2021 ONLINE PANEL DISCUSSIONS
Online Panel Discussion 2021
The International Association of Photography and Theory [IAPT] organized an online panel discussion in two parts entitled In/Visible Landscapes. The discussion develops at the intersection of photography, landscape, the climate emergency and colonialism with the participation of distinguished invited guests.
The first part of the online discussion, entitled In/Visible Landscapes: [Post]-photographic practices and the politics of ecology, took place on Friday, 17 September 2021 (18:00-19:30, EEST) with the participation of T.J. Demos and Jussi Parikka.
The second part, entitled In/Visible Landscapes: Photography, colonialism and the environment took place on Friday, 24 September 2021 (17:00-19:00, EEST) with the participation of Nicola Brandt, Stelios Kallinikou and Uriel Orlow.
Both panel discussions were moderated by Elena Parpa and Nicos Philippou.
The discussions was conducted in English, was free of charge and was livestreamed.
The events were supported by the Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Cyprus and by the University of Nicosia.
This panel concentrates on the way artists working with lens-based media respond to the climate crisis, making visible the altered landscapes of today. Emphasis is placed on artistic practices of a post-photographic approach that situate us in a dystopian present of environmental collapse at the same time that they project visions of a radically rethought future. It is investigated whether such approaches to the photographic medium unsettle human-centred views of the world, abolishing distinctions (between nature and culture, living and non-living beings, between genders, ethnicities and social classes) whilst making visible the asymmetric way that the planet’s destruction is experienced. The question of the role of representation comes centre stage as is the power of the (photographic) image to cultivate environmental consciousness, motivate climate action and encourage alternative, hopeful visions for the future.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
T. J. Demos is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He researches the intersection of visual culture, radical politics, and political ecology—particularly where they oppose racial and colonial capitalism—and is the author of several books, including Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke, 2020); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg, 2016); and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg, 2017). He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). He is presently working on a new book on radical futurisms.
Jussi Parikka is Professor at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and Visiting Professor at FAMU (at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague) where he works as director of the project Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023). In January 2022, he will start as Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. Parikka is a member of Academia Europaea and some of his books include Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010), A Geology of Media (2015) as well as several publications on media archaeology, including What is Media Archaeology? (2012). Recent writing includes the co-authored short book Remain (2019). In Spring 2021, his co-edited (with Tomas Dvorak) volume Photography off the Scale was published by Edinburgh University Press. http://jussiparikka.net
Elena Parpa writes, teaches, and curates alongside the discipline of history of art. She holds a PHD from the Department of Art History Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research focuses on the ways in which artists, across the Cyprus divide, focus on the representation of landscape by negotiating the conditions of place as a contentious area. She has curated a number of exhibitions, including How to Make a Garden (2012), Exercises in Orientation (2013/15) and Planetes (2017). Her essays have appeared in catalogues and edited volumes, including the ‘Daybook’ of documenta 14 (2017), the edited collections Contemporary Art in Cyprus: Politics, Identity and Culture Across Borders (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Marianna Christofides: Days in Between (Hatje Cantz, 2021). She wrote the second issue of Next Spring (Atlas Projectos, 2018), edited by Laura Preston. She is a Scientific Collaborator at the University of Nicosia and at the Cyprus University of Technology.
Nicos Philippou is a photographer with a strong interest in Cypriot topography and material culture. He has participated in several exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad. In 2010 he co-curated the exhibition Re-envisioning Cyprus and co-edited the volume with the same title. In 2012 he participated in the exhibition Sense of Place/ European Landscape Photography at the BOZAR in Brussels and in at Maroudia’s, a component of the major NiMAC exhibition Terra Mediterranea-In Crisis. In 2015 his book Coffee House Embellishments was shown in The PhotoBook Exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens. He is also the co-editor of Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place, Identity. In 2016 NiMAC hosted his solo exhibition Sharqi, and published a photobook with the same title. His writings on photography, vernacular culture and Cypriot Identity have been published in journals, art magazines and collective volumes whereas his photography has been showcased in periodicals like photographies and Exposure. He is currently lecturing at the Communications Department of the University of Nicosia.
This panel holds at its premise that the past colonial practices of extraction, deforestation, dispossession, displacement of communities and the erasure of local knowledges, connect with the climate injustices of the present. In seeking to investigate the links between today’s altered ecologies and the colonial practices of the past, the discussion centres on uses of photography that approach the environment’s destruction as a symptom of colonialism. It considers how artists engage with the geopolitical dimensions of the climate crisis in correlation with issues such as that of capitalist expansionism, neocolonialism, displacement, biopiracy, and the landscape’s association with memory, exploitation, power and control. The politics of representation enter the discussion to encourage reflection on the political urgency with which artists visualize the demise of the environment and the climate injustices experienced, suggesting ways of resistance.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Nicola Brandt is a Namibian-born artist. Her cross-disciplinary work explores the entangled legacies of colonialism and exploitative capitalism in Southern Africa and Northern Europe, and their impact on the environment, identity, and memory cultures she grew up in. Brandt’s work featured as part of intergovernmental talks between Namibia and Germany. She is currently working on a book with Steidl Verlag (2021), which reflects on her photographic, video, and installation work created over the past ten years since the removal of the ‘Reiterdenkmal’ – a German colonial monument in the centre of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. Her upcoming body of work looks at related themes pertaining to landscapes of power in connection to extraction, capital, and ruination. Brandt is the author of the monograph Landscapes between Then and Now: Recent Histories in Southern African Photography, Video and Performance Art published with Bloomsbury in 2020. She has contributed to a number of publications including The Journey: New Positions in African Photography (2020), co-edited by Simon Njami and Sean O’Toole. She is the founder and series editor of the artists’ and writers’ residency Conversations Across Place (CaP), which provides a publishing platform for international artists and writers engaging with landscape in the broader sense of geography, ecology, space, place, built and 'natural' environments. The first CaP volume (2021) is published with Greenbox Publishing in Berlin.
Stelios Kallinikou presents us with sequences of imagery, flowing into interlaced dialogues, whilst exploring the nexus between the narrative limitations of photography and consciousnes. His images appear mythological and archaeologically proto-human, connecting something primordial to the present by narrativising the body’s connection with the earth. Worlds are constructed at an introspective, meditative pace, and then act as speculative scenarios through which the intersections between territorial and ideological notions relating to 'landscape'-such as space/place and time/history - are explored. His work has been presented in solo and group shows at Kunsthalle Baden Baden in 2021; Grey Noise, Dubai, Dubai in 2021; Saigon in Athens, in 2020; Phenomenon artist residency programme /exhibition, Αnafi, Greece, in 2019; MOMus – Thessaloniki Museum of Photography in 2019; Nimac (Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre), Nicosia, Cyprus in 2018 and 2019; Foam Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 2018; APHF, Benaki Museum, Athens, Greece, in 2017; Point Centre of Contemporary art in Nicosia, Cyprus in 2017 and 2019; Equilibrists, a show organized by the New Museum, New York and the DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece, in 2016. Kallinikou was a resident at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany in 2018 to 2019. In 2019 he was selected as a Foam Talent. He is the co-founder of Thkio Ppalies Artist-led Project Space, based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Museum, New York and the DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece, in 2016. Kallinikou was a resident at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany in 2018 to 2019. In 2019, he was selected as a Foam Talent. He is the co-founder of Thkio Ppalies Artist-led Project Space, based in Nicosia, Cyprus.
Uriel Orlow is an artist and educator who lives and works between London, Lisbon and Zurich. He completed a PhD in Fine Art in 2002. Uriel Orlow’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and multi-disciplinary. His work brings different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence and is concerned with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, blind spots of representation and plants as political actors. Orlow’s work has been presented in many international survey shows including 54th Venice Biennale (2011), Manifesta 9 and 12, Genk/Palermo (2012, 2018), Lubumbashi Biennial (2019), 13th Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017), 7th Moscow Biennial (2017), EVA Biennial (2016, 2014), 8th Mercosul Biennial, Brazil (2011), Aichi Triennale (2013); and Bergen Assembly (2013) amongst others. Solo exhibitions in 2020 include Kunsthalle Mainz, La Loge Brussels and State of Concept Athens. In 2020, Archive Books is publishing his monograph Conversing with Leaves, in 2019 Shelter Press published Soil Affinities and in 2018 Sternberg Press published Theatrum Botanicum. Uriel Orlow is a reader at the University of Westminster London and a lecturer at the University of the Arts Zurich.
Elena Parpa writes, teaches, and curates alongside the discipline of history of art. She holds a PHD from the Department of Art History Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research focuses on the ways in which artists, across the Cyprus divide, focus on the representation of landscape by negotiating the conditions of place as a contentious area. She has curated a number of exhibitions, including How to Make a Garden (2012), Exercises in Orientation (2013/15) and Planetes (2017). Her essays have appeared in catalogues and edited volumes, including the ‘Daybook’ of documenta 14 (2017), the edited collections Contemporary Art in Cyprus: Politics, Identity and Culture Across Borders (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Marianna Christofides: Days in Between (Hatje Cantz, 2021). She wrote the second issue of Next Spring (Atlas Projectos, 2018), edited by Laura Preston. She is a Scientific Collaborator at the University of Nicosia and at the Cyprus University of Technology.
Nicos Philippou is a photographer with a strong interest in Cypriot topography and material culture. He has participated in several exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad. In 2010 he co-curated the exhibition Re-envisioning Cyprus and co-edited the volume with the same title. In 2012 he participated in the exhibition Sense of Place/ European Landscape Photography at the BOZAR in Brussels and in at Maroudia’s, a component of the major NiMAC exhibition Terra Mediterranea-In Crisis. In 2015 his book Coffee House Embellishments was shown in The PhotoBook Exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens. He is also the co-editor of Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place, Identity. In 2016 NiMAC hosted his solo exhibition Sharqi, and published a photobook with the same title. His writings on photography, vernacular culture and Cypriot Identity have been published in journals, art magazines and collective volumes whereas his photography has been showcased in periodicals like photographies and Exposure. He is currently lecturing at the Communications Department of the University of Nicosia.