Not Reading Nor Looking at Prefix ICA, Dec. 12

When I first began thinking about how to run a looking group, I had always hoped to do a session on images that were not really photographs: scenes produced by a camera, but rarely reproduced or circulated and instead largely known through textual and verbal descriptions or anecdotes. That interest arose, in part, from Ariella Azoulay’s generative suggestion that the event of photography can take place even when no photograph is made. Just the presence or possibility of a camera can change the relationship between the viewer, subject and photographer, even if no image is produced (a possibility that some of the folks in the Toronto Photography Seminar have also been thinking through in our Photographic Situation project).

I could never figure out exactly how to get at this question in looking group, but thankfully my too-smart colleagues cheyanne turions and Jacob Korczynski invited me to think about it out loud with them in a new hybrid/super discussion group that is set to take place at Prefix ICA in December. Bringing together three existing discussion group formats—an out-loud reading group, an out-loud looking group and an international, thematic reading group that also examines and generates artists’ projects—Not Reading Nor Looking is an attempt at thinking about what happens when images move from photographs to texts, and back again.

Not Reading Nor Looking After the Internet
Thursday, 12 December 2013
Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art (401 Richmond Street West, Suite 124)
7 PM
Free

 

In conjunction with the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, this salon will feature a selection of texts compiled by Gabrielle Moser and Jacob Korczynski.

 

For the last year Gabrielle Moser has been hosting a series of events titled No Looking After the Internet that invites participants to look at a photograph (or series of photographs) they are unfamiliar with, and “read” the image out-loud together. For the past few years, Jacob Korcynski has been hosting reading groups around Toronto based on the research thematics of If I Can’t Dance (IICD), including extended research around reading/feeling and appropriation/dedication. What No Reading, No Looking and IICD share is an interest in how we construct understanding based on encounter, be it with text or images. For this iteration of Not Looking Nor Reading, Moser and Korcynski have selected texts that approach images through language, using prose to conjure scenes in the minds of readers that are already mediated, as representations rather than reality.

 

For this meeting, texts will include selections from Sergio González Rodríguez’s The Femicide Machine and Gauri Gill’s 1984.

 

Gabrielle Moser is a writer and independent curator. She regularly contributes to Artforum.com, and her writing has appeared in venues including ARTnews, Canadian Art, Fillip, n paradoxa, and Photography & Culture. She has curated exhibitions for Access Gallery, Gallery TPW, the Leona Drive Project and Vtape. Moser is a PhD candidate in art history and visual culture at York University and a member of the Toronto Photography Seminar.

 

Jacob Korczynski is an independent curator currently based in Toronto, where he leads the satellite reading group of If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. He has curated projects for the Dunlop Art Gallery, SAW Gallery, Vtape, Gallery TPW and the Art Gallery of York University amongst others, and his writing has appeared in Prefix Photo, Ciel Variable, Border Crossings, C Magazine and Fillip. A former member of the Pleasure Dome collective, he was also the co-curator of Print Generation and From Instructions, the 22nd and 23rd editions of the Images Festival.

 

This meeting of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) is supported by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (as always) and the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art.