By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, much contemporary photography and video embodies a melancholic longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice, and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media. On the occasion of the exhibition, select artists featured in Haunted discuss the themes of their work. Curators introduce the programs and receptions, including an exhibition viewing, with the artists follow.

In 2001, Walead Beshty (b. 1976, London) began a project documenting the abandoned Iraqi diplomatic mission in former East Berlin. In his own words, the site represented “a relic of two bygone regimes, unclaimable by any nation; a physical location marooned between symbolic shifts in global politics.” When exposure marks were furthermore left by airport x-ray machines on Beshty’s camera film, the artist realized the new set of ghostly traces on the images constituted the “core dialectic” of his investigation—a tension between what once was and what remains in the photographic artifact.

The Elaine Terner Cooper Education Fund Conversations with Contemporary Artists
$10, $7 members, FREE for students with RSVP
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