The Humanitarian Storyteller: (Re)connecting Academia and Society Through a Public Exhibition

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Looking for a place for Sonification

This paper discusses the concept of sonification aplied to the Sons de Silício exhibition and more specifically to the design of Buzu, an audiovisual installation that generates an auditory image of the São Paulo bus transportation system. Buzu makes perceptible information of both the system’s planning and behavior during a particular week in October 2017. The work is an artistic outcome of the InterSCity project, an inter‐institutional research initiative concerning the Future Internet and the Smart Cities. Along with the discussion of the Buzu creative process we will examine mining and processing strategies related to the sonification of big data, data‐to‐sound mapping methods, auditory structure for displaying the material and the public exhibition of the work in the context of an artistic event.

“C’est un bourgeois, mais non un bourgeois ordinaire”: The Contested Afterlife of Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-François Bertin

Ingres’s portrait of Louis-François Bertin (1832) has been universally accepted as a visual “apotheosis” of the newly powerful early 19th-century bourgeoisie in France. Here, we study the inconsistencies and contestation which contributed to this identification. Beginning with the moment of its first public exhibition in the 1833 Paris Salon, this article traces Bertin’s evolving reputation as an image of its epoch, focusing on its reappearance in public first at the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle in 1846, and then in the display of Ingres’s works at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. This leads to a critical assessment of how the picture’s role as a political emblem has been related to later assertions that it also exemplified the artist’s incipient modernism. The exhibition of works by Ingres at the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1905 allows us to take stock of claims made about the picture’s status in the early 20th century. However, in contrast to the habitual desire to modernise Ingres (and thereby to detach him from a lingering taint of academicism), this article argues that a key element in the reception of Ingres’s portrait in the second half of the 19th century is a recognition of its rootedness in values emanating from the Revolution of 1789, embodied both in the person of LouisFrançois Bertin and Ingres’s representation of him.

Private collection & public exhibition: the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Responding to Photography

This paper is a detailed description and analysis of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 1984 exhibition Responding to Photography: Selected Works from Private Toronto Collections. One of the first original photography exhibitions organized by the gallery and Maia-Mari Sutnik, the 156 works were drawn entirely from private Toronto collections. The exhibition would come to shape the collecting policy of the photography collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario and set it apart from other institutions across Canada. The selected works represented a generalist collecting philosophy (influenced by Sam Wagstaff) that included photographs by anonymous makers and those made for purposes other than art. Through an analysis of the institution’s historical relationship with photography as well as the context in which the show was developed, this paper proposes that Sutnik’s exhibition is a significant historic marker and indicative of the status of photography in Toronto during the 1980s, a time of increased international prominence for the medium.

Private collection & public exhibition: the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Responding to Photography

This paper is a detailed description and analysis of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 1984 exhibition Responding to Photography: Selected Works from Private Toronto Collections. One of the first original photography exhibitions organized by the gallery and Maia-Mari Sutnik, the 156 works were drawn entirely from private Toronto collections. The exhibition would come to shape the collecting policy of the photography collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario and set it apart from other institutions across Canada. The selected works represented a generalist collecting philosophy (influenced by Sam Wagstaff) that included photographs by anonymous makers and those made for purposes other than art. Through an analysis of the institution’s historical relationship with photography as well as the context in which the show was developed, this paper proposes that Sutnik’s exhibition is a significant historic marker and indicative of the status of photography in Toronto during the 1980s, a time of increased international prominence for the medium.

Curating #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing]: gendered authorship in the ‘contact zone’ of Delhi’s digital and urban margins

This paper examines the curation of a month-long public exhibition titled #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] in one of New Delhi’s busiest metro stations, as a form of self-authorship by young women from its digital and urban margins. #AanaJaana [#ComingGoing] is a metaphor for journeys, communications, connections, associations, interceptions, social networks and individual/collective behaviours, that is curated as women ‘see’ and ‘speak’ with/through their mobile phones. Using Marie Louise Pratt’s notion of ‘contact zone’, we examine #AanaJaana as a space of encounters that emerges by visually ‘composing-with’ as well as ‘learning-with’ the realities and constraints of space, technology and power. Based on self-authorship over a period of 6 months within a ‘safe space’ of a WhatsApp group of young women living in the urban margins, we draw attention to #AanaJaana as a set of crosscutting networks of power dynamics over women’s bodies across the home, mobile phone and the city. #AanaJaana refers to how young women in the margins negotiate the ‘freedoms’ of moving (aana) in online space with the ‘dangers’ of going out (jaana) into the city, or the restrictions of entering (aana) online space with the freedom of leaving (jaana) home. We argue first, that #AanaJaana is a space of confinement because of the infrastructural paralysis in the peripheries. Second that it is also at the same time translocally produced by referencing several textual, digital and material spaces of self-realisation. Finally, we argue that #AanaJaana is a space of intertextuality through encounters between emojis, shorthand, voice notes on the mobile phone, with parody and dark humour of their gendered experiences that can transform shame, humiliation and fear into reflection, resistance and agency. The paper concludes that as a polycentric practice, #AanaJaana offers an appropriate metaphor to expand the ‘contact zone’ in order to decolonise gendered knowledge and power across digital-analogue margins.

A Conversation with Aliza Shvarts

Aliza Shvarts first came to widespread attention when her Untitled [Senior Thesis] (2008), consisting of a yearlong performance of self-induced miscarriages, was declared a “fiction” by Yale University and censored from public exhibition. That controversial work was on view for the first time in New York as part of her 2020 exhibition Purported at Art in General. It frames the areas of inquiry she has continued to explore: how the body means and matters and how the subject consents and dissents. In this in-depth conversation, Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts discuss the exhibition and a wide range of topics relevant to contemporary feminist practice and thought: the genealogy of citation; the uses of theory; speech action; rape kits; nonconsensual collaboration; queer kinship; and memes.