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Creative Conversations/digital: Urban Subjects

Saturday, July 31 | 12PM CT

“In Vancouver, there is no image of nature that is not at the same time an image of private property. Possession structures the visual culture and economy of the image. Whether this image is a meticulously crafted photograph for a condo advertisement staged in False Creek, or a self-portrait at the top of Grouse Mountain, almost always the photograph is invested with an inflated sense of status, projection, and desire.”

 – Urban Subjects, We Hope this Does Not Make Us Sad, 2019

Held in conjunction with the exhibition Public Life: Recording the Blur, this Creative Conversations/digital program features cultural research collective, Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, and Helmut Weber) in conversation with FotoFest Associate Curator, Max Fields.

Urban Subjects will discuss their writing, art practice, and curatorial work that examines global urban issues, the texture of cities, and civic imaginations. For this program, FotoFest has asked the collective to meditate on the relationships between publicness, time, and urbanism and the ways in which these concepts interact with and influence contemporary image production and media circulation. The collective will address these issues and ideas through a discussion focused on their collective projects, their recent exhibition If Time Is Still Alive (Camera Austria, 2021), and through a discussion on public time and space during and after the pandemic years.

About Urban Subjects
Urban Subjects is a cultural research collective formed in 2004 by Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, and Helmut Weber and based in Vancouver, Canada and Vienna, Austria. Together they develop artistic-poetic projects focusing on global-urban issues, the texture of cities, and on civic imaginations. They have held residencies at VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver), at the Leuphana Arts Program (Lüneburg), and at the Austrian Pavilion EXPO in Milano.

Their publications include Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade, Momentarily: Learning from Mega-events (with Bik Van der Pol and Alissa Firth- Eagland), and, as guest editors, Camera Austria 139 on Sincerity.

They have also curated exhibitions internationally, such as Not Sheep: New Urban Enclosures and Commons (Artspeak, Vancouver, 2006), The Militant Image - Picturing What Is Already Going On, or The Poetics of the Militant Image (Camera Austria, festival steirischer herbst, Graz, 2014) and they facilitated the exhibition and public programming for The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21st century at the Museum of Vancouver, 2017.

In 2019 they curated the exhibition It’s Never Too Late to Speculate at fluc, Vienna. Also, they realized an installation and magazine publication We Hope this Does Not Make Us Sad: Architecture and Design in the Plutocratic Age as part of “halfway,” a research project by Christian Teckert, Christina Nägele, and Heidi Pretterhofer “On “Spatializing Urban Conditions,” Vienna, Austria.

Recently they participated in the Graz 2020 project The City and the Good Life and curated the exhibition If Time is Still Alive: Counter-Temporalities and Public Time (March 12 – May 23, 2021) in collaboration with Camera Austria, Graz.

www.urbansubjects.org

Image: Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, Helmut Weber), One Hour in Cotton, 2021. Jaquard weaving, 1.86 cm wide, approx. 50 Meters long. Courtesy of the artists.