The Institute of Fine Arts invites you to an evening of project presentations by current Conservation Center students from their summer experiences at IFA-sponsored and co-sponsored archaeological excavations.
Presentations will include:

Chantal Stein, Sardis Excavations in Turkey
Andrew Wolf, Samothrace Excavations

A question and answer session will follow the last presentation, and please join us for a light reception in the Loeb Room at the conclusion of the evening's program.

Abstract: In 1927, the radical-left magazine Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (or AIZ) published a two-page spread with the declarative titled “Die AIZ sagt die Wahrheit!” [The AIZ Tells the Truth!]. At issue was its cover photo from a few weeks earlier showing right-wing militiamen scandalously posing on the country estate of German Interior Minister Walter von Keudell, the first “völkisch” member of a Weimar-era cabinet. The picture had ignited furious public debate before enveloping the minister himself, who was forced to protest his innocence from the well of the Reichstag. As von Keudell declared, the picture was nothing more than a cut-and-paste falsification. In the subsequent two-page spread, the AIZ now confessed that its cover had indeed been a “Bildkombination,” but that the image nonetheless told the truth about the government’s codling of proto-fascists. Using this case of a highly public debate about photography’s veracity, my paper proposes that Weimar-era Germany’s politically polarized public sphere was significantly fomented by the camera. The experience of political combat was now being driven by a contest of photographic images. But as the paper also suggests, the rhetoric of truth propelling this encounter, particularly in the face of an open “Bildkombination,” shows that photography now functioned at an affective register that reinscribed the medium as a passionate rather than mechanically objective form of witness. This phenomenon resembles today’s photographic conditions in the era of “alternative facts.”

Andrés Mario Zervigón is Associate Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Photography and Germany (Reaktion Book, 2017). In addition, Zervigón coedited three anthologies: Photography and Its Origins with Tanya Sheehan(Routledge, 2014), Photography and Doubt with Sabine Kriebel(Routledge, 2016), and Subjective/Objective: A Century of Social Photography with Donna Gustafson (Zimmerli/Hirmer, 2017). For his current book project, titled Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung -- The Worker's Illustrated Magazine, 1921-1938: A History of Germany's Other Avant-Garde, he received the Paul Mellon Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA, 2013-14). His articles and reviews have appeared in New German Critique, Visual Resources, History of Photography, Rundbrief Fotografie, Photo/Researcher, Études Photographiques, October, Art Journal, and CAAReviews. Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group at Rutgers that promotes interdisciplinary dialogue on photography’s history, theory and practice. Its last event was the two-day symposium Reinventing Documentary Photography in the 1970s, co-convened by Sarah Miller and Drew Sawyer.

Abstract: Artist, poet, activist and philosopher, Cecilia Vicuña (born in Chile, a long-time resident of New York) has been noted for many decades for her work in a wide variety of media and venues. Her political activism, her artistic innovation and her stimulating and original approach to problems of visuality and the expression of collective emotion are at the heart of her art.

We are immensely pleased to have Cecilia as the first Artist in this Fall's series of Latin American Forum events. She will discuss her work in the context of a conversation with Edward J. Sullivan, Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Art History and Deputy Director of the Institute of Fine Arts
Image Courtesy of the Artist.

Abstract: Anicka Yi lives and works in New York City. Recent institutional solo exhibitions of her work include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunsthalle Basel; List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and The Cleveland Museum of Art. In October 2016, she was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize and presented a solo exhibition at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, from April to July 2017. Yi has screened her film, The Flavor Genome, at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in 2017. She is represented by 47 Canal, New York.