Chennai Photo Biennale 2019 International Conference on Photography

Ashwini Asokan / India

Image and reality, in the age of Artificial Intelligence The age of AI has been coming for a good 5-6 decades. Unfortunately, we humans have done very little work to help society understand, grow and acknowledge the nature and enormity of what this means. While popular culture, books & movies have explored narratives around robots  as proxy for AI, we've entirely ignored how AI affects our collective understanding of what constitutes reality. This is the age of fake news, deep fakes (modified images to change ground truth) and revenge porn. It's also the age of access to medical imagery, 3D visualizations and generative networks that can help reconstruct lost histories, data and more. This talk will explore the changing definitions of reality in an AI generated world.

Diwas Raja | Nepal

Archive as Agency: Possible Histories from the Margins Since 2011, Nepal Picture Library has been collecting, digitizing, and documenting photographs of all kinds with the objective of safeguarding a visual repository of ordinary life, social history, and public culture of Nepal. Such an archive, we believe, can thrust historical awareness in Nepal from the stodgy register of Great Men to a vision of the past where Nepali people can see themselves reflected. My presentation will bring experiences and lessons from two of our most recent archival drives: The Feminist Memory Project and the Dalit Photo Archive . Through these two projects, I will consider what the photographic and visual archive can do to reinvigorate our imagination of the recent past and to capture historical agencies of marginalized groups.

Emeka Okereke / Nigeria

Seeing in The Eye: On Photography and The Gaze

In my preoccupation with borders, movement and all the various forms of differences they

presuppose, I have more often than not encountered the question: how can imagery (and by

extension photography) play a useful role in the restitution of our world towards more conscious

and correlational human relationships? In an attempt to address this question, my presentation

will draw from my decade-long work with the Invisible Borders Trans-African Project. This project,

since 2009, has brought African artists – photographers, writers, filmmakers – together to engage

the question of borders as it relates the African continent, and to attempt an alternative gaze and

narrative of realities therein.

Kristoffer Gansing / Germany

Writing with Numbers: Images, Computation and Subjectivity in the Digital Imaginary

This presentation will introduce a post-digital approach to thinking about the aesthetics and

politics of the photographic image and image-production today. The first step in this approach

involves going beyond the analogue/digital division and instead rethinks photography as a

Chennai Photo Biennale 2019.

International Conference on Photography

Speakers brief abstracts process of visualization based on a combination of sensory and imaginative techniques. A second step considers how this process is currently being transformed through the current moment of treating images as data-sets for information extraction and prediction. The presentation will draw on both artistic practices and technical developments as examples.

MK Raghavendra | India

Selfies and Citizenship: The Reflections of a User

The selfie has today become a significant component of life itself since the mobile phone, which

few people can do without, not only enables the taking of pictures at a moment’s notice but also

blurs the distinction between the photographer and the subject. This presentation tries to look at

the precursors of the selfie, chiefly the amateur family photograph, to examine the social role they

performed in linking private space to historical time, private memory to historical time and hence

to one’s position as citizens within organized society. It is significant that the selfie marks an era in

which history as an agreed collection of public events marked by a chronology has itself been

undermined by the internet, which through the ‘noise’ it creates, destroys consensus over public

happenings as acknowledged ‘truths’.

The selfie, coming at this time, is not a record or documentation of an event linked to public

memory but more an act associated with everyday living and an assertion of individual identity.

The presentation looks at what the selfie could be doing to the notion of citizenship when the

grand narrative of linear history is itself being obliterated by a bewildering multiplicity of narratives.

P Sainath / India

The Visual Retreat of the Rural

The Indian countryside, arguably the most complex part of planet earth with 833 million human

beings speaking 780 living languages is consigned to the margins of media coverage. A 

generation of urban Indians grows up as foreigners in their own country. The next one won't have

the option of knowing what that world looked like. Worse, some of the best in arts, crafts,

occupations, livelihoods – disappear undocumented at an alarming pace, barring those set to

work for touristy and exotic ends. The People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) is a multimedia

digital space attempting to take journalism out of the hands of corporations and into those of

communities. The presentation aims to emphasise the importance of recording the rural, of

documenting and telling stories of the everyday lives of everyday people.

Rashmi Sawhney / India

Photography and Cinema

In the 1895 Lumiere brother's film, The Photographic Congress Arrives in Lyon , the astronomer

and chronophotographer, Jule Janson, stops in front of the cinematography -- which is

live-recording the responses of the photographers who have come to see this new machine --

and takes a photograph. This early encounter between the cinematography or cinema and

photography is symbolic of the inseparable manner in which both forms are linked. While

photo-artists have developed conventions such as narrative (more commonly associated with

cinema) in innovative ways, photographers and photographs have equally played an important

role in many films, the Chennai Photo Biennale 2019

International Conference on Photography

Speakers brief abstracts a most iconic example of this arguably  Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up . In this presentation, I examine this most crucial role played by photography in constructing our very idea of cinema and stardom. What is the relationship between the still photograph, the moving image,

and the cinema industry? 

Sabeena Gadihoke | India

The Partition in a Digital Age: An Archeology of Personal Photographs through Absence and

Presence One of the largest displacements of the 20 th century, the partition in the subcontinent affected more than ten million people. The mnemonics of the event can be accessed through press images of mass suffering; the crowded trains and the endlessly long kafilas or the caravans of people. Set against this discursive backdrop, I seek to explore the spectre of the partition through the

absence of personal photographs, as well as a more recent imagination of the event made

possible by the digital circulation of historical footage and photographs of the family. While

trauma may have been the overarching lens through which the partition has been defined, these

photo practices or accounts related to photography may suggest ways to escape this framework.

Satyajit Mayor / Director, National Centre of Biological Sciences Bengaluru

Imaging the Imagined Our understanding of the living world has been inextricably intertwined with our ability to visualize and capture the structure and form of living organisms. Developments in modalities of imaging have closely paralleled our capacity to decipher secrets of the living world, providing new windows on life processes, with every advancement. In my talk I will discuss, beginning with the discovery of lenses to enhance the acuity of our eyes in the 1600s, which led to the articulation of the Cell theory, unprecedented developments in imaging methodologies in the last two decades. These are leading us to interrogate living processes at temporal and spatial scales, never imaged before.

Shela Sheikh | UK

The Aesthetics of the Earth; Or, Nature Represents Itself

In the context of ever-exacerbated anthropocenic environmental violence, can nature be a

witness? In conceiving of more-than-human witnessing collectivities that testify to historical and

contemporary violations against humans and nonhumans, a classic postcolonial question arises

regarding representation. In seeking to advocate for nature, do ‘we’ (certain human subjects) not

run the risk of silencing or erasing the ‘voice’ of the subaltern or nature? Does nature not, in fact,

represent – ‘narrate’ and ‘image’ – itself? If so, how to ‘read’ this? I discuss artistic practices by

Susan Schuppli and Fazal Sheikh, examining modes of indexicality and registration in the context

of political and aesthetic (self-)representation.

T Shanaathanan / Artist and Archivist / Jaffna

Archive of the difficult past: violence, memory, resistance and photography in Sri Lanka

Based on selected images circulated through photography books and the exhibition catalogues,

this paper attempts to map the shifting tensions between the frame and the framed through

following questions connected to the major historical moments of Sri Lanka: how was

Chennai Photo Biennale 2019

International Conference on Photography

Speakers brief abstracts photography invested in the making of Sri Lanka as a colonial state and a place of paradise? How did the civil conflict and the violence alter the photographic gaze? How did photography witness violence or expression of trau ma? How does photography become a tool of resistance? Y. S. Alone / Art Historian, JNU / DelhiUnfolding the Image of the Invisible: Making sense of being ‘What?’ There is a difference between the ‘Photograph’ as exotic, what gets captured, and an invitation to enter into the world of invisible territory. The third category deals with many evil practices the Indian caste-Hinduness has been nurturing over a period of time. Claims of being ‘modern’, ‘post-modern’, ‘post-colonial’ become extremely problematic as embedded hierarchical thinking acts as a catalyst. Sudharak Olwe and Arun Vijai Mathavan capture the images of social existence of the communities where a frame is an invitation to enter into the darker territories that are

otherwise invisible to the naked eye, or for that matter question the whole idea of ‘pure

appearance’ not as momentary process but a process that thickens the very existence of the

abject conditionality of the material existence of the Scheduled Caste communities in India. Their

repertoire of images are directed to question the prerogative of ‘question of being’.

Zhuang Wubin / Photography historian / Singapore Photographing the Vietnam War: A Comparative Reading of Two Photo books from Vietnam

The Vietnam War was one of the most bloodied conflicts in the spectre of Cold War. This paper is

based on a comparative reading of two iconic photobooks produced ostensibly to represent the

viewpoints of the two Vietnams. The first photobook is Viet Nam in Flames (published c. 1969),

involving photographers Nguyễn Mạnh Đan (b. 1925) and Nguyễn Ngọc Hạnh (1927-2017). The

second book is War Time Photos (published in 2000) by Lâm Tấn Tài (1935–2001). While

recognising the imprint of politics dividing both Vietnams, this paper attempts to resurface the

parallel (and diverging) contexts that informed the production and afterlife of both photobooks.

This is made possible by tracing the biographies of the photographers involved, their participation

in the global milieu of salon photography, how they understood their involvements in the war

efforts, and their lives after reunification. This reading aims to complicate our dichotomous

impression of two Vietnams and to unpack the reach (and limits) of politics in photographic

production.