Forelesning
Critical Images
Katarina Nitsch, artist and Senior Lecturer at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, will make a presentation about her collaboration with the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara, followed by a discussion.
Venue: Prøvesal 2, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Fossveien 24.
Critical Images was initiated as a response to an urgency for artists to find ways and means to create emancipatory images, without serving a political project, respecting the autonomy of art. The course builds on the framework of the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara and their call for The Right to a Dignified Image.
We live in a world filled with images that are captured, edited, and published at hyper speeds. Images referring to images. Our political, ethical, and intimate lives are constructed around images, through images, and in images.
These sentences constitute the preface to A Right to the Image for all – A concept paper for a coming revolution,by Abounaddara. Since 2011, they have been making short films, emergency cinema, which they publish online as a response to the spectacle of indignity exposed on the screens of the world since the beginning of the popular uprising in Syria.
What is operating, what is active, what is at stake? The injustices in the world, obscured by geopolitical, cultural and religious explanations, are at stake. The autonomy of art is at stake. Our shared human dignity is at stake. And the challenge for artists of how to create images which are the same time urgent and transformative.