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Lecture: Curating Conflict

Saturday 8 August 2015
12—1pm

Gold coin donation
No bookings required**

Join Daniel Palmer in conversation with Tate Modern curator Shoair Mavlian and artists Christopher Stewart and Esther Teichmann on the curation of their two respective exhibitions and publications relating to photography and conflict – Conflict, Time Photography (Tate Modern and Tate Publishing 2014) and Staging Disorder (University of the Arts London and Black Dog Publishing London 2015). Both exhibitions approached the photography of conflict from a temporal perspective – that of aftermath or anticipation. Shoair Mavlian will also discuss the Tate’s recent collection and exhibition activities relating to photography.

Copies of both books will be available to purchase after the talk.

Shoair Mavlian is a curator at Tate Modern, London, focusing primarily on photography, working on the research and delivery of exhibitions and displays across Tate Modern and acquisitions for the international collection. She co-curated the major exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography (Tate Modern, London, 2014) and the collaborative exhibition Project Space: A Chronicle of Interventions (Tate Modern, London and TEOR/éTica, Costa Rica, 2014). She has also worked on many of the photography displays of the permanent collection across Tate Modern including New Documentary Forms (2011), Harry Callahan (2013), Charlotte Posenenske and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (2014) and Close Up: Identity and the Photographic Portrait (2015).

Daniel Palmer is Associate Dean of Graduate Research and teaches in the Art History & Theory Program at MADA. His publications include Twelve Australian Photo Artists (Piper Press, 2009) co-authored with Blair French, Digital Light (Open Humanities Press, 2015) edited with Sean Cubitt and Nate Tkacz, and The Culture of Photography in Public Space (Intellect 2015), edited with Anne Marsh and Melissa Miles. He is working on an ARC-funded research project with Martyn Jolly around photography curating.

Christopher Stewart is Associate Professor in Photography at the University of Technology Sydney in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building. He has exhibited widely including at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. His work is featured in photographic surveys including The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Thames and Hudson and 100 European Photographers, EXIT Madrid.

Esther Teichmann is an artist and writer and recent group and solo exhibitions have included InAppropriation at the Houston Centre of Photography and Moonswimmers at the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum Mannheim in Germany. In 2014, she was the recipient of the Levallois Award and the subsequent exhibition Fractal Scars, Salt Water and Tears was shown in Paris and in London. Her work is featured in important survey publications including In Our World: New Photography from Britain edited by Filippo Maggia, 100 New Artists edited by Francesca Gavin, Laurence King and Phaidon’s Looking at Photographs by David Campany. She is a Senior Lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London and a lecturer at the Royal College of Art in London.

About the projects

Conflict, Time, Photography
From the seconds after a bomb is detonated to a former scene of battle years after a war has ended, this moving exhibition focuses on the passing of time, tracing a diverse and poignant journey through over 150 years of conflict around the world, since the invention of photography. In an innovative move, the works are ordered according to how long after the event they were created from moments, days and weeks to decades later. The result is the chance to make never-before-made connections while viewing the legacy of war as artists and photographers have captured it in retrospect.

Staging Disorder
Staging Disorder considers the contemporary representation of the real in relation to photography, architecture and modern conflict. The exhibition and book includes selected images from seven photographic series that were made independently of each other – Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s Chicago, Beate Geissler & Oliver Sans’ personal kill, Claudio Hils’ Red Land Blue Land, An-My Lê’s 29 Palms, Richard Mosse’s Airside, Sarah Pickering’s Public Order and Christopher Stewart’s Kill House. The works by these artists provoke a series of questions concerning the nature of truth as it manifests itself in contemporary photographic practice.

Supported by Monash University Art Design & Architecture and University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Building.