Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War
http://www.blackwoodgallery.ca
Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War
Curated by Séamus Kealy
Opening: Wednesday January 16th; 5 to 7 pm, Justina M. Barnicke
Gallery; 7 to 9 pm, Blackwood Gallery
Exhibition Runs January 17th to March 2nd, 2008
Symposium and Catalogue Launch: Friday January 25th, 2:15 to 8 pm
Free shuttle buses from Toronto to Mississauga available for the
opening and symposium
Signals in the Dark: Art in the Shadow of War (January 17 ? March 2,
2008) is an inter-disciplinary project exploring contemporary art?s
relationship to war and its representations. A collaboration between
the Blackwood Gallery (University of Toronto at Mississauga) and the
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery (Hart House, University of Toronto), this
project includes an exhibition of seventeen international artists at
two university gallery locations, a forty-day film/video program, a
catalogue, and a public symposium.
Investigating the interstices between perpetual war, dominant
politics, and representation, this project confronts issues of global
warfare, how it is imaged, and how it is imagined. The exhibition
presents artists who are responding to representations of war through
informed critique. While a number of artists produce analyses or
outraged expressions arising from their own or others? experiences of
war, other artists challenge the spectacle of contemporary war, its
veracity and, ultimately, its intertwinement with a New World Order.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Sharanpal Ruprai
Contemporary Film Theory: The Image Now
GS/FILM 5230
Dr. Hayashi
Blog Entry # 2
January 29, 2008
Blog Entry # 2: Harun Farocki – Images of the World and the Inscription of War, War at a Distance – I am going to focus my blog on the article, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Questions in Feminist and Privilege of Partial Perspective” by Donna Haraway.
Summary:
The article outlined a feminist perspective on “objectivity.” Haraway, argues that feminists have been thinking about objectivity in binary terms (transcendence and splitting or separating) which are inflexible and selective and further, makes feminists hold on to “both ends of a pole simultaneously or alternately.” (188) She argues that feminists need to revision “objectivity” in terms of situated knowledge – knowledge that comes from the body and comes from “seeing”. She argues for a “doctrine and practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformations of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing” (191-2) She concludes her argument for feminist objectivity with a call for an “apparatus of bodily production” (200) which she borrows from Katie Kings argument for a “apparatus of literary production.” She would like to take up questions of the body in the framework of literary production. Therefore she asks the question, “Are biological bodies ‘produced’ or ‘generated’ in the same strong sense as poems?” (200)
Main Points:
Some of Haraway’s main points are:
“Vision is always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices” (192) she goes on to say “Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning” therefore, “Positioning is, therefore, the key practice grounding knowledge organized around the imagery of vision” In other words, when we “see” an image we are already grounded within a position.
Another point that is related to the above is:
She is arguing for a “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the conditions of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. The view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.” (195)
Reflections/Question:
The relationship for me between Farocki’s film and Haraway’s article is the idea of vision. Farocki’s film is shot from what I perceive as a “view from above, from nowhere from simplicity” (Haraway 195) Farocki is able to challenge his viewer by inserting collages of images that flash before one’s eyes, however, there is an disembodiment that occurs. For example the shots of the 1960s Algerian women are shots from a book – we are watching someone else viewing the photographs of these women. We, the viewers of the film, are separated from these women first by the page and second by the film. Farocki’s partial vision is what Haraway is arguing for, she suggests that through partiality “connections and unexpected opening situated knowledge make possible” (196). What are the connections and the unexpected openings that Farocki make possible? I suggest he makes visible what we do not see because of our own positioning. When watching the 1960s women what I saw was not horrified women but rather, women with slight smiles on their faces. It also shows women who are being exploited, women who have secrets hidden in their lips. Farocki’s commentary is positioned in Western thought, the idea that these women’s were “Faces which up till then had worn the veil” (Farocki, ‘Commentary’). These women wear the veil in front of strangers, but in their world of women they have shown their faces. As viewers are only now “privileged” to see their faces. I found the disembodiment of the women a little unsettling. Why? Because from my position, brown women’s bodies are always disembodied – and my Western thought demands to see the “whole picture.”