FotoFest Biennial 2022 If I Had a Hammer Symposium
Saturday, October 8 | 6–8PM
Sunday, October 9 | 10AM–5PM
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston – Wyatt Theater
5500 Main Street Houston, TX 77004
Admission is free; registration required
Seating is limited
Held in conjunction with the FotoFest Biennial 2022, this symposium brings together leading voices from art, music, theory, and writing for a series of conversations that examine key issues explored by the artists featured in the FotoFest Biennial central exhibition, If I Had a Hammer. The symposium is presented over the course of two days and features panel discussions and talks that address the ways in which photographs and visual media both reflect and inform social and political issues and movements.
To register for your free tickets, visit the link below.
This symposium is presented in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Session 1
Photographic Archives and the Power of Narrative Control
October 8 | 6–8PM
David Kelley and Delilah Montoya; Introduced and moderated by Ashlyn Davis Burns
This panel discussion will examine the ways photographic archives function as both a symbol and form of social and political power by establishing and preserving dominant historical and cultural narratives. The guests will discuss how their work addresses archival impulses such as the maintenance of imperial ideologies, the perpetuation of hegemonic thought, and production of authoritative forms of knowledge and social realities. They will offer examples of how artists utilize archives and archival materials to explore the complex narratives, disparate temporalities, and subjectivities that are often unaccounted for and omitted from historical repositories.
Session 2
Making Pictures out of Protest, Making Protest out of Pictures
October 9 | 10:15–11:30AM
Fred Schmidt-Arenales and Yazan Khalili; Introduced and moderated by Gina M. Masullo
Making Pictures out of Protest, Making Protest out of Pictures is a panel discussion featuring artists Fred Schmidt-Arenales and Yazan Khalili in conversation with writer and professor Gina M. Masullo. This discussion explores how social movements and protest inform the production and interpretation of images, and likewise, how the proliferation and expanded reach of images today inspire sociopolitical actions. Accessibility to wide-ranging technologies and fast-paced visual reproduction facilitate the creation of images that illuminate broad cultural and political perspectives. Informed by her research on the power of digital media to both connect and divide people, Gina M. Masullo will guide the panelists in conversation about socially informed image production and its influence on social reality, individual beliefs, and journalistic reportage.
Session 3
Ghostly Shutter: Pictorial personhood and (im)permanence
October 9 | 11:30AM–12:45PM
Ryan Patrick Krueger, Dionne Lee, and Liz Rodda; Introduced and moderated by Roberto Tejada
This panel discussion will address an irony of photography: that despite its default associations in regard to creating an index, archive, and objective trace, photography’s susceptibility to circulation, redistribution, and recontextualization demonstrates the fragility of temporality, subjecthood, and notions of permanence. Artists Dionne Lee, Ryan Patrick Krueger, Liz Rodda and writer Roberto Tejada will discuss how their work grapples with concepts of impermanence, relating their interests in disparate cultural narratives and political issues, ranging from bordering and land politics to queer and feminist histories.
Film Screening:
Jyoti Mistry, Cause of Death, 2020
October 9 | 1:30PM–2:00PM
Introduced by Madi Murphy
Women’s bodies are always at risk. An autopsy report describes the physical impact on the body that results in death but hides the structural and recurrent violence on women’s bodies that leads to femicide. Through archival film footage, animation and spoken word poetry an experience of structural violence against women is exposed in Jyoti Mistry’s short film, Cause of Death.
“The film is comprised of mini-vignettes across five sections and each has its own rhythm, tempo and emotive charge that creates distinctive moments in a short space of time in the film. The woman with a curious and peering-look on her face at the end of the film is one I find haunting. She is an every-woman in a way and yet she is distinctive and her stare straight into the camera is arresting because she demands to be seen.” – Jyoti Mistry
Cause of Death examines ways in which images of women have been marginalized historically in the archived through their depiction in photographs and ethnographic film.
Session 4
Closing Roundtable
October 9 | 2:15–4:30PM
Steven Evans, Max Fields, Nora N. Khan, Amy Sadao, Mark Sealy, and Jeanne Vaccaro; Introduced and moderated by Celina Lunsford
In this closing roundtable, If I Had a Hammer curators Steven Evans, Max Fields, and Amy Sadao will join Dr. Mark Sealy and curatorial advisers Nora N. Khan and Jeanne Vaccaro to reflect on the biennial exhibition and ideas elucidated in the preceding symposium sessions. Through this reflection, the panelists will revisit how systems and structures of contemporary image-production influence historical narratives, engage collective discourse, inspire visual forms of resistance, and impact future cultural imaginaries.
About the speakers
Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and filmmaker. His projects attempt to bring awareness to unconscious processes on the individual and group level. He has presented films, installations, and performances internationally at venues including SculptureCenter and Abrons Arts Center, New York; Links Hall, Chicago; The Darling Foundry, Montreal; LightBox and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Museum of Fine Arts, and FotoFest Houston, Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz, and Kunsthalle, Vienna. Fred is a 2022-23 Core fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
Ashlyn Davis Burns is a writer and independent curator based in Houston, Texas and the co-founder of Assembly, a gallery, agency, creative studio, and art advisory that holistically nurtures artists and their practice, while identifying and cultivating opportunities for collaborations with a global network of creatives in both the fine art and commercial worlds. Burns has worked to support lens-based artists for the past decade through curatorial, editorial, and fundraising initiatives, including most recently as the Executive Director & Curator of Houston Center for Photography (2015-2020). She has written for numerous publications, consulted with artists and publishers on photobooks, and curated exhibitions internationally for a variety of institutions including libraries, universities, and galleries.
Steven Evans is a curator, writer, artist, and the Executive Director and curator of the award-winning arts organization FotoFest, based in Houston, Texas. He is responsible for exhibitions and the artistic direction of FotoFest and its Biennial. Among many exhibitions organized for FotoFest and other venues, Evans produced and oversaw the development of the FotoFest Biennial’s central exhibitions for African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other (2020), India: Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art (2018), and Changing Circumstances: Looking at the Future of the Planet (2016). He co-edited the related hardcover books African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other (2020), INDIA (2018), and Changing Circumstances (2016), as well as recent FotoFest publication Velvet Generation (2019). Prior to FotoFest, Evans worked with a wide range of artists and collaborators as managing director of the Dia: Beacon Museum in New York State and as director of the Linda Pace Foundation in San Antonio, Texas. His curatorial work incorporates a range of approaches with a focus on photography, moving image, and new media art.
Max Fields is the Associate Curator and Director of Publishing at FotoFest. He has presented numerous exhibitions and has written for and overseen the production of multiple museum and gallery publications. Recent projects include Public Life (2020–21), African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other (with Mark Sealy, 2020), and Gareth Long: Kidnappers Foil at the Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, 2019–20). His recent exhibition, In Place of an Index, was produced and presented with the 2021 Texas Biennial and was co-curated with Ryan Dennis and Evan Garza.
David Kelley is an artist working with photography, video, and installation. His recent projects draw attention to the effects of global capitalism, resource extraction, and shifting physical and political landscapes. Influenced by a range of visual traditions, Kelley draws upon elements of experimental documentary, ethnography, performance, and avant-garde cinema. By working at the intersection of these strategies, he encourages an understanding of his subjects that is simultaneously direct and speculative. His work has been shown in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include the Louvre (Paris, 2019), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2019), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2014). Other exhibitions include Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles, 2013, 2015), Bank (Shanghai, 2014), DeCordova New England Biennial (Boston, 2013), MAAP Space (Brisbane, 2012), Jim Thompson Art Center (Bangkok, 2012), and BAK (Utrecht, 2011). Kelley received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine, and was a 2010–11 resident at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He is currently based in Los Angeles, where he is an associate professor of the practice of fine arts at the University of Southern California.
Yazan Khalili is an architect, visual artist, and cultural producer working in between Palestine and the Netherlands. His projects have been exhibited and published across international cultural platforms, and he is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
Khalili received a degree in architecture from Birzeit University in 2003; an MA degree from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2010; and an MFA degree at Sandberg Institute, Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam in 2015. He was one of the founding members of Zan Design Studio (2005–10). He was the production coordinator for Sharjah Biennials 9 and 10, and the technical director of the inaugural exhibition of the Palestinian Museum, Jerusalem Lives, in 2017. He co-curated Young Artist of the Year Award (YAYA) 2012, The City | The Image symposium with Goethe Institute (Ramallah, 2012), The Long Journey (United Nations Headquarters, New York, 2014–15), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) Audio-Visual Archive for Palestine Refugees (2013), and Debt at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center (Ramallah, 2018). He co-organized the workshop and symposium Walter Benjamin in Palestine (Ramallah, 2015) and Marx: The Ultimate Contemporary (Ramallah, 2018). He won the Extract Young Artist Prize 2015.
In addition to pursuing his PhD, he is currently co-chair of photography at the MFA program at Bard College and artist-in-residence at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. He was the artistic director of Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre between 2015–19, and is the co-founder of Radio Alhara (2020).
His writings and photographs have been published and featured in several publications, including eflux journal, Assuming Boycotts, WDW Magazine, Kalamon, Manifesta Journal, Frieze Magazine, Race & Class, C-Print, Ibraaz, Contemporary Art: World Currents, and Subjective Atlas of Palestine.
Nora N. Khan is a curator, editor, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture, the politics of software, and the philosophy of emerging technology. She is the Executive Director of Project X for Art and Criticism, publishing X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal in Los Angeles. She is also the curator for the upcoming Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2023, with Andrea Bellini, hosted by the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. In 2020, she curated Manual Override at The Shed (New York), featuring artists Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Simon Fujiwara, and Martine Syms.
Khan’s short books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Rail, 2019), on the logic of machine vision, and Fear Indexing the X-Files (Brooklyn: Primary Information, 2017), co-written with Steven Warwick. Forthcoming are No Context: AI Art, Machine Learning, and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries), The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole), and a hybrid memoir about criticism from Strange Attractor Press. She frequently publishes in publications like Artforum and Art in America, and has written commissioned essays for major exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Gallery, and the Venice Biennale. Her practice extends to a wide span of artistic collaborations, including the production of scripts, librettos, films, and a tiny house (in A Wild-Ass Beyond: Apocalypse RN, with Sondra Perry, American Artist, and Caitlin Cherry at Performance Space, New York).
Ryan Patrick Krueger is a lens-based artist whose work addresses themes of masculinity and friendship. Their process includes collecting vernacular images and appropriating photographs in order to consider the intersections of LGBTQ+ history in the US and photography. Krueger holds a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and currently lives in Syracuse, New York, where they work as digital services coordinator for Light Work, a nonprofit, artist-run photography organization at Syracuse University. They have curated exhibitions and held shows nationally, most notably Response Response (Portland, Oregon, 2015), a two-person exhibition with artist and gay-rights activist Linda Kliewer, and Queer Moments: Selections from the Light Work Collection (Syracuse, 2021).
Their work has been reviewed and written about in publications including Art in America, Humble Arts Foundation, and Sixty Inches from Center. Recent exhibitions include On Longing at MONACO (St. Louis, 2022) and FotoFest Biennial 2022: If I Had a Hammer (Houston, 2022).
Dionne Lee is a visual artist working in photography, collage, sculpture, and video to explore power and personal history in relation to the American landscape by challenging the historical narratives that exist within its photographic representations. Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. She has exhibited work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2022), Feria Material (Oakland, 2022), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2021), New Orleans Museum of Art (2020), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, 2019), San Francisco Arts Commission (2017), and Aperture Foundation (2016), among others. Lee was a 2022 artist-in-residence at both the Chinati Foundation and Unseen California.
Celina Lunsford is the artistic director of the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt exhibition program and the FFF Academy. As a co-founder of RAY 2018, a triennial in Frankfurt/RheinMain, her curatorial eye is focused on extraordinary interdisciplinary photographic themes and artists. She has curated for other festivals and collections such as the International Photography Festival Lodz, Poland; Lianzhou International Photography Festival, China; Fundación MAPFRE Fundación Telefonica; the H2 Zentrum für Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg; and the Imogen Cunningham Trust. Lunsford is frequently a jury member for international prizes and fellowships. By cooperating with the Country Guest of Honor projects of Frankfurt Book Fair, she has dealt with platforming photography from Norway, India, Brazil, Georgia, Turkey, Finland, and Indonesia, among others. She is currently looking for innovative work that deals with Ideologies on a global or personal levels.
Gina M. Masullo (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is Associate Director of the Center for Media Engagement and an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Media, both at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her research focuses on how the digital space both connects and divides people and how that influences society, individuals, and journalism. She is the author of Online Incivility and Public Debate: Nasty Talk and The New Town Hall: Why We Engage Personally with Politicians and co-editor of Scandal in a Digital Age. She spent 20 years as a newspaper journalist before becoming a professor.
Delilah Montoya is an artist based in New Mexico. She is a professor emerita at the University of Houston, where she taught Photography and Digital Imaging. Montoya’s work explores the unique Southwest experience, the search for identity, social and cultural issues, and the exploration of being a Chicana in the United States. Since 2015, she has been engaged in work that questions the colonial process that established racial and ethnic segregation by utilizing science and social tools such as DNA testing.
Montoya received an MFA in Studio Art in 1994 from the University of New Mexico. Montoya is a founding member of an artists’ and activists’ collective based in Texas: Sin Huellas (Without a Trace). This phrase refers to the practice of erasing one’s fingerprints to avoid detection by authorities as one attempts to evade deportation. Her work has been exhibited in many galleries and museums, including the Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe, Photo Do Not Bend Gallery in Dallas, Instituto Cultural Mexicano in Los Angeles, Project Row Houses in Houston, MOMA PS1 in New York, and Transart and FotoFest, both in Houston. Montoya’s work is in numerous collections, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; the Art Museum of the Americas and Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; Tufts University Collections, Medford; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work has appeared in many books, including Women Boxers: The New Warriors by Delilah Montoya and Teresa Marquez (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2006), Art of Colonial Latin America by Gauvin Bailey (New York: Phaidon Press, 2005), and Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement edited by Rita Gonzales, Howard N. Fox, and Chon Noriega (Berkely: University of California Press, 2008). Her awards include the USLAF Latinx Fellowship, Artadia Award, and the Richard T. Castro Distinguished Professorship.
Liz Rodda is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions and screenings, notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (2021), Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (2017), David Shelton Gallery (Houston, 2015), and Anthology Film Archives (New York, 2014). Rodda has been an artist-in-residence at Fountainhead in Miami, Florida, and at La Napoule Art Foundation in Mandelieu-La-Napoule, France. Rodda was born and raised in Sacramento, California, and currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Amy Sadao received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 1995 and an MA in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000. She was Executive Director of Visual AIDS for the Arts from 2002 to 12 and served as the Daniel W. Dietrich II Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia from 2012–19. Sadao lives in Philadelphia and is currently the Program Director for Denniston Hill and has upcoming exhibitions at Columbia University in New York City and REDCAT in Los Angeles.
Roberto Tejada is the author of poetry collections that include Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), and Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006). His book Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (2019) is a Latinx poetics attuned to colonial settlements and cultural counter-conquest; intersections of history and metaphor in art and writing of the Americas.
A translator, editor, essayist, art historian, and cultural critic Tejada's writing addresses the political imagination and impurity of time in shared image environments; configurations of art, life, and language inclined to the future. His multifaceted creative practice and critical inquiry have been recognized with numerous fellowships and grants including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Foundation, Creative Capital Warhol Foundation, Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (São Paulo, Brazil), as well as The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Williams College.
Tejada lived in Mexico City (1987-1997) where he worked as an editor of Vuelta magazine, the cultural monthly published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, and as executive editor of Artes de México, a quarterly detailing pre-conquest to contemporary Mexican art. He founded the multi-lingual literary journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. Co-edited with Kristin Dykstra and Gabriel Bernal Granados, the publication featured innovative writing in its original language—English or Spanish—and high-quality translations of existing material, together with visual art and other forms of critical inquiry. All sixteen issues of the journal, together with a compilation of photographs, letters, and other related materials, are available in digital form at Northwestern University’s Open Door Archive.
He has taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Dartmouth College, University of California San Diego, University of Texas Austin, SMU Meadows School of the Arts, Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Committed to poetics and open sites of cultural inquiry—regional, transnational, and diasporic—Tejada’s research and creative interests involve the language arts and image worlds of Latin America, especially Mexico, Brazil, the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, and other sites of U.S. Latinx cultural production.
Jeanne Vaccaro is a writer, scholar, and curator of contemporary art and public practice. Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, considers the felt labor of making identity and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. As scholar-curator at the ONE Archives, Vaccaro designs pedagogical interventions to amplify minoritarian histories and liberation struggles. At ONE, she has organized a conversation with Arthur Jafa and Tourmaline on speculative archives and Black futures as well as Foucault on Acid, an exhibition exploring the racial and sexual imaginary of the desert. As part of the Getty Foundation Pacific Standard Time initiative, she is co-curating Scientia Sexualis, a survey of contemporary artists whose work engages histories of sexuality in the sciences and confronts and reimagines sex and gender as sites of experimentation, for the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. Vaccaro received her PhD in Performance Studies at New York University, and has published scholarship and art criticism in TSQ, Social Text, GLQ, Radical History Review, Journal of Modern Craft, and BOMB Magazine. She is co-founder of the New York City Trans Oral History Project, a community archive partnership with the New York Public Library, and an Assistant Professor of Transgender and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas.
FotoFest Biennial 2022 Media Sponsor:
Image: Delilah Montoya, Casta 1, 2018. From the series Contemporary Casta Portraiture: Nuestra Calidad, 2018. Dye sublimation on metal, wooden curio box, laser-etching, sand, QR code. Courtesy of the artist.
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