Please Pay Attention Please

2019

The perception and reading of a photograph are determined by, and conditioned through, the placing of the photograph within a specific context. At the level of perception, the determination functions through the cultural/historical context inherent in the referential quality of the image itself. By its nature, the literal message of the photograph is transparent, as here " the relationship of signifieds to signifiers is not one of 'transformation' but of 'recording.' " 1 At the level of reading, the production of meanings is conditioned by the onlooker's cultural background, and by the context of the photograph's presentation. Whether encountered in a museum gallery, a photo album, a book, or a magazine – and whether in printed form or projected on a screen, the photograph is usually accompanied by a written text that qualifies our viewing experience and channels it within the parameters of authorial intention. While intended to meet the viewer's expectation for factual, historical, 'objective' information, this metatext often reduces the range of possible associative interpretations, and restrains the connotative field of the image. This paper addresses works by two artists that propose an alternative way of contextualizing photography. Through the process of embedding still photographs in their films, these artists place the artifacts at the center of their filmic discourse, and thus open a terrain fertile for a practice of inter-mediality. We are interested in the filmmakers' ability to trace and enhance the qualities of photographic and filmic by creating an articulation that allows for a symbiotic rather than hierarchical relationship, by shaping a context in which the two media redefine and complement each other, rather than one of competition and displacement. Alina Predescu 1 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (Lonodn: Fontana Press, 1977), p.44.

Space and Culture, 2018

Cinema, arguably the time-based medium most synonymous with modernity, is also an art form of place: cinema records place in time and, in the best circumstances, stores it through time. If, as Michel de Certeau remarked, " space is a practiced place, " then cinema is the memory of that practice; it is the archive of that transformation. Cinema, in other words, " emplaces time. " Moreover, because of its physical properties, film is also an archival object whose very existence is challenged by the passing of time. In recent years, the ways in which cinema emplaces time have become the subject of a dual contemplation on the part of a generation of photographers whose projects re-photograph cinema's loci, from movie palaces to film locations. This article investigates the relationship between film the work of three " cinematic pilgrims " : British artist Michael Lightborne, whose 2012 installation Interval (After Intervals) included photographs of the locations for Peter Greenaway's 1969 short film Intervals alongside the original film; Christopher Moloney's ongoing project FILMography, in which the Canadian photographer travels the world bringing printed reproductions of film stills to the sites where they were originally shot and then re-photographs them in situ; and the travel blog Fangirl Quest by the Finnish Tiia Öhman and Satu Walden, a photographer and a travel expert, respectively, who re-photograph a location while displaying the related movie scene on a tablet practice (a practice they call " sceneframing "). These projects underscore cinema's innate relationship with place, while they also highlight the changes that occurred in the time that intervened since production, revealing the instability of the filmic object as one of time as well as in time. Man does not end with the limits of his body or the area comprising his immediate activity. Rather is the range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating from him temporally and spatially.

Projects/Processes: The Personal is Political: Photo, Film and Performance Archives Vol I Serendipity Arts Foundation and HarperCollins Publishers, 2019

A personal documentary about living with illness, the film traces the relationship of the artist to thalassemia in his sister Nan, and AIDS in his partner Tim. This narrative of love and loss is set against a background of colonialism in the Caribbean and the reverberations of migration.

"As Slowly as Possible": A Symposium of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 24-26 May 2018 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam The 2018 international Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present symposium will be hosted by the CLUE+ Interfaculty Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and dedicated to exploring notions of slowness.

Modernism/modernity, 2010

Outskirts Feminisms Along the Edge, 2007

Using the logic of the absence-presence of light (through mimicking shadows and remnant ghosts) in the images/time-images of Gail Jones' Sixty Lights and Jane Campion's The Piano, this paper attempts to frame time such that the overexposed past becomes the blank page of the future. I propose that history, when viewed in the light of the present, enables a truly open future for female and postcolonial subjects. It is important, therefore, to think of the blank page emerging from the overexposed image not as symbolic of a psychoanalytic lack of the phallus, but as an open response in the wake of the excesses of phallogocentrism and Eurocentrism. Such a conception of the past and the future in terms of an excess and a lack that do not constitute a dialectical relationship requires a re-visioning of the Hegelian view of time as "linear, progressive, continuing, even, regulated, and teleological" (Grosz, 1995: 98). Following Bergson and Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz problematizes the common philosophical view that history is the basis of learning from the past, and the idea that by reflecting on it, we can improve the future:

The Still/Moving Image: Cinema and the Arts, 2010

"The usefulness of this book lies above all in the judicious and felicitous choice of contrasting complementary case studies, each of which is given a highly original historical placement and subjected to a complex multi-layered historical hermeneutics," Professor Thomas Elsaesser writes. What happens when we suddenly feel that a moving image is being slowed down or halted? Nowadays it happens all the time in the cinema and the art galleries. A basic question of life - is it still or is it moving? - here urgently addresses emotional and aesthetical issues as well as questions concerning media. The still/moving image compels a new sensibility. (from Saarbrucken: Lamber Academic Publishing, 2010)

Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theatre, Media, vol. 10, issue 2 (2013) (peer-reviewed)

The essay examines a paradox of visuality in video art and photography by addressing a number of issues such as manipulation, quotation, remediation, unstable mediums, artistic hybrid discourse, and cross-referentiality. I propose the concept of In Between Frames as the main theoretical instrument to analyze this paradox. The term In Between Frames describes the median zone in arts and media productions, the “interstice” that breaks with appearances and conventions, that defies any predictable accounts and established principles related to medium, technology, cultural patterns, or power configurations. Crucial in defining the conceptual and functional dimensions of being In Between Frames is the time factor. The artworks discussed here—Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) and Adad Hannah’s “video stills”—opt for an atypical temporality, one that undermines not only the narrative, understood in the traditional sense as a flow of sequences in time, but also—and this is my main argument here—the very definition of their own medium (photography and video, respectively). Undermining, as I will demonstrate, is not simply an act of negation, but rather a process of remediation: photography turns into film, and video aspires to the condition of photography—a way to recuperate, reevaluate, recite and recycle a medium by turning into its opposite.