PHOTO LIVE September 2020
4.9.20
PHOTO LIVE is a series of live streamed conversations about the social and cultural role photography plays in our lives, addressing a range of issues from identity and belonging to human rights and social justice. Our third series of PHOTO LIVE launches on Thursday 17 September 2020.
PHOTO LIVE will be broadcast live on the PHOTO 2021 Facebook page (no log in required) and added to our website the next day. All events will be live captioned. All times listed are for Melbourne (AEST).
THURSDAY 17 SEPTEMBER, 6pm
HANNA PUTZ AND ANDRZEJ STEINBACH
Hanna Putz and Andrzej Steinbach are currently exhibiting in the Centre for Contemporary Photography exhibition ‘No True Self‘. It is on display at CCP until 25 October 2020, as part of PHOTO 2021’s expanded program.
An autodidact, Hanna Putz is interested in conveying moments that defy our culture of ubiquitous self-awareness. Documenting everyday moments from the tender to the absurd, Putz provokes the notion of authenticity and of self-presentation, and what she calls ‘ the high demands of self-representation’ today. Putz’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at Kunsthalle Vienna, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, FOAM Museum, The Photographers Gallery, Autocenter Berlin, and at the 6th Moscow Biennale. Her work has been featured extensively in magazines such as DUST Magazine, TAR Magazine, New York Magazine, as well as recently featured in the British Journal of Photography. Her latest publication, aptly titled ‘Everything else is a lie’ (2019) is out now from PAMPAM Publishing.
Andrzej Steinbach is interested in the signifiers of photographic portrayal and how our assumptions turn individuals into signifiers – and into characters. At times political and containing various subtexts to revolt, his photographs cast a critical gaze squarely at the ubiquitous and unambiguous norms perpetuated by governments and algorithms. Challenging our assumptions of identity using superficial factors and pluralities of gesture, body language, clothing, race, and by subverting the conventions of photographic portraiture to which we are accustomed, he renders the familiar, unfamiliar. In 2018 Steinbach received the German Federal Prize for Art Students and has exhibited throughout Europe and North America, including group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York and the Centre de la Photographie in Geneva, Switzerland. Steinbach is represented by Galerie Conradi, Hamburg.
Hanna and Andrzej will be in conversation with David A. Kerr (Curator of No True Self at CCP).
MONDAY 21 SEPTEMBER, 6pm
GUY GRABOWSKY AND KIRON ROBINSON
Guy Grabowsky’s exhibition ‘Symbionts’ will be presented at STATION from 12 September to 10 October 2020 as part of PHOTO 2021’s expanded program. Kiron Robinson is curating an exhibition at Sarah Scout Presents for PHOTO 2021.
Guy Grabowsky is a Melbourne-based artist and photographer working with analogue photography. Grabowsky’s interest lies in the photographic medium—all aspects of its evolvement, its role in our shifting realities, how it ‘looks’ at us and how we perceive its usefulness. Grabowsky creates photographs with and without the camera, using unconventional and traditional analogue/digital techniques. Negatives are treated as found objects; the original narrative behind the moment of capture becomes irrelevant. Through intervention and grouping, each image is provided with a new narrative and conceptual framework. The work often tests Grabowsky’s perception of an unstable reality often present in the ubiquitous image. In Grabowsky’s images this ambiguous response continually evolves—the hand is present, causing destruction to reveal a new authenticity, a new Image. The emphasis is placed upon the photograph’s textural surface and the underlying resonances it points to. Here each photograph embodies two components: the image itself, plus the reflection, or thinking about the photographic medium.
Kiron Robinson is an artist who lives and works out of Melbourne. He loves photographs but does not trust them. He uses a number of photographic strategies in different mediums to interrogate the image. His work circulates around a set of ideas that he recognises in the photograph – belief and doubt in the ability to believe except through doubting. Since 2003 Robinson has exhibited his work widely both nationally and internationally. He has held recent solo exhibitions at Sarah Scout Presents and the Centre for Contemporary Photography. He has curated a number of exhibitions questioning the current photographic condition including at West Space and Benalla Art Gallery. His work is held in a number of public and private collections.
THURSDAY 24 SEPTEMBER, 6pm
PETA CLANCY
Peta Clancy is currently exhibiting in ‘The Burning World’ exhibition at Bendigo Gallery, on until 8 November 2020. This exhibition brings together major works by four leading Australian artists Hoda Afshar, Peta Clancy, Rosemary Laing and Michael Cook. It is part of the PHOTO 2021 expanded program.
Peta Clancy is a descendant of the Bangerang people from south-eastern Australia. Her photographs explore notions of the real and the perceived, and seek to challenge the viewer to focus on what might never have been noticed. She was awarded the 2018 Fostering Koorie Art and Culture grant from Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne, to research massacre sites on Dja Dja Wurrung and Bangerang Country. Her current work investigates these hidden histories in the landscape. Clancy lectures at Monash Art, Design & Architecture, Monash University, Melbourne. Her collaborative project with Helen Pynor, The Body is a Big Place (2011), explored organ transplantation and life–death thresholds.
Peta will be in conversation with Clare Needham (Curator, Bendigo Art Gallery).
MONDAY 28 SEPTEMBER, 6pm
MINSTREL KUIK
Minstel Kuik was exhibited at Horsham Regional Art Gallery earlier this year as part of the PHOTO 2021 expanded program. A virtual tour of the ‘She who has no self’ is now available online.
Chinese Malaysian artist Minstrel Kuik (b. 1976, Malaysia) left her fishing village hometown Pantai Remis at 18 years old. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Art degree majoring in painting in Taipei, Taiwan, she obtained her master’s degree in photography in Arles, France in 2006. With her multilingual education, the access to different cultures has come amid the first awareness about the politics of place, gender and identity, to which her migratory body has to constantly conform and adapt. Minstrel has exhibited at FotoFest, Houston; Photoquai, Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Higashikawa Photo Festival, Higashikawa, Japan; and at the Lishui Biennial Photography Festival in China. In 2017 she was part of a group show – Our Studio Selves at Artspace Ideas Platform in Sydney, following by another solo exhibition Old Wave Brings Empty Shells at Cross Art Projects in Sydney in 2018.
Minstrel will be in conversation with Alison Eggleton (Curator, Horsham Regional Art Gallery).