RYERSON IMAGE CENTRE
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
PAST EXHIBITIONS HUMAN RIGHTS HUMAN WRONGS WARNING: Please be aware, this exhibition contains photographs that may be disturbing to viewers due to the graphic or violent nature of the subject matter. Viewer discretion and parental guidance are advised. Featuring more than 300 original prints from the prestigious Black Star Collection, HUMAN RIGHTS HUMAN WRONGS begins circa 1945 and includes photographs of well-known Civil Rights Movement events such as the Selma to Montgomery March and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The exhibition also features images of the independence movements in many African countries, a selection of portraits of Nobel Peace Prize winners, and photographs, magazines and books which document protests, war and conflict from the Vietnam War to the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. The exhibition functions as a catalytic enquiry into photojournalistic practice, addressing the legacy of how photographs have historically functioned in raising awareness of international conflict. It critically considers the cultural meaning these photographs produce, how inhumane acts are rendered photographically for us to look at, and the visual legacy they leave behind. We see the wide dissemination of photographic images of humankind in abject, euphoric or violently explicit conditions. How do these images assist us in understanding the case for civil and human rights? Guest Curator Mark Sealy has a special interest in photography and its relationship to social change, identity politics and human rights. Since 1991 as director of Autograph ABP he has initiated the production of many publications, exhibitions and residency projects and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide. In 2002, he jointly initiated and developed a £7.96 million capital building project (Rivington Place), which opened in 2007 and developed in partnership with the Institute of International Visual Arts. He has written for several international photography publications, including Foam Magazine (Amsterdam), Aperture (New York) and Next Level (London). Published in 2002, Sealy’s book project published by Phaidon Press Limited entitled Different, focuses on photography and identity and is produced in partnership with Professor Stuart Hall. His most recent curated projects include the commissioning of The Unfinished Conversation a film-work by John Akomfrah on the political life of Professor Stuart Hall first staged at the Bluecoat Gallery as part of the Liverpool Biennial 2012. Roma-Sinti-Kale-Manush, a group show that examined the representation of Roma Communities across Europe was on display at Rivington Place (London) from May 25 to July 28, 2012. He has served as a jury member for several prestigious photography awards including the World Press Photo Competition. He has also guest lectured extensively throughout the UK and abroad including The Royal College of Art and has recently devised MA studies programs for Sotheby’s Institute of Art on global photography. Sealy is currently a PhD candidate at Durham Centre for Advanced Photographic Studies at Durham University, England. His research and curatorial practice focuses on photography and cultural violence. Presented by TD Bank Group. With additional funding the Paul J. Ruhnke Memorial Fund, the Howard and Carole Tanenbaum Family Charitable Foundation and Ryerson University. ............................................................................................................................................................................................ Alfredo Jaar:The Politics of Images Focusing on human rights, the Chilean-born, New York-based artist addresses political concerns and the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. His œuvre highlights ignored contemporary tragedies, such as genocides, epidemics and famines, and promotes cultural change. In his works “Searching for Africa in Life” (1996) and “From Time to Time” (2006), Alfredo Jaar displays covers of news magazines to analyze the lack of visibility and the visual clichés about Africa disseminated in Western culture. The artist’s three-channel video “We Wish to Inform You That We Didn’t Know” (2010), his most recent project on the genocide in Rwanda, acts as an epilogue to “The Rwanda Project, 1994-2000”, a series of twenty-five artworks developed to critique the world’s indifference and inaction to this mass murder. Alfredo Jaar: The Politics of Images is made possible with the generous support of the artist. ............................................................................................................................................................................................ Clive Holden: UNAMERICAN UNFAMOUS Is it un-American to be un-famous? Are Americans failures if they die without fame? Drawing from the Black Star Collection at Ryerson University, Clive Holden creates UNAMERICAN UNFAMOUS using the “un-famous” as an organizing principle in his selection of one hundred image details and faces. Plucked from obscurity, these people can be found in the backgrounds of famous photographs, or simply hidden in the depths of a photographic archive. At times they are literally seen over the shoulders of celebrities in the iconic photographs that capture the “American Century”. The work’s media tile construction is made with a hybrid adaptation of photographic, cinematic, and web tools. Its many cultural influences arise from a wide variety of media and genres as the work spans the divide between time-based and non-time-based art forms. It also uses film leader as raw material (the beginning and end pieces of film reels). With a complex series of randomizing algorithms, these film loops are juxtaposed and continually remixed with the “unsung human leaders” found in the Black Star Collection, as well as with photographs of local un-famous un-Americans nominated by members of the general public. The work will evolve over the course of the exhibition as more images are submitted via social media. ............................................................................................................................................................................................ Gemma Warren: Year Zero. A Prison With No Walls A reflection on the relationship between memory, trauma, past, and present, the work focuses specifically on the repercussions of the Khmer Rouge genocide, which took place throughout Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The landscape photographs in this series provide a visual framework as documents of present sites inhabited by traumatic histories. Incorporating direct quotes from survivors, Warren creates a dynamic that reveals a gap between the atrocities that were suffered and what the landscape fails to reveal. Similar to the photographs, video and audio are looped to display images and sounds specific to S-21 Tuol Sleng prison and Choeung Ek Killing Fields, placing the viewer directly in front of the sites where so many lost their lives. ............................................................................................................................................................................................ From the ArchiveJanuary 23 - April 14, 2013 Sheldon Levy, President of Ryerson University, is the first guest to make a selection of prints from the Black Star Collection. President Levy selected images by Civil Rights photographers Bob Fitch and Matt Herron, which will be on view from January 23 through April 14, 2013. ............................................................................................................................................................................................ Dominic Nahr: Captive State In August 2011, Dominic Nahr travelled to Mogadishu with Alex Perry (TIME’s Africa Bureau Chief) to document the famine in Southern Somalia. They found overwhelming suffering and death. Around 150,000 of the 2.8 million Somalis affected eventually starved to death. Almost as appalling was the knowledge that a US anti-terrorism policy unwittingly blocked aid to the famine areas for years. Perry writes, “if drought set the conditions for last year’s famine in East Africa, it was man who ensured it.” When Nahr and Perry returned the Mogadishu the following year, the improvements were tangible. Al-Shabab had been cleared from the city by an African Union force. But as Perry states, “if Mogadishu was enjoying its longest sustained peace in 21 years of civil war, you couldn’t mistake that for a return to normality.” ............................................................................................................................................................................................ Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection focuses on the Black Star Collection as seen through the eyes of internationally-renowned Canadian contemporary artists Stephen Andrews, Christina Battle, Marie-Hélène Cousineau, Stan Douglas, Vera Frenkel, Vid Ingelevics, David Rokeby and Michael Snow. Peggy Gale is an independent curator and writer whose texts on contemporary art, especially video art, have become artistic benchmarks. Born in Guyana in 1944, Gale studied at the University of Toronto and the Università degli Studi in Florence. She has published extensively, with essays in Video By Artists (1976, 1986), Mirror Machine: Video and Identity (1995) and Lectures obliques (1999), and texts in many museum catalogues. She was editor, among others, of Museums by Artists (with AA Bronson, 1983) and Video re/View: The (best) Source for Critical Writings on Canadian Artistsʼ Video (with Lisa Steele, 1996). Videotexts, a selection of her essays, was published in 1995. She has organized many exhibitions including: Videoscape (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974-1975); XIV Bienal Internacional de São Paulo (1977); Electronic Landscapes (National Gallery of Canada, 1989); the Biennale of the Moving Image (Madrid, 1990) and Tout le temps / Every Time (La Biennale de Montréal, 2000). Peggy Gale lives in Toronto. Popescu was previously the Deputy Director of the Goethe-Institut Toronto, where she managed the Gallery and Kinowelt Hall, organising international photography, video and new media-based exhibitions and film events. For more than 25 years she has been deeply involved with both Canadian and international artists and scholars in the visual arts, film, literature, music, cultural theory, history and philosophy. She is a co-founder of the European Union Film Festival and the International Experimental Film/Media Congress. She has served on multiple juries, has spearheaded numerous publications and has guest curated arts programs for galleries and international festivals in Canada and abroad.  ......................................................................................................................................................................................... The Art of the Archive The exhibition The Art of the Archive is built on the reoccurring and popular theme of photographic and video archives and is divided into three parts: uses of the archive, representation of the archive and aesthetics of the archive. The works of the "archival artists" (Hal Foster) gathered for this occasion combine two temporalities, the past and present, through reinterpretation and creative experience. The projects cover topics as diverse as the concepts of genealogy and family experiences, the evocation of childhood, the political history of the United States and the architectural standards of archival repositories. The appropriation of old objects and images, the representation of spaces devoted to these objects, or the playing with visual forms specific to the archive seem to respond to what Jacques Derrida called the "archive fever," an irrepressible desire to create a collective memory. The works in this exhibition come from current students and recent alumni from the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. This exhibition is curated by Dr. Gaëlle Morel, Curator at the Ryerson Image Centre. Morel received her PhD in the history of contemporary art from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, and she is a member of the editorial committee of the bilingual refereed journal Études photographiques. Morel was the guest curator of the Mois de la Photo in Montreal in 2009 and she has written essays that have appeared in a number of books and catalogues. ......................................................................................................................................................................................... Berenice Abbott: Photographs The Ryerson Image Centre is honoured to partner with the Jeu de Paume in presenting Berenice Abbott: Photographs in Paris and Toronto. Berenice Abbott: Photographs is organized by the Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto) and the Jeu de Paume (Paris), and presented in Toronto in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. ...................................................................................................................................................................................... Edward Burtynsky: Oil
Edward Burtynsky: Oil, is presented by the Ryerson Image Centre, Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, and Scotiabank Group, hosted at the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. The exhibition is an examination of one the most important subjects of our time by one of the most respected and recognized contemporary photographers in the world. The exhibition features 53 beautiful and provocative large-format photographs that explore the hotly-debated effects of oil extraction and our international dependency on the substance. With an unflinching eye, Burtynsky presents us with the reality of oil production as its role in our civilization undergoes massive transformation. ...................................................................................................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................................................................................................... This expansive collection was assembled at the Black Star photo agency in New York City over a period of 80 years. More than a quarter of a million photographs capture the notable figures, events and conflicts of the 20th century. As a result, these photographs form a complete media record and a compilation of memories that can be passed on to future generations. 50 Years of American Photojournalism: 1939-1989 is curated by Valérie Matteau and Judy Ditner.
...................................................................................................................................................................................... The photographs in Photo Narratives: Remembering the 20th Century are drawn from a collection of images, assembled over a period of eighty years at the Black Star photo agency in New York City. Chosen for this exhibition, these images have been used to form photo-stories of major historical events and developments of the 20th century. These photographs act as visual records of our past. While some may remember their impact when first published in newspapers and magazines, others will be seeing them for the first time. Regardless, these events, which affected and continue to affect the human psyche have inevitably become etched in our collective memory. The Hindenburg Zeppelin, the end of World War II, the bombing of Hiroshima, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Birmingham Campaign, the funeral of Malcolm X, the Kent State Massacre, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Cambodia, the building and tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and the Apollo space missions – these events marked the 20th century in ways which seemed inconceivable at the time, and yet now have become integral parts of our world history. By embracing a structure similar to that of magazine layouts made famous in North America by Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post, this exhibition returns the photographs to their original visual context, of a photographic sequence that can communicate a story. In these visual arrangements, the photographs speak to us without having to rely on extensive text, returning the authority to the images. Accompanied by historical quotes of the day, the photo-stories in the exhibition speak to a Western history of the world in the 20th Century. Photo Narratives: Remembering the 20th Century is curated by Valérie Matteau.
...................................................................................................................................................................................... The exhibition The Celebrity Persona explores the notion of the constructed portrait using photographs from Ryerson’s Black Star Historical Black & White Photography Collection. The images in the exhibition speak to the concept of the constructed nature of photographic portrayal while paying particular attention to the staged celebrity persona, as well as the less controlled moments captured by the camera which provide insight into an individual’s personality and character. The concept of the ‘objective’ image has been fundamental to photojournalism since its early beginnings; through it news is conveyed in a way that would not be possible through the written word. By delving into areas such as politics, science, music, religion and the arts, and in keeping with the character of the collection, The Celebrity Persona proposes to examine portraiture from the photojournalistic perspective.
...................................................................................................................................................................................... For those who remember these events, the collection serves to confirm their memories and is, in addition, a resource of inestimable value. An immense drama is presented in these pictures with all the clarity of the camera lens, the veracity of the optical enlargement and the immediacy of the hand-held camera. For those who do not remember the events described by the Black Star pictures, and for those in future generations, the collection is an engaging portrait of social change and struggle and a moral lesson of no small significance. The Kennedy and Johnson presidencies in the United States are often seen as a time of great idealism and accomplishment, in stark contrast to racial violence, political assassination and a pointless war; and the photographs bear this out. The Black Star Collection at Ryerson University: Highlights is curated by Judy Ditner.
|
RYERSON IMAGE CENTRE - 33 GOULD STREET, TORONTO, ONTARIO M5B 2K3 | 416.979.5164 Contact Us | Hours | Admission |
Bookmark with:
