Abstract

In this talk, I will discuss what I call an ecological or diagrammatic approach to the archive as found in the photographic work of the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans. In a number of his works and image constellations, the dynamic worlds he and his machines create are dominated by phenomena that we may define as image ecological, even though they are not living in the biological sense, seemingly producing new sets of realities, environments, and strange relations. His photographic work and archival strategies allow us to discuss what is at stake for ecological thought when an intensive artistic engagement with technical means and material relations produce visual worlds that are neither the effects of representation nor preservations of the past. Instead, they are the result of material and affective relations that challenge notions of subjectivity and self-sufficiency. I would also like to point to the ways in which Tillmans’s production of an archive and methods of constellating images rehearsel questions of autonomy, key to the 20th century avant-garde art.

Bio

Sara R. Yazdani  is Associate Professor of Art History and Art Theory in the Department of Art and Craft at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She received her Ph.D. in Art History and Media Aesthetics from the University of Oslo in 2019, and her work is published in Art Journal (2021), Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (2021), and a number of catalogues and anthologies on modern and contemporary art. Yazdani is currently working on her first monograph with the tentative title Self-Sufficiency, which explores the work of Wolfgang Tillmans and the re-emergence of an ecological approach to  photography, and on a research project on how ideas of the  environment and sensation (perception) are explored in contemporary art of the 21st century called Sensing Bodies and Other Ecologies.