FORUM SEMINAR: BLANK IDENTIFICATION
In conjunction with the exhibition A neutral, flexible structure by Morten Torgersrud, Hordaland Art Centre welcomes you to the seminar Blank Identification, touching on themes of photography, abstraction and economy.
In the exhibition Torgersrud challenges the idea we have of what a photograph is, and what we can expect from it. If we reflect this back onto the capitalist logic we can similarly ask what we expect of contemporary society. This seminar comprises four lectures, and an open discussion with the audience of the ideas put forward by our guests, with all the digressions and associations that come with it.
13:00 – Welcome and introduction by Anne Szefer Karlsen
13:15 – Morten Torgersrud, artist, Kirkenes, Norway/Stockholm, Sweden: The distribution of place: Ellisif Wessel, Jorma Puranen and the space of photography
14:00 – Matt Packer, Curator of Exhibitions & Projects, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland: Grey Area
14.45-15:00 – Break
15:00 – Arne Skaug Olsen, art critic, Bergen: Photography and stupidity – We’ll slide down the surface of things
15:45 – David Cunningham, Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, London, England: Photographing Capitalism: Sequence, Seriality, Narrative
16:30 – Conversation/debate
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The seminar will be held in English. Participation is free, but due to limited avaliable seats we encourage everyone interested to notify us before April 25th to hks [at] kunstsenter.no.
The seminar is supported by Bergen Academy of Art and Design.
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David Cunningham, Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster. His major research interests are in the avant-garde, modernism, critical theory, aesthetics, and urban theory. He is currently working on a monograph on late modernism and abstraction. Cunningham is Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, the co-ordinator of the Westminster English Colloquia series, and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy.
Arne Skaug Olsen, art critic, curator, publisher and artist. He holds an MA in Photography and MA in Curating from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. He regularly writes for the Nordic online journal for art criticism Kunstkritikk and Camera Austria. His work generally deals with questions of politics and its relation to art and contemporary culture. Skaug Olsen is a founding member of Flaggfabrikken - Centre for Photography and Contemporary Art, and a founding editor of Ctrl+Z Publishing.
Matt Packer is a photographer and artist as well as Curator of Exhibitions & Projects at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland. He holds an MA from the Curatorial Programme at Goldsmiths College, London and has curated numerous exhibitions, including Getting Even: oppositions & dialogues in contemporary art (co-produced with Kunstverein Hanover, 2008), Grin & Bear It: cruel humour in art & life (2009) and School Days (2010). His writings have been featured in magazines such as Source, CIRCA, Journal of Utopian Studies, Photography & Culture, and various exhibition catalogues.
Morten Torgersrud holds his BA in Photography from the University of Brighton (1997) and his MA in Photography from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (2002). His last project Circulating sites was exhibited at Fotogalleriet in Oslo 2011 where it also received the BHK Fotokunst-prize. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as Collective matters (curated by Hilde Methi, Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst, Trondheim, 2010) and Nameless science (curated by Henk Slager, Apexart, New York, 2008), and his works have been acquired by several Norwegian public collections. He has previously published two artist books: Murmanskrovaniemikirkenes (2004) and [untitled] (2009).