Mykola Ridnyi, from the “Speck in the Eye” series, 2021.
Using various media such as photography, film, installation and text, Mykola RIDNYI’s artistic practice employs historical research methods and the investigation of current political events. Ridnyi counters the sensational visualization and aestheticization of brutality with a distanced critical approach by addressing the representation of violence without its reproduction. In the post-truth era, facts have to be constantly checked, but the traditional way of presenting information needs to be questioned as well. Is there still a space for trust in both critical journalism and socially engaged art? In the second edition of a discussion series in the context of his Fellowship in Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, the artist talks with Natalia GUMENYUK, Ukrainian journalist, author, and founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, and Alfredo CRAMEROTTI, author, curator, and director of MOSTYN Contemporary Art Centre in Wales about the contradictions and similarities in the visual approaches of artists and journalists.
The broadcasting of violent images has always been at the core of the news business, the media’s modus operandi. However, with the invention of 24/7 TV cable news in the 1990s, and the later appearance of social media and live-streaming, the global audience is constantly exposed to a multitude of images of violence of both domestic and international conflicts. While the commercialization of news forces journalists to edit news videos in a way that resemble action movies, the normality of human existence is cut out to keep the audience hooked by better selling visuals. In her talk, Natalia GUMENYUK will address the following questions: is it at all possible to ‘un-edit’ the world we see in order to put violence in its place? Are we ready to sacrifice the aesthetics of violent and emotional imagery to bring back a raw version of reality at the risk of being boring?
In his book Aesthetic Journalism, Alfredo CRAMEROTTI describes different strategies of the interaction of aesthetics and information, such as witnessing, interactivity, hijacking and disclosing. He claims that ’aesthetic journalism works by combining documents and imagination: the necessity of the former and the desire of the latter [sic], since desirability is almost an antidote to the often senseless accumulation of information’. In his talk, Cramerotti will explore how the artist can find ways to ’import’ journalism into art and reintroduce an artistic approach to the information industry. The talk will posit a reflection on the concept of public opinion – does it work as an aggregate, and is it open to critical understanding?
PLEASE NOTE: This is a hybrid event. Up to 17 people can participate in the event in Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen. Participating in the event on site is possible only in accordance with the current legal COVID-19 regulations. In addition, the event will be streamed. If you would like to directly participate in the discussion, please register via Eventbrite. You will receive the Zoom link automatically. Otherwise, you will be able to follow the event on Facebook.
Current information on events taking place at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in the context of the exhibition Transgressions of the Real can be found on our website.
Participants:
Mykola RIDNYI is an artist, filmmaker and essayist based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He works across media, ranging from early political actions in public space to the fusion of site-specific installations, photography and the moving image which constitute the current focus of his practice. In recent films he experiments with nonlinear montage, and a collage of documentary and fiction. His way of reflecting social and political reality draws on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories. A connection with alternative times and phenomena, the influence of the past to the present and future, and the pressing polemic of manipulating historical memory born out of contemporary political agendas are among the main issues revealed in his engagements, initiatives, and projects.
Ridnyi has been a founding member of the SOSka group – an art collective originated from Kharkiv, Ukraine. He is a contributing editor of Prostory, an online magazine about art and society. His works has been exhibited in Venice biennale for contemporary art, The School of Kyiv – Kyiv biennale, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, daad galerie in Berlin, Transmediale in Berlin, Zentrum fur Kunst und Media in Karlsruhe, Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst in Leipzig, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Bonniers konsthall in Stockholm and others. He has been a scholar of Akademie der Kunst in Berlin, Iaspis in Stockholm, Gaude Polonia in Krakow and others. http://www.mykolaridnyi.com/
Natalia GUMENYUK is a Ukrainian author, documentary filmmaker, and journalist specialized in conflict reporting, human rights and foreign affairs. She is a founder and runs the Public Interest Journalism Lab to popularize public spirit journalism and overcome polarization. Its method combines social research and visual storytelling. Since the Revolution of Dignity and the beginning of the war in Ukraine, she has been reporting on events in the Donbas and on a few journalists regularly traveling to occupied Crimea. In 2020 Gumenyuk published a book consisting of reportages, The Lost Island. Tales from Occupied Crimea based on six years of her reporting. The book has been published in German. She has worked as a reporter in more than 60 countries and is the author of the book Maidan Tahrir. In Search of a Lost Revolution (2015), based on her reporting in the Arab Spring. Gumenyuk is co-founder of Hromadske TV and was from 2013 – 2020 a special correspondent for this TV station. She is German Marshall Memorial Fund Fellow 2017 and Draper Hill Fellow at Stanford University (2018).
Alfredo CRAMEROTTI is an author, curator, and director of MOSTYN, Wales UK and Adviser to the British Council Visual Arts Acquisition Committee and the Art Institutions of the 21st Century Foundation. He curated radio and television formats in Germany and Denmark, three national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, EXPO Film & Video in Chicago, and the biennials Sequences VII in Reykjavik, Iceland and Manifesta 8, Region of Murcia, Spain. He serves as Vice-President of AICA (International Association Art Critics), President Cand. of IKT (International Association Curators Contemporary Art), Co-Chair of VAGW (Visual Arts Group Wales), Executive Committee Member of ICOM UK (International Council of Museums), and is a member of CIMAM (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art). He holds a PhD in Communication Design and Photography and has had over 200 texts published on art, media and curatorial practice, contributing to a large number of books, catalogs, monographs and online journals. Alfredo is Editor-in-Chief of the Critical Photography book series (Intellect Books), and his own publications include Curating the Image: Notebook for a Visual Journey (2020); Forewords: Hyperimages and Hyperimaging (2018); Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness (2010); and Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing (2009, published in the Büchs’n’Books series). In 2007-08, Alfredo Cramerotti was Fellow in Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, where he worked on the book Aesthetic Journalism.
Pages 248-262 | Published online: 29 Jan 2021 | Published in print: February 2021
Abstract
In 2001, artists Broomberg and Chanarin documented a day in the Iraq war. The result was a visual yet non-descript narrative, achieved with light and presence; a physical documentation of their journey titled The Day Nobody Died. In 1968 photojournalist Eddie Adams captured Saigon Execution in Vietnam, also a war-time image but with the lens of reportage. The former is a rendition of their experience, not bound by the constraints and facets of aestheticising fact. The latter was presented as news and was the receiver of outrage and scrutiny as such. This article explores how representations of humanitarian crises and wartime are complicit in their perpetuation, and how art demonstrates an attempt at representing such events as futile. We seek to establish a link between what is viewed and what is reported; what is seen and what remains outside the picture; an attempt to unravel what the difference is between viewing and witnessing.
Alfredo Cramerotti Aesthetic Journalism: the uncertain domains of information, communication and aesthetics
Friday 3 February 2017, 13:00
Konstfack Research Week 2017, 30 January – 3 February
Konstfack, 126 27 Stockholm www.konstfack.se
Aesthetic Journalism is not about delivering information; “journalistic art” is preoccupied with this, and I am not preoccupied with the artist-as-journalist. What I care about – seeing it from a certain distance – is a cultural practice that weaves together the criteria of journalism and art, questioning and possibly reversing the tradition of both fields. An activity – either produced by artists or journalists or technologists – that queries the realm of fiction as the site of imagination, and that of journalism as a site for reality. This brings me to issue an invitation to embrace a notion of information, communication and aesthetics which includes the artistic treatment of reality; because ultimately, we start to get closer to the core of the matter (ourselves included) when we make our reality not a given, irreversible fact, but a possibility among many others. Konstfack Research Week is an annual event highlighting and discussing research practices at Konstfack and research perspectives related to Art, Craft, Design, Interior Architecture, Visual Communication and Visual Studies and Art Education, in Sweden and internationally.
The programme includes presentations of on-going research at Konstfack as well as related perspectives from invited Swedish and international guests. It combines presentations, lectures discussions and workshops and targets Master and PhD students, researchers and faculty members at Konstfack, as well as a wider public interested in these issues.
Konstfack Research Week is organized through Konstfack Board of Education and Research (UFN) and coordinated by Magnus Ericson.
Photography in Academic Research international conference at UCL Heritage Studies, in collaboration with RAI (Royal Anthropological Institute) and Birkbeck, Department of Politics, London, UK, 8-9 Sept 2016
ALFREDO CRAMEROTTI (MOSTYN and eCPR European Centre for Photography Research, University of South Wales) presents a paper on Hyperimage: Towards a Theory of Expanded Photography
Friday 9 September 12:30, Room B10
We are all implicated in photography whether we like it or not. Whether we associate this visual language with a precise function or use it to shape ourselves as individuals and communities, we trade our existence in images. We refer to images and image-making in social, political and cultural act.
The established categories in which photography was once subdivided, practiced, understood and discussed have been reconfigured. It’s as though our society has freed image-making from previously articulated specific applications, blurring the boundaries between genres and functions, and rendering the photographic image as a free-floating subject on its own, detached from any relation specific to its origins; what we may term as “hyperimage’.
CAMERA ospita nel Gymnasium un programma di incontri aperti al pubblico con protagonisti nazionali e internazionali del mondo della fotografia e della cultura. Un nuovo spazio di confronto, dibattito e sperimentazione culturale.
Fotogiornalismi. Nuove tendenze del giornalismo fotografico.
Negli ultimi anni il fotogiornalismo ha subito trasformazioni radicali, sia come esito di tensioni interne sia in risposta alle mutazioni del sistema circostante. Sono cambiate la forma e la modalità di lavoro delle agenzie. La fotografia giornalistica si è combinata con la ricerca dell’arte contemporanea, occupando i contesti di gallerie e musei. I testimoni di grandi eventi ne hanno ripreso direttamente alcune immagini attraverso i propri telefoni cellulari, diffondendole immediatamente in rete e dando vita al cosiddetto citizen journalism. Sono questi fondamentali mutamenti l’oggetto di questo incontro, che ne rileva le caratteristiche e gli effetti principali attraverso le voci di tre protagonisti del settore.
Intervengono Alfredo Cramerotti, Curatore e Direttore MOSTYN Gallery Roberto Koch, Fondatore e Direttore di Contrasto Clement Saccomani, Direttore di Noor
Il programma è realizzato con il supporto di
Ingresso3€ – Omaggio per i visitatori della mostra nella data dell’incontro
Curatorial Research: Lecture & Workshop on Aesthetic Journalism by Alfredo Cramerotti MFA Curating Goldsmiths (University of London)
Wednesday 8 October 2014
Conversation on investigative research methodologies in contemporary art practice, and the idea of Aesthetic Journalism in specific relation to artistic/curatorial research and Fact/Fiction in contemporary art.
Organised by Aaron Juneau and Simon Sheikh / MFA Curating Goldsmiths (University of London)
Alfredo Cramerotti, Director of MOSTYN, Wales’ Contemporary art Centre and writer of the book Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing on how the artist can find ways not only to ‘import’ journalism into art, but also re-insert an artistic approach into the information industry.
Alfredo will reflect on the concept of public opinion. Does it work as an aggregate and is it open to critical understanding?
Further contributions by Jasmina Metwaly artist and member of Mosireen collective in Cairo, and Truls Lie, documentary filmmaker, editor-in-chief of DOX European Documentary Magazine and a film critic at Le Monde Diplomatique, Scandinavian edition. Final discussion
lead by the hosts: Carsten Juhl, Head of Department for Art and Theory and Tijana Mišković, Academic Research Project Coordinator.
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About the seminar MEDIA, REVOLT AND CRITICISM: Globally we are being confronted with new encounters between visual art and information practices. In urgent and tense situations like the Arab Spring the moving images become important means of communication, especially because of their manipulative nature.
This seminar is the 2nd part of Arab Spring art seminar at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, that started in October 2011. The next seminar will take place December 14, 2012 including presentations by: Seamus Kealy, museum director at The Model, Aida Eltorie from Finding Projects Association and visual artist Rabih Mroue.
Alfredo Cramerotti, Director of Mostyn, Wales, and next co-curator of the Wales in Venice Pavilion 2013 will give a talk about his curatorial work across different disciplines, and will revisit his endeavour of art & media curating for Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art which took place in the region of Murcia, Spain, in 2010.
Alfredo Cramerotti is a writer, curator and artist based in the UK. His cultural practice explores the relationship between reality and representation across a variety of media and collaborations such as TV, radio, publishing, internet, media festivals, photography, writing and exhibition curating. Cramerotti is Director of Mostyn, the leading publicly funded contemporary art gallery in Wales, and was co-curator of Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art (2009-2010) and Senior Curator, QUAD Derby (2008-2011). He co-directs AGM Culture, roaming curatorial agency; CPS Chamber of Public Secrets, media and art production unit and is Visiting Lecturer in various European universities among others NTU Nottingham Trent University, University of Westminster and DAI Dutch Arts Institute. Cramerotti is also Editor of the Critical Photography book series by Intellect Books, and his own recent publications include Aesthetic Journalism: How to inform without informing (2009) and Unmapping the City: Perspectives of Flatness (2010).
Alfredo-Jaar-Logo-for-America-1987
Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti] 
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