- 2024
- 12/02/2024
current
When one visits the rooms dedicated to Velásquez in the Museum of Prado, it is extraordinary how portraits of kings and those of jesters and peasants are laid side-by-side. The nobility and dignity given to the lower members of the court exemplifies an early example of a revolution in the politics of representation. In the antipodes of this example, we analyse how the campaign of the millionaire Michael Bloomberg to be the Democratic Candidate for the 2020 elections hired companies to produce nonsense memes and digital propaganda. Our hypothesis is that on the center of its strategy the goal was to create an image of Bloomberg that besides viral would be relatable and humorous. The article overviews the evolution of the portrait as an element of political of representation and reflects on how the development of modern and contemporary art transformed the art of political portraiture. Furthermore it deliberates on the two-way appropriation of representation techniques between art movements and political movements.
- Keywords: aestheticization of politics, Diego Velázquez, digital propaganda, Michael Bloomberg, politics and aesthetics, politics of representation
João Pedro Amorim is a visual artist, a PhD candidate and researcher at the Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR), with a FCT fellowship. His papers have been published in indexed journals (Scopus and WoS). His film on shadows and their names was premiered in Doclisboa 2020. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Digital Creativity Centre at the School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, where he coordinated the communication team and the residency program in partnership with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. He holds a Master in Contemporary Artistic Practices (Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto) and a Bachelor in Communication Sciences (University of Porto). Between 2014 and 2015 he collaborated with the collective Caucaso Factory (Bologna/ Berlin) in several film projects as assistant director.
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India’s Independence from the colonial rule saw the nation’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru emerge as a powerful visual presence. At the peak of his popularity, in June 1955, he made a highly publicised 16-day visit to the USSR. This visit, made in the backdrop of the Cold War and the impending Big Four Conference, was covered in detail by the Indian and foreign press, as well as both government’s official photographers and camerapersons. Paper addresses an official album made after this iconic visit to investigate the role of photography within India-Soviet diplomatic networks. Casting Nehru as the Master persona, it delves into the function of photography in recasting his image as an international traveller, a crusader for peace, a negotiator, and a friend of the Soviet. Considering India’s and Soviet’s differing political stance and international position in that period, the article questions what does the presence of these official photographs reveal about emerging trans-national networks and if there were there any deviations in this careful reconstruction of the Master and his ally.
- Keywords: diplomatic visit, Nehru, photography album, Soviet Union
Krupa Desai is a PhD scholar at the School of Art, Birkbeck. Her doctoral thesis is on the social history of photographic practices in India. Her work looks at photography around industrialisation, development, and transnational diplomatic exchange, during the Nehruvian period. Her PhD is supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation and the Birkbeck School of Arts Post Graduate Research Scholarship.
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Financial domination (findom) is a fetish practice in which a submissive derives erotic pleasure from sending money to a dominant or a cashmaster. Cashmasters produce photographs meant to elicit this desire in cashslaves, essentially arousing the desire to send money. This essay approaches this emergent genre of seemingly self-promotional photography as a genre of photographic performativity (Levin 2009). Rather than the desire to capture or represent (Batchen 1999), these images evidence a choreography of photographic performativity including both masters (as makers) and slaves (as viewers). Though the compliance with form and economic practice tempts the interpretation that masters are now slaves, this essay suggests that these images invite performances of domination, submission, and critique into wider performatives of arousal and elicitation. What critics and social analysts perceive as power (economic, erotic, or otherwise) are, in fact, desire at its seams, in the process of active and cooperative composition.
- Keywords: critique, desire, fetish, financial domination, masculinity, photography and performative
nel yang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Their research engages the areas of ordinary finance, models of subjectivity (self, user, analyst), the semiotics of desire, and experimental ethnography. Current projects include investigations of digitally mediated transaction (of which findom is one), subjectivity-models in the field of user research (UX), and Taiwanese claw machines (娃娃機). Other media they work with include free verse, “lyric ethnography”, 35mm (color), and digital performatives (tweets).
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The deadline for contribution proposals (150-word abstracts and/or visuals) is April 28, 2022. The deadline for the finished contributions from accepted proposals is July 4, 2022. Please send proposals via the online form or contact us directly at editors(at)membrana.org.
- 2022
- 18/02/2022
The deadline for contribution proposals (150-word abstracts and/or visuals) is April 28, 2022. The deadline for the finished contributions from accepted proposals is July 4, 2022. Please send proposals via the online form or contact us directly at editors(at)membrana.org.
- 2022
- 18/02/2022
- Vol. 5, no. 1
- 2020
- 05/04/2021
- Vol. 5, no. 1
- 2020
- 04/04/2021
Open Access
Although the interpretations of Koštrun’s works and his entire opus are undeniably multifaceted and open to different interpretations and readings, the article suggests that all his word does share a common meditative stillness and sense of solitariness. Peter Koštrun’s opus lingers on the intersection of pristine nature and cultural landscape, on the intersection of the impact of humans on the environment and the insignificance of the individual in relation to nature. Even if Koštrun’s photographic motifs allude to archaism and romanticism, and are at first glance connected to the tradition of photographic pictorialism, they are in their essence distinctly modern, attached to the reality of the here and now. His expression is completely non-narrative in the classic sense of photographic representation, as the images do not tell a linear story, but are dedicated to visual language, which is (as opposed to the written word) always ambivalent and layered.
- Keywords: Anthropocene, landscape, melancholy, mortality, nature photography
Miha Colner (born 1978) has graduated from Art History and works as a freelance curator and art critic. Colner works as a curator and programme coordinator at the International Centre of Graphic Arts / Svicarija Creative Centre in Ljubljana. He is also active as a publicist, specialised in photography, printmaking, artists’ moving image and various forms of (new) media art. In the period 2006-2016 he was a curator at Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography, Ljubljana. Since 2005 he has been a contributor of newspapers, magazines, specialist publications, and his personal blog, as well as part-time lecturer. In 2006, he became a member of the project group Station DIVA at the SCCA Institute in Ljubljana, which is creating an archive and conducts research on Slovenian video art. In 2007, he co-curated and co-organized Break 2.4 festival, held biannually by K6/4 Institute. Since 2005, he has also worked as an art critic and a regular member of the cultural department at Radio Študent – he is an editor of the show on contemporary art Art-Area. He is also a regular external contributor to the daily newspaper Dnevnik and to the magazines Fotografija and Art-Words. He occasionally contributes to other specialist magazines on fine art and music, such as Maska, Forum, Časopis za kritiko znanosti, Flash, Folio, Zarez, Art Kontura, Frakcija (Croatia), Foto dokumenti (Serbia), Flaneur, Cluster (Great Britain), and Sculpture Network (USA).
He lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Peter Koštrun (1979, Ljubljana, Slovenia) graduated from Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where he currently teaches at the Department of Photography. He has been exhibiting at home as well as abroad since 2003. Koštrun is a master of landscape photography known for his depiction of empty and deserted landscapes as well as his refined selection of framing and light. He is less interested in the documentary dimension of the land as he approaches the genre conceptually. His works contain a subtle atmosphere that evokes a feeling of something greateror even immortal. He lives and works in Brnica near Celje. Recent solo exhibitions include Moments, Mottard & Jenray, Liège (2012) in Belgium; The Time is Now, Photo Gallery Lang, Samobor in Crotatia (2012), Singularity, Photon Gallery in Vienna, Austra (2014) and Premonition, Center for Contemporary Arts Celje, Slovenia (2016). Koštrun has shown his work in many group exhibitions at home and abroad, including Almost Spring, 100 Years of Slovene Art at the Maribor Art Gallery (2012), as well as in one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary landscape photography, Sense of Place at the Bozar Expo in Brussels (2012), and the exhibition Land / City / Real / Imagined at Diemar / Noble Gallery in London (2011). His most recent exhibitions are After all, Cellar Gallery, Kraków, Poland (2016) and Premonition, Photon Gallery Vienna, Austria (2019). Koštrun’s works can be found in the Essl collection in Vienna and in the collection of the Cabinet of Slovenian Photography in the Museum of Gorenjska in Kranj.
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Urška Savič (1992) is a critic and journalist active in the fields of visual arts and cultural politics, working also as a photographer and radio artist. She finished her BA in photography at FAMU (Prague, 2014) on the topic of collage and photo-montage and has obtained her MA at the Department of Sculpture at ALUO (Ljubljana), focusing on archiving practices in contemporary art. She was a residency artist at the Centre for Digital Arts in Holon, Israel (2015), and did an internship at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy (2015). Since 2017, she is an active participant of the cultural redaction at Radio Študent, one of Europe’s oldest and strongest non-commercial, alternative radio stations. There, she has been a curator of an open radio (art-theory) research platform R A D A R since 2019.
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The article analyzes the artistic process of the Berlin-based photographer Vanja Bučan, who always manages to maintain at least some recognizable expression despite her varied approaches. Her works are visually rich, carrying complex meanings and associations. She chooses not to directly reflect the collective and the individual everyday life but depicts universal existentialist motifs where the social perspective is usually shown through metaphors and allegories. The centerpiece of her work is the relationship between culture and nature and between humans and their environment, as well as the ontology of image in mass media circulation. Her photography requires a considerable degree of cerebral activity and intuition in order to sense some of the fundamental questions of humankind in the Anthropocene.
- Keywords: Anthropocene, art photography, photographic mise-en-scene, representation of nature
Miha Colner (born 1978) has graduated from Art History and works as a freelance curator and art critic. Colner works as a curator and programme coordinator at the International Centre of Graphic Arts / Svicarija Creative Centre in Ljubljana. He is also active as a publicist, specialised in photography, printmaking, artists’ moving image and various forms of (new) media art. In the period 2006-2016 he was a curator at Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography, Ljubljana. Since 2005 he has been a contributor of newspapers, magazines, specialist publications, and his personal blog, as well as part-time lecturer. In 2006, he became a member of the project group Station DIVA at the SCCA Institute in Ljubljana, which is creating an archive and conducts research on Slovenian video art. In 2007, he co-curated and co-organized Break 2.4 festival, held biannually by K6/4 Institute. Since 2005, he has also worked as an art critic and a regular member of the cultural department at Radio Študent – he is an editor of the show on contemporary art Art-Area. He is also a regular external contributor to the daily newspaper Dnevnik and to the magazines Fotografija and Art-Words. He occasionally contributes to other specialist magazines on fine art and music, such as Maska, Forum, Časopis za kritiko znanosti, Flash, Folio, Zarez, Art Kontura, Frakcija (Croatia), Foto dokumenti (Serbia), Flaneur, Cluster (Great Britain), and Sculpture Network (USA).
He lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Vanja Bučan (1973) is a photographer who constantly transitions between documentation driven narration and directed images. In doing so, she raises the universal issue about the relationship between humans and nature. In 2010, she graduated from the Dutch Royal Academy of Art in Deen Haag and has been working as an independent artist ever since. She actively takes part in international festivals of photography and exhibits in many institutions. She lives and works in Berlin.
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Jasna Jernejšek (born 1982) holds a BA in Cultural Studies and an MA in Media and Communication Studies from the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Since 2012 she is an editor of radio programme on contemporary visual arts Art-Area at Radio Student. She is a regular contributor to Fotografija magazine. Since 2013 she collaborates as project manager and curator with gallery Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography and with festival Photonic Moments – Month of Photography. She lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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