the future (Götterdämmerung). In an associative manner, Parzival brings together various artistic and political features to confront the romantic ideal of the ruin with the horrors that might result from such a myth. In addition, this book contains a reprint of Michel Foucault’s essay “The Imagination of the Nineteenth Century” (1980). GPRC label: