[spectre] (fwd) Intl Photography Exhibition Gjon Mili at the National Gallery of Kosovo

[Andreas Broeckmann]

September 03, 2015

e-flux <http://www.e-flux.com>

	


  National Gallery of Kosovo

sept3_kosovo_img.jpg <http://www.galeriakombetare.com/>
View of /Supply Lines: Photography And Logistics/, National Gallery of 
Kosovo, 2015. Photo: Jetmir Idrizi.

*14th International Photography Exhibition Gjon Mili*
*/Supply Lines: Photography And Logistics/*
7 August–7 October 2015

*National Gallery of Kosovo*
Agim Ramadani 60
Pristina
Kosovo

www.galeriakombetare.com <http://www.galeriakombetare.com/>

The National Gallery of Kosovo is pleased to present the 14th edition of 
the International Photography Exhibition Gjon Mili. /Supply Lines: 
Photography and Logistics/, curated by Richard Birkett, brings together 
20 artists selected from a national open call together with invited 
international artists.

The exhibition includes works by: Din Azizi, Martin Beck, Ardit Hoxha, 
Majlinda Hoxha, Genc Kadriu, Antoneta Kastrati & Casey Cooper Johnson, 
Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman, Meriton Maloku, John Miller, Atdhe Mulla, 
Armend Nimani, Alban Nuhiu, Marina Pinsky, Josephine Pryde, Lucy Raven, 
Carissa Rodriguez, Sean Snyder, Kushtrim Zeqiri.

The technologies of photographic image production and presentation play 
a central role in numerous sense-making systems that aspire to delineate 
our reality—from the medical sciences to forensics, space science to 
surveillance apparatuses, drone warfare to social media. From this 
perspective, photographic media sit at a junction between aesthetics, 
science, and logistics, where image-capture on one hand services 
speculative processes and experimental methodologies of knowledge 
production, and on the other feeds information to ever-more precise 
algorithmic instruments intent on smoothing infrastructural flows.

As writers Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have identified, the 
present-day dominance of the field of logistics in our everyday lives 
and work suggests the development of capital away from a reliance on the 
subject: "For capital the subject has become too cumbersome, too slow, 
too prone to error, too controlling, to say nothing of too rarified, too 
specialized a form of life… Logistics wants to dispense with the subject 
altogether. This is the dream of this newly dominant capitalist 
science." Under logistics, systems and logics are developed and refined 
with the aspiration to finitely gauge risk and map probabilities, as a 
means to maximize and standardize productivity independent of human 
contingencies. Meanwhile, strands of contemporary science increasingly 
service logistical capitalism not just by providing new instruments for 
data capture and analysis, but also through an isolation and 
quantification of neurological and biological capacities.

The art of the last century also turned towards organizational systems, 
to contest the primacy of the author and that of the art object itself. 
While strands of art have given over to the autonomous mediations of 
technology, the application and deconstruction of linguistic and 
semiotic systems formed the predominant driving force behind critical 
artistic practices of the latter half of the 20th century, rooted in an 
understanding of art's role as one of challenging the fixity of signs 
and interpretations that form distinct power relations. Alongside this 
critical attitude to institutionalism, however, contemporary art has 
itself become entwined with and mediated by logistics—a managed movement 
of artworks, artistic identities, ideas, discourses, and influences 
which shape its supposedly transnational disposition economically and 
socially, as well as geopolitically. With this in mind, contemporary 
artists' application of organizational systems and technologies within 
the production and materiality of artworks bears a different weight.

Trained as an engineer at MIT in the 1920s, the Albanian-American 
photographer Gjon Mili, along with fellow student Harold Edgerton, is 
well known for having pioneered the use of stroboscopic instruments in 
the production of photographs, capturing a sequence of actions in one 
image. The 2015 International Photography Exhibition Gjon Mili takes 
this practice, of capturing movement within a single still image, as a 
metaphor for questions around photography's relationship to science and 
logistics. How do artists using the medium today address its proximity 
to the analytical processes of the social and natural sciences? In what 
ways do they look towards photography's informational capacities and its 
usage within organizational systems to make visible what Keller 
Easterling has called "the power of infrastructure space"? And if 
logistics seeks to open supply lines beyond the subject, where does that 
place photography as an artistic medium in which technology approximates 
the biological capacities of sight and memory, as well as the ability to 
circulate and aggregate images?

With the support of Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Kosovo / 
Raiffeisen Bank




sept3_kosovo_logo.jpg

	e-flux
	311 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002, USA

-------------- next part --------------
Skipped content of type multipart/related