The Affective Space of the Museum, the Flying Elephants of the Docart and the Photo Book of the Dig
Talk by Victoria Musvik
29th of November, 18.00
EHU campus (Valakupiu g. 5, room 301)
Superseding postmodernism, our own epoch has not yet received the exact name but is sometimes called 'digimodernism'. New technologies, including the arrival of the Internet, the invention of simple digital and mobile cameras and the emergence of exciting possibilities for image editing, have brought about dramatic changes in the field of photography. Among them are the 'unfreezing' of the decisive moment and the dematerialization of the medium, the increasing role of amateurship and the birth of multimedia, the rejection of the Western gaze's hegemony and new opportunities for image dissemination, the attention to the senses after the corporeal and affective turns and the blurring of the doc/art boundary. This list of changes, by no means exhaustive, makes some critics talk about the end of photography or its transformation into the 'post-' phenomenon while others optimistically discover new genres, formats and possibilities. Curatorship is part of this process where a search for new forms of project presentation in virtual reality goes hand in hand with the resistance to de-materialization in photobooks and affective/immersive museum spaces.
Based in Moscow and affiliated at EHU, Victoria Musvik is both an academic, researcher, art critic and curator. She teaches courses in theory and history of photography, visual studies, art criticism, analysis of photographic image, history of emotions and affect theory in academic and non-university environments. She has recently been an invited curator in the magazine Art (Iskusstvo) and the head of the jury at the photographic festival in Uhlich where she has also curated a programme of Lithuanian photography.
Image: Joan Fontcuberta (1987) "Aeronafts" (photo: C. A. Bromley (1941)
The lecture is held as part of the Laboratory for Studies of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art seminar series 'Art and Curatorial Practice in a Digital Age'.