Photography, Power & the Ethics of Representation
Session #1 | Who gets to Picture, Narrate, Position?
M. Neelika Jayawardane (facilitator)
M. Neelika Jayawardane is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg (South Africa). She is a recipient of the 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a book project on the Afrapix, a South African photographers’ agency that operated during the last decade of apartheid. She was a founding member of the online magazine, Africa is a Country. Along with academic publications, her writing is featured in Aperture, Transition, Contemporary & , Contemporary Practices: Visual Art from the Middle East, and Even Magazine.
Zora J Murff
Zora J Murff is an Assistant Professor of Art in the University of Arkansas’ School of Art. He received his MFA from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and holds a BS in Psychology from Iowa State University. Merging his educational experiences, Murff’s practice highlights the various intersections between social systems, social phenomena and art. He has published books with Aint-Bad Editions (pulled from publisher) and Kris Graves Projects. His most recent monograph, At No Point In Between (Dais Books), was selected as a winner of the 2019 Lucie Foundation Photo Book Awards (Independently Published category). Murff is a Co-Founder and Co-Curator of Strange Fire Collective, a group of interdisciplinary artists, writers, and curators working to construct and promote an archive constituted by diverse makers. Works from At No Point In Between will be exhibited in The Museum of Modern Art’s Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020.
Sama Raena Alshaibi
Sama Alshaibi’s photographs, videos and immersive installations examine the mechanisms of fragmentation in the aftermath of war and exile. They often feature a female figure that references a complex site of struggle and identification, and confront an image history of photographs and moving images through a feminist perspective. Recent exhibitions include the State of The Art 2020, Crystal Bridges (Arkansas), 13th Cairo International Biennale (Egypt, 2019), and solo exhibitions at Ayyam Gallery (Dubai, 2019) and Artpace (San Antonio, 2019). Alshaibi received 1st place for the 2019 Project Development Award from the Center (Santa Fe), 2018 Artist Grant from the Arizona Commission on The Arts, and the 2017 Visual Arts Grant from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (Beirut). Her monograph, Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In was published by Aperture, NYC. Alshaibi’s twenty-one solo exhibitions and over 150 group exhibitions include the 55th Venice Biennale, Pen + Brush (NYC, 2019), 2018 Breda Photo Festival (Netherlands), American University Museum (Washington D.C., 2018) and the 2017 Honolulu Biennial. Alshaibi is a Palestinian-Iraqi, born in Basra, Iraq and currently resides in Tucson, Arizona, where she is Professor of Photography, Video and Imaging at University of Arizona.
Aaron Turner
Aaron Turner is a photographer, artist, and curator based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Aaron received his M.F.A in Visual Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, an M.A. in Visual Communications from Ohio University, and holds a BA in Journalism & Fine Arts from the University of Memphis. He uses photography to pursue personal stories of family and resilience, in two main areas of the U.S. - the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. Aaron also uses the 4x5 view camera to create still life studies on the topics of race, history, blackness as material, and the role of the black artist. His work has been exhibited in numerous contexts, including the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art and the Houston Center for Photography. His awards include an En Foco Photography Fellowship, a 2020 Project Space Residency at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, a Light Work Artists-in-Residence, 2019, and participation in the New York Times Portfolio Review, 2018. Aaron currently works as a Research Fellow in Photography at the University of Arkansas School of Art where he founded and runs The Center for Photographers of Color, which seeks to promote the advancement of emerging and under-represented artists of color working within photography, digital imaging, and other lens-based media.
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson’s works negotiate explorations of selfhood, representation and narration within intimate and personal interventions, which focus on transnational migration, belonging, displacement and collective memory. As the art historian Professor Eddie Chambers has written “British life has had the disastrous effect of immigrants not being routinely regarded as sensitive human beings, but being instead cast as vexatious problems. Jackson’s work restores humanity to people from whom this critical characteristic has been routinely withheld or withdrawn. And in restoring humanity, a thousand stories of life can be, and are, told.” Jackson is a recipient of the month-long Light Work/Autograph ABP International Photography Residency, and a graduate of the MA Documentary photography program at Newport, Wales. Jackson’s works are held in numerous photography collections, such as the United Kingdom Government Art Collection, the Garman Ryan Collection, Light Work Collection and the Rugby Museum & Art Gallery. He has undertaken numerous written commissions, most recently In The Night Of The Day for the Living Memory Project. He is the co-founder and co-director of ReFramed and is a full member of Diversify Photo. Jackson currently lives and works works between the UK and Canada.