FICA is pleased to announce a series of Reading Modules, taking off from the FICA Virtual Reading Group, that would be led by different resource persons, including but not limited to academics, curators and critics. The first FICA Reading Module, Image/Object/Affect: Circuits of Seeing led by Ranu Roychoudhuri will take readers through a close scrutiny and analysis of notions of the image and a politics of visual representation that comes into question via guided readings and a series of discussions.
Dates: 15 - 17 July and 22 - 24 July
Days: Thursday, Friday, Saturday
Time: 10 AM to 1 PM
Eligibility:
All are welcome to apply. There are no prerequisites for applying to participate as readers.
Application materials:
To allow a more vibrant and wide-ranging group of readers to assemble, we invite readers to demonstrate their interest in the Module by choosing to send us a glimpse of whatever they may wish to share - examples of their writing, artistic practice and/or any other related pursuits - that might demonstrate their interest in the module and connect/contribute to the themes in question.
As part of your application, please write to us at info@ficart.org with a very short introduction of yourself, along with samples of your work as mentioned above.
About the module:
Visual images both inundate and mediate our perceptions of the exceptional and the everyday, conditioning human experiences of the real in a hyper-visible arena, or what we have come to know and refer to as a 'society of the spectacle.' Within rapidly accelerating and intersecting modern networks of production and consumption, the visual image is both mobile and potent, with continuously redefined limits and publics; this is where shifting terrains of meaning-making have now come to pose challenges on the making of such images and their publics. Where do we then locate the medium of photography with its promise of fixity and authenticity, especially when historically specific moments are precarious?
Image/Object/Affect: Circuits of Seeing is structured to include sessions that will explore myriad visual forms as provocations to think about the present, reflecting upon the objecthood of images and their cultural locations alongside ideas around their fluidity, their processes of production, museumization and conditions of viewing. Over six days spread over 2 weeks, participants will be invited to critically reflect on the politics of contemporary visuality by delving into key twentieth-century texts in art history, visual culture and photography. They will also be encouraged to respond to instigations from within the syllabi, annotate and intervene with their own intermedia references and contribute to curating a shared thematic resource.
Faced with a contemporary moment that is both evasive and traumatic, we are being pushed to reconsider our ways of thinking about photographs in moments of crisis and periods of ‘slow violence.' This Reading Module with Ranu Roychoudhuri hopes to be able to both deliberate over and dissect in some part the dynamism of images as well as the purported ambivalence of spectatorship and anxious witnessing that characterise our encounters with visuals today.
The Reading Modules exemplify FICA's interest in sustaining and shaping acts of reading as critical, discursive, intimate and subversive; they will also include a prolonged, dedicated focus on chosen themes, permitting more thorough explorations over a period of time. We are also keen to experiment with devising syllabi as blueprints that might develop across different Modules, and to further consider modes of disseminating the same. Through the FICA Reading Modules, we hope to look at the practice of reading as spilling out beyond the dimensions of textual into more processual and dynamic interactions that are non-hierarchical, dialogic, organic, intuitive and affective.
About the resource person:
Ranu Roychoudhuri is a historian of modern and contemporary art with focus on photography, South Asian studies, postcolonial theory, popular visual culture, and intellectual history of art. She specializes in connected histories of mass circulated photographs from South Asia. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes and she is presently working on her first monograph on twentieth-century camera cultures in India. She received her academic training at Jadavpur University, Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and The University of Chicago and held a research fellowship at Yale University. Previously she taught at Nalanda University and Yale University, and currently teaches at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, where she trains undergraduate and graduate students in the History of Art. Roychoudhuri is also a trained photographer and an independent curator.