Each period [in history] lays its own meaning on the image. Each photograph already has a context which it signifies. [...] But it does require a sort of delicate excavation, an archaeology, tracing the contradictory impression which previous discourses have left in the iconography of popular memory.
- Reconstruction Work: Stuart Hall on Images of Post War Black Settlement (1984)
How do we critically engage with historical images today? What can they tell us about our shared present, about the political and cultural shifts that have occurred since?
Professor Stuart Hall provided us with many tools to confront the present – tools which necessitate grounding ourselves in the complex histories that continue to shape each specific moment in time. In this reading group, we will discuss 'Modernity and Its Others: Three "Moments" in the Post-War History of the Black Diaspora Arts (2006) and 'Reconstruction Work: Stuart Hall on Images of Post War Black Settlement' (1984).
The latter was published in the ‘Black Image’ issue of Ten.8, the history of which is addressed in the current exhibition Ten.8 in Focus: The legacies of Black Image and Body Politics.
This session will be led by curator and writer Orsod Malik.
Produced in collaboration with International Curators Forum
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The Shifting the Centre reading groups aim to open up a space for collective study to consider the ways in which critical texts can act as important analytical tools for addressing the urgent political realities we are currently navigating.
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