subject / citizen / people

... //

first, over black, we hear the sound of a light rain.

1. a (wo)man's voice

i'm not a poet. i've never moved anyone with my words.

then, still over black, we hear the sound of a sudden organic beat.

maybe that's why they chose me.

// ...

A /

Access
Aesthetics
Air
Alarm
Algorithm(ic)
Alternative
Art
Audience
Autumn

B /
Behavior
Biology
Blitzkrieg
Blind Spot
Body
Bureaucracy

C /
Calendar
Canon
Capitalism
Celebrity
Change
Chamaeleon
Choice
Choreography
Citizen(ship)
City
Civilization
Class
Collapse
Colonialism
Commodity
Communication
Community
Conservatism
Consumption
Contemporary
Copy
Country
Culture

D /

Deconstruction
Defenestration
Democracy
Descriptor
Desire
Development
Diaspora
Difference
Disability
Discipline
Discourse
Distribution

E /

Economy
Education
Elite
Ellipse
Emotion
Empirical
Environment / Ecology
Equality
Equinox
Ethnicity
Everyday
Evaluation
Evolution
Exodus
Experience
Euskera

F /

Faith
Family
Fashion
Feminism
Fetish
Food
Formation
Frame(s)
Freedom
Fundamentalism

G /

G-Force
Gay and Lesbian
Gender
Gene / Genetic
Generation
Gift
Globalization
Government

H /

Hailstorm
Heritage
History
Holocaust
Home
Human
Human Rights
Hybrid

I /

Identity
Ideology
Image
Indifference
Indigenous
Individual
Industry
Information
Intellectual
Interest
Intermezzo
Invent

J /

Justice
Java

K /

Karoshi
Knowledge

L /

Laïcité
Level
Liberalism
Logistics
Logarithm(ic)
Logo

M /

Management
Marginal
Market
Mass
Materialism
Mathematics
Media
Measure
Memory
Meridian
Metric
Method
Mobility
Modern
Mode
Moebius Strip
Movements
Multiculturalism

N /

Narrative
Nation
Nature
Network
Noise
Normal

O /

Objectivity
Oblique
Ontology
Organization
Original Sin
Other
Orientalism

P /

Panic

Participation
People
Person
Place
Political Correctness
Policy
Popular
Pornography
Postcolonialism
Postmodernism
Poverty
Power
Pragmatism
Privacy
Public

Q /

Quantity
Queer
Quality

R /

Race
Radical
Reason
Reform and Revolution
Relativism
Representation
Resistance
Risk
Rupture

S /

Sarajevo
Science
Script(s)
Season(s)
Secular
Self
Sense
Sexuality
Share(holder)
Sign
Sleep
Socialism
Society
Solstice
Sovereignty
Space
Spectacle
Stake(holder)
Strategy
State
Subject
Syncope
System

T /

Taste
Technology
Territory
Text
Theory
Therapy
Time
Tolerance
Topology
Tourism

U /

Ultra
Unconscious
Utopia

V /

Value
Virtual

W /

Water
Welfare
West, the
Work
Writing

X /

X
xxx
X-Chromosome

Y /

Yesterday
Y-Chromosome
Youth

Z /

Zenith

Zero
Zone

Rendition(s)

... //

Excerpt #1 /
From the earliest recorded history of the photographic encounter, Africa has made for a fascinating and elusive subject, at once strange, intoxicating, carnal, primitive, wild, luminous. At first the desire to record the exotic, mysterious beauty of the black continent may have provided the incentive to invent a kind of sport in which a hunterlike figure wielding congeries of instruments stalks a gamelike subject — suspended between an abyss of indeterminacy and plenitude — waiting to be literally captured. This early phase of the photographic sport (dominated by ethnographers, prospectors, speculators, prosecutors of the colonial enterprise) yielded a huge archive of visual tropes about Africa that have persisted in the popular imagination. Today, hunter and game remain more or less the same, except that the result has become not only outlandish but also has acquired a quality of myth impossible to dislodge from the real. In this latter phase, Africa has been transformed into a wasteland of the bizarre and outrageous.

No other cultural landscape has had a more problematic association with the photographic medium: its apparatus, various industries, orders of knowledge, and hierarchies of power. As already mentioned, the act of photographing Africa has often been bound up with a certain conflict of vision: between how Africans see their world and how others see that world. In a way, this is a clash of lenses, a struggle to locate and represent Africa by two committed but disparate sensibilities — one intensely absorbed in its social and cultural world, the other passing through it, fleetingly, on one assignment or another. The latter sensibility has come to represent specters that haunt Africa. It is constituted around an accumulation of myths. This photographic sensibility works on assumptions based not so much on what it sees but on a preordained, fragmented, and internalized view of the world Africans seem to occupy. This view feeds a phantom essence and releases it as a readymade canon of fascination and repulsion. The image of Africa that I am describing, and which has overwhelmed every other pictorial value, has been produced as much from processes of estrangement as from positions of engagement.

/ By Okwui Enwezor, ICP Adjunct Curator. The text belongs to the catalogue for the exhibition Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography and has been taken from icp.org, the image belongs to the movie la noche de los girasoles and is taken from the presskit for that movie.

// ...

le regard interieur vs. le regard exterieur

... //

Excerpt #2 /
I want us to direct attention to the multiple ways of representing African life and space, to enunciate forms of visual practice that open us up to the facts that we not only share the same space but also the same time. In other words, I am speaking about visual practices that recognize coevalness, that reach beyond the stock images that have endured until now as the iconography of the “abandoned” continent.

In light of this exhibition inquiry, how might the photographic apparatus — that is, any digital or mechanical, duplicating instrument — engage the continent's vast and complex visual world without resorting to the clichéd metaphors of the media's horror index? This inquiry is as much about photography as it is about representation. Wherever and whenever photography engages Africa, it invents a pathology of spectrality and transience. Each pathology in turn invents its own panacea: pity, infantilization, paternalism, or the reanimation of the grotesque. It could be said that photography's greatest accomplishment is the vast encyclopedia of cures that have followed each of its forays into the continent. Whether we are witnessing visual splendor or astounding civil disorder, Live Aid and other charity events will always be on the near horizon to intercede. This exhibition is not about any of that. It is not about disorder. Nor is it about the collapse of civility, nor genocidal wars. It is not a recapitulation of pathologies.

/ By Okwui Enwezor, ICP Adjunct Curator. The text belongs to the catalogue for the exhibition Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography and has been taken from icp.org , the images belongs to the movies hunger and waltz with bashir. they have been taken from the presskits for these movies. the bookcover of johnny mad dog has been found in a blog about bookcover design.

// ...

sur le corps et la blessure corporelle

... //

Excerpt #3 /
This exhibition is in part devised to ask pertinent questions about the role of images in the public narratives of the African self and spaces within a changing global image ecology. It is not centered on a specific dispute, nor is its critique simplistic. The exhibition comprises discreet, modest, and forceful propositions on how to look at Africa, how artists work with the tool of photography to trace the arc of a different social reality that is both deliberately pictorial and narrative in approach and at the same time questions the historical dependence on narratives of anomie. African artists and photographers are looking at the unfolding drama of contemporary life and experience in Africa with a fine-tuned alertness. They are examining and analyzing the dizzying processes of spatial transformation, massive transition, and social adaptation that make up the varied realities of diverse groups: urban and rural, formal and informal communities. The artists' penetrating insight provides the remarkable story of this project.

Each of the artists has either taken up a problematic or focused attention on social subjects. For instance, a number of artists explore the interstices of urban communities undergoing transformation, while others use very simple mechanisms of portraiture to spotlight the self-expression of individuals portrayed or deploy the artifice of fashion stylization to draw out values of individual identity. Overall, the works assembled here aid us in examining a different context of image making that is as African in its aesthetic intentions as in its ethical concerns. Given the prevailing, antiphotogenic gaze of these artists, the exhibition most certainly denies the viewer the violent spectacle of deprivation and depravity that has constituted the signature visual image of Africa. In fact, the works evidence a subtle yet substantive critique of such images. Not because there is no deprivation or depravity in contemporary Africa, but because the metaphors of violence and poverty cheapen our understanding of the cultural context. The paradox is that images of suffering — which function as a sort of shorthand for neither looking properly nor seeing Africans in normal human terms — do not ameliorate the disasters which they purportedly engage. On the contrary, they have compounded and skewed the photographic imperatives of a mediatized fascination with the continent's “abnormality” as the primal scene of global media's masochist pleasure, its unrelenting horror vacui. This is why quite often what the viewer encounters in the works produced by artists and photographers in this exhibition is a kind of antiphotogenic and antispectacular approach to making images.

/ By Okwui Enwezor, ICP Adjunct Curator.

// The text belongs to the catalogue for the exhibition Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography and has been taken from icp.org , the image belongs to the movie johnny mad dog and is taken from the presskit for that movie.

(la) mesure(s)

... //

Godard counts /

Histoire(s) du cinema does not reduce to propositions. Yet its investigation does discover at least three points:

The first is the visibility of history in the artifactual record. History is visible in exactly the way that cinema is: in and through shared perception, mutual attunements between monteur and audience, connoisseur and community. There are no hidden discourses or ideologies or Zeitgeister. On the contrary, this mode of knowledge is no less (and no more) intimate than your relation to your own hands.

The second point is the priority of montage to any historical project. Technical procedures of combination regulate knowledge of the past, an assertion that does not entail skepticism about the world but the open-ended possibility of its rediscovery. Against the case method of historical criticism, with its arrangement of artefacts into objects of study and supporting evidence, Godard insists that the principle of combination always awaits fresh finding, as a continent, a world, forever new: “Firstly we have to know the meaning of ‘plus’”. The most neglected aspects of historiography - connoiseurship and other technniques of evidence - are, precisely, the ones that count most.

The third point is the ethical implication of monteur and audience. Exactly because montage asks us for universal assent, exactly because the audience will not give it, asking, giving, and withholding come to constitute either community or catastrophy. Testing these rules of agreement is the essence of what Godard calls a politique.

/ By Richard Neer, from Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2007