SymposiumEncounters with the African Archive

The Walther CollectionNew York University

University College London

Distance and DesireEncounters with the African Archive

A three-part exhibition series on photography from Southern Africa, Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive presents rarely before seen portraits, albums, cartes de visite, and books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The exhibitions stage a dialogue between eth-nographic visions and contemporary engagements with archival imagery and feature recent work by African and African American artists. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the archive, reimagining its poetic and political dimensions, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The series is curated by Tamar Garb.

The Walther Collection Project Space, New York

Part I: Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-CroninSeptember 13 – November 17, 2012

Part II: Contemporary ReconfigurationsNovember 30, 2012 – March 9, 2013

Part III: Poetics and PoliticsMarch 22 – May 18, 2013

The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African ArchiveJune 8, 2013 - May 18, 2014

The Walther Collection is dedicated to researching, collecting, exhibiting, and publishing modern and contemporary photography and video art. The collection was founded in the traditions of European and American photography and has expanded to incorporate works across regions, periods, and artistic sensibilities, giving particular focus to artists working in Africa and Asia. Based in Neu-Ulm, Germany and New York, the collection is currently engaged in a multi-year examination of African photography and video art through the themes of portraiture, landscape, and the historic archive.

The Walther Collection Project Space 526 West 26th Street, Suite 718New York, NY 10001+1 212 352 0683contact@walthercollection.comOpening HoursWednesday – Saturday, 12pm – 6pm

www.walthercollection.comwww.facebook.com/thewalthercollection

The Walther CollectionReichenauerstrasse 2189233 Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany+49 731 176 9143info@walthercollection.comOpening Hours by Guided TourThursday – Sunday, 11am – 5pm

Unknown photographer, Elizabeth and Jan van der Merwe, Johannesburg, c. 1900, from Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950, 1997

Zanele Muholi, Ms Le Sishi I, Glebelands, Durban, from Beulahs, 2010

Unknown photographer, Portrait of Kgama III, South Africa, early 20th century

Symposium Program

9:30am Artur Walther and Tamar Garb: Welcome and Introductions

Session 1 – Presentations Deborah Willis, Chair

Christraud Geary: Zulu Mothers Traveling Around the World: The Postcard and the African Archive Michael Godby: Change without Changing: The Ethnography of A.M. Duggan-Cronin’s The Bantu Tribes of South Africa Hlonipha Mokoena: Being Zulu: A History in Portraits John Peffer: The Subject of Agency, from Native Studies to White Weddings: A Genealogy of Portraiture and Photography in South Africa

Questions and Discussion Jennifer Bajorek, Respondent

12:30pm Lunch

1:30pm Session 2 – Presentations Tamar Garb, Chair

Salah Hassan: Beyond the Ethnographic: Abjection in the Archive Erin Haney: Portrait Index Riason Naidoo: Are South African photographers re-inscribing the old myths of the continent for a foreign audience? Gabi Ngcobo: I’m Not Who You Think I’m Not Chika Okeke-Agulu: Happy Survival! Photography and the Postcolonial Condition

Questions and Discussion Awam Amkpa, Respondent

4:45pm Closing Remarks

5:30pm Public reception at The Walther Collection Project Space 508 West 26th Street, Suite 718

Encounters with the African ArchiveNovember 10, 2012New York UniversityAwam Amkpa is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He received a BA in Dramatic Arts

from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, an MA in Drama from Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria, and a PhD in Drama from the University of Bristol, England. Amam is the author of Theatre and Postcolonial Desires and the forthcoming Archetypes, Stereotypes and Polytypes: Theatres of the Black Atlantic. He is the curator of the international traveling exhibition Africa: See You, See Me.

Jennifer Bajorek is a lecturer in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University. She holds a BA in English from Princeton University, an MA in Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from University of California, Irvine. Jennifer is the author of the forthcoming book Photography and Decolonial Imagination in Africa and she is a contributor to Theory, Culture & Society, Aperture, and Critical Interventions.

Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London. She holds a BA from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town and a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Garb is the curator of Land Marks/Home Lands: Contemporary Art from South Africa at Haunch of Venison Gallery, London (2008) and Figures and Fic-tions: Contemporary South African Photography at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2011).

Christraud Geary is Teel Senior Curator of African and Oceanic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received a PhD in African Studies and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Prior to the MFA, Geary was Curator of the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., where she organized Seydou Keïta Photographer: Portraits from Bamako, Mali (1996) and In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960 (2002). In 2008, she co-curated the exhibition Exposures: Other Histories in Early Postcards from Africa at the Boston University Art Gallery.

Michael Godby is Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He received his BA from Trinity College, Dublin, his MA from the University of Birmingham, and his PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johan-nesburg. Godby has curated exhibitions including Is there Still Life? Continuity and Change in South African Still Life Painting (2007) and The Lie of the Land: Representations of the South African Landscape (2010).

Erin Haney teaches at George Washington University and is Research Associate with the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Photography and Africa and is the co-editor of special volumes of Critical Interventions, Visual Anthropology, Photography in Africa, and Perspectives Africaines en Photographie. Haney is founding co-director with Jürg Schneider of africaphotography.org, dedicated to wider dissemination of archives.

Salah M. Hassan is Goldwin Smith Professor and director of the Africana Studies and Research Center and Professor of African and African Diaspora Art History at Cornell University. He is also the director of Cornell’s Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM). Hassan is an editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and is a consulting editor for African Arts and Atlantica.

Hlonipha Mokoena is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She received her PhD from the University of Cape Town. Mokoena is the author of Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual, which is about the first Zulu-speaker to publish a book in Zulu and the conditions of black intelligentsia in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century South Africa. She has contributed to Journal of Natal and Zulu History, Journal of Religion in Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies, Scru-tiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, and Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing.

Riason Naidoo is Director of the South African National Gallery and the Old Town House, part of Iziko Museums of South Africa, where he organized 1910–2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective (2010). Naidoo has curated exhibitions on the South African pho-tographer Ranjith Kally and The Indian in DRUM magazine in the 1950s. Previously, he was the director of the South Africa-Mali Project: Timbuktu Manuscripts, in addition to coordinating artistic projects at the French Institute of South Africa in Johannes-burg and teaching drawing, painting and art history at the University of Witwatersrand.

Gabi Ngcobo is the Creative Director of the Center for Historical Reenactments and lecturer at the Wits School of Arts, Univer-sity of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ngcobo co-curated “rope-a-dope: to win a losing war” at Cabinet, New York (2010), curated “DON’T/ PANIC,“ a project that coincided with the 17th UN Global Summit on Climate Change, in Durban, South Africa (2011), and was a contributor to The Ungovernables, the New Museum Triennial (2012).

Chika Okeke-Agulu is Assistant Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the co-author, with Okwui Enw-ezor, of Contemporary African Art since 1980, a co-editor of Ezumeezu: Essays on Nigerian Art and Architecture – A Festschrift in Honour of Demas Nwoko, and a co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. In 2010, Okeke-Agulu co-organized Who Knows Tomorrow, a large-scale exhibition of five contemporary African artists at the Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

John Peffer is Associate Professor of Art History at Ramapo College. He holds a BA from Indiana University, Bloomington and a PhD from Columbia University. Peffer is the author of Art and the End of Apartheid, and co-editor of the forthcoming Portraiture and Photography in Africa. His current research is concerned with issues of color and the vernacular reception of photography in South Africa.

Deborah Willis is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. A Guggenheim and MacArthur fellow, Willis has curated exhibitions including Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits (2007) and Posing Beauty (2009). She is the co-author, with with Carla Williams, of The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, and the author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers – 1840 to the Present, Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot.”

Symposium Participants

Encounters with the African Archive is co-organized by The Walther Collection, University College London, and New York University, and co-presented by the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Depart-ment of Photography and Imaging, the Department of Africana Studies, and the Institute of African American Affairs.