‘PANEL DISCUSSION’

Taking as a starting point photographs of the 1960s protests included in the exhibition, artists Marcelo Brodksy, Artem Loskutov,  Gideon Mendel and Oliver Ressler, curator Christine Eyene and art historian Antigoni Memou will discuss what role contemporary photography and art can potentially play in contemporary political struggles around the globe.

MODERATOR

(Dr.) Antigoni Memou (PhD, Courtauld Institute of Art, MA University of Southampton) is Senior Lecturer in Visual Theories at the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London (U.K.). She has published in the journals Third Text, Philosophy of Photography, Epherema and Photographies. Her book Photography and Social Movements: From the Globalisation of the Movement (1968) to the Movement Against Globalisation (2001) was published by Manchester University Press in 2013. 

PARTICIPANTS
Christine Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator. Invited for the second time by BOZAR in the context of the Summer of Photography, Christine is the curator of “RESIST! The 1960s protest, photography and visual legacy”. She is a Guild Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire and a doctoral student at Birkbeck, University of London. Writing a thesis on South African photographer George Hallett. She is also co-founder of the Cameroonian photography platform YaPhoto and member of the acquisitions committee of FRAC, Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain, Réunion. She has recently joined the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco’s scientific committee. 

Marcelo Brodsky is an international visual artist  with work focused in visual language, Memory and Human Rights.  His work combines text and images to convey meaning and to build up alternative narratives. His work is part of the collections of  Tate, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art NY,  the Pinacoteca del Estado, Sao Paulo, the National Museum of Fine Arts, Argentina, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, etc. He has published several books and essays such as Good Memory (1997), Nexo (2001), Visual Correspondences (2009), Tree Time (2014), Once @ 9.53, and he is now publishing 1968: the Fire of ideas. Brodsky is founder of the Parque de la Memoria and a member of its Board.

Artem Loskutov lives and works in Moscow and Novosibirsk. In 2004, he and other members of the group CAT (Contemporary Art Terrorism) organized the May Day happening Monstration in Novosibirsk. In 2007, after the breakup of CAT, he founded the group Kiss my Babushka, of which he was a member until 2014. Since 2012, he has been a member of the working group of the MediaImpact Festival of Activist Art. He has been awarded the Innovation Prize (Russia, 2010). 

Gideon Mendel was one of the young generation of ‘struggle photographers’ documenting change and conflict in South Africa in the lead-up to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. In 1990 he moved to London, from where he has focussed on social issues globally. He has won six World Press Photo Awards, first prize in the American Pictures of the Year competition, a POY Canon Photo Essayist Award, the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography and the Amnesty International Media Award for Photojournalism. He has produced a number of pioneering photographic advocacy projects working with charities and campaigning organizations, such as The Global Fund, MSF, Treatment Action Campaign, The International HIV/AIDS Alliance, Action Aid, The Terrene Higgins Trust, Shelter, Leonard Cheshire Disability, UNICEF and Concern International. Since 2007 he has been working on a major project addressing climate change, entitled ‘Drowning World’ which involves travelling to a variety of flood ravaged locations around the world. 

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, global warming, forms of resistance and social alternatives. He has completed thirty films that have been screened in thousands of events of social movements, art institutions and film festivals. A retrospective of his films took place at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in 2013. In 2002, he won first prize at the International Media Art Award of the ZKM in Karlsruhe and is the first prize winner of the newly established Prix Thun for Art and Ethics Award in 2016. For the Taipei Biennale 2008, Ressler curated an exhibition on the counter-globalization movement, A World Where Many Worlds Fit. A travelling show on the financial crisis, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, co-curated with Gregory Sholette, has been presented at nine venues since 2011. Ressler was the project leader of the research project Utopian Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom at Secession in Vienna in 2014, in collaboration with Ines Doujak, funded by the Austrian Science Fund.