Residency at The Artists Press

2000

Granthaalayah Publications and Printers, 2023

This paper focuses on the contribution of woman visual artist, printmaker Shakuntala Kulkarni from Bombay School who is breaking forms of artwork from restricted spaces to multi mediums and technologies. Artist Shakuntala Kulkarni's thought process and experiences give an overview on her socially engaged art practice by using contemporary technologies of print making as well as combinations of arts and craft in works. This paper will provide relevant narratives like film, video, drawing, painting and print making that emerges in her work from artistic thought process and journey of the artist. Artist works against the backdrop of a growing movement to bridge the gender gap are timely and on point with a focus powerful expression on unique modes, methods even process through which she addresses and engage with society, politics, history, emotions and environment of contemporary times and becoming part of the global international art scene.

2005

Leah King-Smith, Buttons (from Beyond Capture series), archival inkjet on cotton rag When the discourse surrounding archival ethnographic photography came under the control of Indigenous artists and writers in the 1980s and 90s, modes of representing and deconstructing Aboriginality moved out of the hands of white Australia for the first time. In her Patterns of Connection series (1995), Leah King-Smith was one of many contemporary Australian artists to engage with 19th century ethnographic archival photography. This recombinant, 'Indigenous' media art, colliding with the visual culture of Australia's colonial past, did much to reveal the mediated nature of Indigenous oppression and present a cogent visual history of the camera's constructions of whiteness.

Photographs of artists reside in an ambiguous space between subject and object: they are at once a document, a printed record of an artistic act by the photographer (a work of art), and an image, a tonal rendering of a body that once was there (an artist). The artists represented within the unique sub-genre of “photos of artists by artists” are similarly marked by ambiguity, dually positioned as subject and object, maker and image. Yet unlike in other media, such as painting or sculpture, where the surface of the model is always reinterpreted through the hands of the artist, in the photograph the subject dictates their own representation, in that the camera captures a momentary look, flinch, or gesture produced solely through their actions. The photographer may direct, but ultimately the subject determines his or her own performance, which shifts the position of authorship and raises the question: is the photograph a work of art by the photographer (the labor of making) or by the artist in the photograph (the labor of posing)? I suggest that it is both, for the game of photography changes when the subject in front of the lens also identifies as an artist; the institutional binary of artist/model no longer holds. The question is further complicated when viewing photographs of female artists taken by male artists, a relationship already steeped in a long art historical tradition of men making images (out) of women. For example, Man Ray’s photographs of Méret Oppenheim have been read as pure visual objectification of the female artist, as have Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. Yet this narrow interpretation denies agency to the women artists represented in the work. I aim to position the photographs of Oppenheim and O’Keeffe closer to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Louise Bourgeois, which exudes a sense of confidence and self-knowledge by a woman who has determined her own performance not solely as object, but also as subject.

June e technical developments of the last two decades have changed our relationships with photographic images -may they be moving or still, situated in artistic or non-artistic contexts. While in most cases the increased ease of production and distribution was met with enthusiasm, for artists the shear amount and fast pace of digital images presents a challenge. To illustrate this point Dutch art director, collector, curator, and artist Erik Kessels has allegedly printed each photo uploaded to Flickr within a single day for his installation Hrs in Photos. e spectacular installation was shown several times since its rst instantiation in -usually at photography venues or festivals -and we can imagine how photographers encounter it with both compulsion and despair. In another reaction to the lost value of photographic prints Kelley Walker decided to o er his piece Chess Players from as a digital le and concedes the owner the right to modify, print, and display it in any desired form. In a recent gallery show in Berlin the work hence was simply crumpled up on the oor. Images are disappearing as it seems -at least for artists. One strategy to face this situation is what some call the 'networked image, ' that is the assembly of images and people in social media as demonstrated by Amalia Ulman in her Instagram performance Excellences & Perfections. Over a period of several months Ulman blended her artist persona with a stereotyped social media addict who pretended to optimize her photographic appearance also by use of plastic surgery. She thus showed how the border between image and body has blurred. ese are just three more or less arbitrarily chosen examples that demonstrate the precarious state of photographic images or the medium of photography in ne arts as it is debated in post-photography discourses. Of course, artists did not need to wait for digital photography and the internet to reject the production of new images in view of those that already exist. But when Rosalind Krauss described the destructive energy of photography as a 'theoretical object' -i.e. the in ltration of ne arts with photography's logic of reproduction etc. -she did not yet imply the possibility that this would nally also strike back on photography as an artistic medium.

ICA Bulletin, 2015

Ahead of our Friday Salon Machine Divas: The Archive, exploring early feminist media art practices, Dimitra Gkitska spoke to Kathy Rae Huffman for the ICA Bulletin. A curator, writer and networker, with a special focus on issues concerning the history and development of media art, Huffman has been active in the field of media art since the early 1980s. DG: Tell us about your first involvement with media art. How does it relate to your curatorial practice? KRH: My curatorial practice developed in the late 1970s from my-let's call it obsession-with video art.

International Symposium PRINTMAKING AT/BEHIND THE EDGE, 2021

I believe that we are living an explosion of printmaking as a totally fertile visual language which is continuously evolving, through new narratives and a vast range of innovative procedures. In the light of new social, political, ecological, historical and religious circumstances, the artist becomes a spectator and an actor, choosing his own personal language to express himself. Printmaking has a preeminent position in this contemporary cultural scene and could be considered a phenomenon, reaching the limits of a new religion, with a continuously increasing number of faithful followers among visual artists. Temples, where printmaking today is a matter of research and continuous evolution, are all Art Institutions, Colleges of Arts, Faculties of Fine Arts and Universities worldwide, well known for their printmaking departments, international workshops and printmaking residencies. https://www.grafickikolektiv.org/gks/html/en/simpozijum_naslovna_eng.php

Studio Potter, 2020

International Design Journal (Print), 2021