“Photography, Curation, Affect,” Journal of Visual Culture, Photography at the Limits of Affect, Lisa Cartwright and Elizabeth Wolfson, editors, 17.2, 177-197
Photography, Curation, Affect
Abstract
This paper explores the implications of photographic affect for curatorial practice by examining the exhibition Through The Body: Lens Based Work by Contemporary Chinese Women Artists (Art Museum 2014a). I focus on the curatorial task of situating the work of three of the artists, Chen Zhe, Fan Xi and Chun Hua Catherine Dong, that employ affect in related but potentially incompatible ways. Chen's visceral series The Bearable documents her practices of cutting as an attempt to overcome shame and begin healing. Fan's portraits of topless Chinese lesbians use affect to assert the human dignity of her subjects and make their presence visible in a culture that erases them. Dong's photographic and video documentations of her mail-order bride performances use affect to disrupt and complicate the power relations her performances expose. By situating their works in the exhibition, the paper investigates the issues raised by photographic affect for curatorial practice.
Keywords: Photography, Affect, Curation. Contemporary Chinese Art, Empathic Identification
Introduction: Photographic Affect as a Curatorial Issue in Through The Body
Affect is an underdiscussed aspect of curating photographs and requires separate consideration from an art historical or visual culture perspective on photographic affect.[1] Given the centrality of affective and emotional strategies to several strands of contemporary photographic practice, dealing with affect is necessarily a part of curating contemporary lens-based work. This paper examines the challenges of thinking photographic affect curatorially through an analysis of the production of Through the Body: Lens-Based Work by Contemporary Chinese Women Artists. The necessity of dealing curatorially with photographic affect emerged during the preparatory work for the exhibition.[2] Ultimately, photographic affect became a central curatorial element in putting together the exhibition. I worked on the project with two co-curators: Fu Xiaodong and Zhou Yan. Fu is a Beijing based curator and director of Space Station Gallery in the 798 Art District.[3] Zhou Yan is a Toronto-based freelance curator and translator who is currently pursuing a PhD in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.[4] We worked collaboratively on the project and exhibition decisions were made as a group. I consulted with both co-curators in writing this article and am drawing on their experiences in the description of the project's development.
TTB took three years to complete and was made available on April 28, 2014.[5] The final version of the exhibition was mounted at the University of Toronto Art Centre (UTAC) as a primary exhibition of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival (Art Museum 2014a).[6] In its final form, the exhibition brought together the work of none artists and one artists’ collective that explored Chinese women’s bodily experience.[7] The exhibition was structured around the Chinese concept Ti Shi, which can be translated as the act of learning through bodily experience. The works in the exhibition used personal situations, experiences, and bodies to speak to the broader social and political situations the artists inhabited. The selected art works explored issues relating to family, sexuality, reproduction, cultural legacies, and social expectations, while examining the tensions between the residues of tradition and the new possibilities generated within China’s rapidly changing political, economic and urban landscapes. The works in the exhibition were also selected and arranged for their affective potential.
Fan Xi’s Up Front: Photographic Affect as an Artistic Strategy
It was during a studio visit with the artist Fan Xi that it became clear to the curatorial team that we needed to deal with photographic affect in curating the exhibition and that dealing with photographic affect curatorially raised different issues than reading it art historically (Brown and Phu 2014b). Fan Xi (b. 1984) is a Beijing based, emerging Chinese artist and filmmaker who studied sculpture at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Her practice turned to photography and video in 2011. We visited Fan as part of a series of studio visits the three exhibition curators conducted in Beijing in July 2013 to select the final work for the show. Our encounter with Fan’s work highlighted the centrality of affect to the artistic strategies of the artists we were visiting. The experience shaped the curation of the exhibition and prompted an ongoing reflection on the curatorial role of affect. In particular, it was an encounter with Fan’s series Up Front (2011-) that resonated for us. Up Front is a series of black and white half and three-quarter length, topless portraits of butch, Chinese lesbians. The portraits are emotionally powerful and are intended to assert the basic human dignity of their subjects and create a space of lesbian visibility in China.
In Fan’s studio, there were a number of photographic series pinned up on display and a black cloth that ran the length of one wall. The cloth was pinned up over a series of small photographs. After showing us the other works, Fan removed the cloth to show us the series beneath. The photographs she revealed were black and white portraits of half-naked Chinese women. Despite the generic subject matter, and the small scale they were printed at, the works were compelling – these were not traditional nudes. The photographed women held our gaze and placed emotional demands on us. The ad hoc-ness of their presentation, un-mounted and pinned to the wall, seemed appropriate to the emotional rawness of the work. Zhou and I were then told that these were portraits of Chinese lesbians.[8]
My initial assumption about this strange presentation style was that the cloth was a response to potential government censorship; the artist hid the works because depicting homosexuality or nudity was a political problem and the black cloth was the polite fig leaf that made having the work in the studio acceptable. When I asked the artist if this was the case, she laughed and said that lala was not a big deal for the government.[9] Instead, she indicated that the reason she covered the photographs up was that they were too emotionally charged. If she could see them then she couldn't do any work in the space. She couldn't look at the portraits without having an affective response. We couldn’t either.
We (the curators) immediately agreed these works had to be part of the exhibition and the conversation turned to their display. We then asked the artist some standard curatorial questions to determine how the works could be displayed. How were the works titled? Was this the final size or were these maquettes? How large could/should the works be printed? How could/should they be presented: mounted, framed, or unmounted? How many were available? Could we make exhibition prints in Toronto or would the works have to be shipped from China? How much room did the works require? How many needed to be presented for the series concept to work? This question is related to Deepali Dewan and Sophie Hackett's (2009: 338) formulation of 'cumulative affect.' Dewan and Hackett used cumulative affect to describe the affective charge of viewing collected studio photographs that was not related to the ‘uniqueness of single photographs (2009: 338). Many contemporary photographic works derive additional affective and conceptual charge from their position in photographic series. Often, the artist prefers to display the work in groups in order for the series concept to communicate or be legible to viewers.[10]
When I told Fan that we wanted to fill a room with them as part of the exhibition we were working on, she said that if we did that, she would come to the room and face the works. We also asked about how the work was made and what her relationship to the subjects was. According to Fan, the photographs were made quickly – there was a long front end to the project in which the artist built trust and relationships with the subjects but the photographic sessions themselves were short, sometimes under a minute, with only a few exposures made. While all of the women depicted identified as lesbians, Fan revealed that not all of the women depicted were fully out (either to their families or to society).[11] She also indicated that some of the women had never before been seen naked by someone else (with the lights on). Part of the power of the work stems from this tremendous vulnerability and bravery on the part of its subjects. For Fan, the works’ nudity was not sexual or eroticized; it asserted their subjects’ human dignity and acted as an assertion of lesbian visibility.
This encounter highlighted the importance of photographic affect to Fan’s practice. As Fan’s relation to the works reveals, affect wasn’t an additional element to be accounted for when writing or thinking about the work, affect was central to her experience and understanding of the work. Curating Up Front and incorporating it into the exhibition meant dealing with its affective charge in a respectful and responsible manner (without simply presuming that either the artist’s, or our own, response to the images was universal). We felt a responsibility to the work and its subjects. In presenting the works, we wanted to respect their affective force. Thus, in taking on these works and seeking to make them central to the exhibition, we had taken on as an additional task dealing with photographic affect as a central aspect of the exhibition.
Curatorial Selection
The encounter with Fan’s work sensitized us to the affective content of the work of the other artists we talked to. Ultimately, we selected works by nine additional artists and collectives for TTB, all of which had a strong affective component. One group of works explored family dynamics. Ma Qiusha's single channel video From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tiangiaobeili (2007) explores the emotional demands of filial piety.[12] In a single take, Ma speaks to the camera about her parents’ sacrifices to support her art career and the pressure they put on her to succeed in it. The title comes from her parents’ decision to sell the family home to pay for her to do an MFA in the USA. Her presentation oscillates between guilt over their sacrifices, resentment of the weight of their expectations, and gratitude for their support. The narrative is spoken with a razor blade in the artist’s mouth which she removes at the end: this is a story that it hurts to tell and to hear. We also selected works from two, related video series by Ye Funa, six from Family Album I (2010) and three from Family Album II (2012).[13] In these pieces, which are shown on digital picture frames, Ye performatively restages photographs of her family members. She attempts to hold the static pose of the original photograph while the family member describes the moment of the photograph’s taking and situates it in their life history. Her struggles to stay still echo the difficulties her mother and grandmothers faced and give the works an emotional resonance. Jin Hua’s ongoing photographic series My Big Family (2010-) documents her extended family across China.[14] In part an examination of the social effects of the one-child policy, the series explores the nature of family connection in a context in which the categories of aunt and uncle have largely disappeared.[15] The series evokes a longing for connection; the sparse aesthetic of many of the images, and the isolated single children she represents, reflect the isolation Jin felt as a recent immigrant to Canada.
Two works we presented dealt powerfully with themes of suicide and the murder of women. Two videos edited by Da Fu and Chen Si offer looped documentation of a poetry-theater performance titled Riding a Roller Coaster, Flying into the Future (2013), a moving work in which LadyBird Theater responds to the suicide of a young, contemporary woman poet by exploring the social and political structures that were oppressing her.[16] The videos included translated text overlays of the poems motivating the performance which focused on subjects relating to women's experiences in China such as spousal abuse and child prostitution. The reference to futurity in the title, which is taken from one of the poet’s best-known works, resonates chillingly with the fact of suicide. We also presented 4 photographs documenting The Death of the Xinkai River (2008), a performance in which the artist Li Xinmo immerses herself in a river at the site where a murdered coed’s body had been discovered.[17] The green surface of the polluted river provides a beautiful visual contrast to Li’s white dress but also ties the devastation of a woman's murder to environmental devastation, making a chilling link between sexual violence and social corruption.
Two multi-channel video works in the show presented fantastic scenarios that elicit lighter affects. Lovers Are Artists (Part 1) (2012) is a whimsical four-channel video installation by Fang Lu.[18] The piece presents a single narrative across the four channels; in stop-motion, a young woman buys food in a traditional Hutong neighbourhood in Bejing, decorates her bike with it, plays games with it (i.e, hopscotch with scallion pancakes), and makes art with it. In Lei Benben’s dreamlike five-channel video, Original Face (2009), the body-painted artist becomes elements of nature.[19] In the five channels, she variously performs as a leopard, a crane, a rock, a lotus flower, and a rape (canola) field. Her mesmerizing gestures create a soothing and contemplative experience. We also included a second work by Ma Qiusha that provocatively examines the tensions between social collectivity and individual behaviour. US (2010), a three-channel video, documents a performance at a Beijing gallery in which Ma hired one hundred Chinese peasants, sewed them together into white cotton smocks, and then had them pull themselves apart from the group and leave the gallery. The repetitive sound of tearing cloth, the participants' physical struggles to separate themselves (without losing all their clothing), and the surveillance camera aesthetic, combine to give the work a voyeuristic frisson.
While all the art works selected had an affective component, two in particular seemed to us to resonate with Fan’s work in ways that were important but which could also potentially interfere with Up Front’s affective content. These were Chen Zhe’s photographic series The Bearable (2007-10) and Catherine Chun Hua Dong’s series of related photographic, video and performance works, The Husbands and I.
Born in Beijing, Chen (n.d.) graduated in 2011 from the School of Photography at the Pasadena Art Institute. She has exhibited her photographs internationally and has received several international awards for her practice.[20] Chen’s series mixes black and white and colour imagery as it documents her practices of self-cutting. Close-ups of wounds, clumps of hair, and blood-stained towels, are placed in contrast with oddly erotic closeups of eyes and mouths, out of focus glamour shots of the artist, and a picture of her feet curled up in bed. The work is visceral and unflinching. Its nudity is confrontational. We were concerned that its sometimes angry presentation of wounded bodies would disrupt the more contemplative viewing we saw Up Front demanding. However, we also wanted the complex relations Up Front's subjects had with their displayed bodies to be in dialogue with The Bearable’s unflinching exploration of the artist’ distrust and discomfort with her own corporeality.
The other body of work whose affective content concerned us in relation to Up Front was Dong’s The Husbands and I. Born in China, Dong (2016) emigrated to Vancouver, Canada as an adult where she studied art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She later received an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal. Dong’s work had three components: photographs documenting one-minute performances with random white men on the streets of Vancouver in which Dong asked them to pose with her as if she was their mail order bride (2010);[21] a fifteen-minute video showing elements of eleven 24-hour performances with ten men and one women, recruited through Craigslist, who agreed to perform with Dong as her mail-order husband (2010-11);[22] and a live performance component in which Dong invited gallery visitors to get in bed with her and perform as her husband (2012).[23] The work, which responded to Dong’s experiences of being exoticized as a recent immigrant, used humour, anger, and eroticism in powerful and provocative ways. We wanted the work's humor and anger to resonate with Chen's and Fan's works but also felt Dong's work needed to be physically distant from theirs in order to not impinge on the other works' affective structures.
Photographic Affect and Exhibition Layout
In our preliminary exhibition layout from November of 2013 [Figure 1], we arranged for these works to be separate from each other. There are a number of potentially conflicting considerations that curators must balance when positioning work in an exhibition. These include: thematic consistency and development; the size of the works in relation to the available spaces (normally, curators begin by situating larger works, or works with more exacting space requirements, before placing smaller, or less spatially demanding, works); viewing distance (does the work require intimacy or is it intended to be seen from a distance); sequencing; lighting requirements (low light is needed for projections and videos whereas bright light is required for some wall works); hanging requirements (ceiling heights, location of power outlets, etc.); and need for in-gallery seating (related to duration of time-based works) (Newhouse 2005).
Figure 1: Preliminary Installation Plan of TTB
These considerations are also constrained by the overall budget and by the flexibility of the space available. Some exhibition spaces are reconfigurable with the use of temporary walls. Sometimes exhibition curators and exhibit planners design and construct new, purpose-built spaces for an exhibition. In other cases, due to time, budget, or space limitations, the curators adapt the project to fit within an existing floorplan. In this case, we worked to fit the exhibition into the Gallery's pre-existing floorplan. As can be seen in Figure 2, the UTAC space presents several constraints: a central axis, no single route through the exhibition, and two entry points. The Gallery has three main spaces: the art lounge, the Delta Gamma Gallery (DG), and the West Galleries. The West Galleries are divided into six rooms. There are glass doors between the art lounge and the DG and the DG and the West Galleries, which means that works on the back wall of the Central West-West Gallery are visible from both the DG and the art lounge. The 'There and Back Again' (Grey, Gardom, and Booth 2006: 35) structure imposed by the facility means that viewers will encounter the work in the DG twice; that work will shape how viewers encounter the rest of the exhibition and will then be re-experienced by them as they leave.
In translating our selection of work that explored the theme of women’s bodily experience into a concrete arrangement of objects in space there were a number of elements that constrained our arrangement: thematic consistency, object size, room sizes, gallery layout, lighting requirements, mounting requirements, sound bleed, and affective charge. The Gallery Map in Figure 2 shows the final layout of the exhibition and its relation to the Centre's concurrent programming.
Figure 2: Final Layout of Exhibitions at UTAC
Up Front was placed at the west end of the central West Gallery at UTAC. This is the gallery’s featured space as work placed on the back wall of the gallery is visible throughout the institution. In the exhibition, we showed eleven works from Up Front: three on the back wall and four on each side. The works were printed at 150x100cm, which presented the figures as slightly larger than life sized. Hung high on the wall so that viewers looked up at the figures, the works were shown unframed and were attached to the wall by rare earth magnets across their top edge. The bottom edge of the photographs was unfastened and allowed to curl slightly toward the viewer.[24] This hanging emphasized the materiality of the works while allowing viewers an unmediated encounter with the images. The three works on the back wall were visible from the exhibition's entrance and acted as an anchor for the show. [Figure 3. Up Front Installation view]
Figure 3: Fan Xi, Up Front, (2011-). Installation view, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.
We collocated Up Front with Li’s The Death of the Xinkai River. Li’s work’s use of a politics of visibility to ritually commemorate the river and the murdered girl seemed an effective complement to Up Front’s assertion of lesbian visibility. We showed four works from the series. They were printed at 150x99cm, face-mounted on sintra, and displayed unframed on the east side of the gallery space. [Figure 4: Installation view of Death of the Xinkai River]
Figure 4: Li Xinmo, Death of the Xinkai River (2008). Installation view, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.
TTB showed 50 framed photographs from Husbands and I in the west half of the north-west, West Gallery. The photographs were double hung, with 22 on the south wall and 28 on the north. The photographs flanked a bed and end tables with lamps. A monitor was hung above the bed to show the video component of the work and a bench was placed at the foot of the bed for visitors to sit on while they watched the video. Dong performed the piece for the exhibition's Thursday night launch event and the following Friday and Saturday.[25] The series contains provocative, bold and angry work that we felt addressed the context of the exhibition – showing works about Chinese women’s bodily experience to a largely Western audience.[26] [Figure 5: Installation view of Husbands and I]
Figure 5: Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Husbands and I, (2009-11). Installation view, photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.
TTB showed the entire 30 works of The Bearable for the first time.[27] The artist designed the hanging arrangement based on the space allocated to her project. The images were printed at sizes ranging from 47.2 x 31.5” to 6.5 x 4.3” and were hung in three groupings according to the artist’s design [Figure 6: Installation view of The Bearable]. Printed in China and then framed to the artist's specifications in Toronto, the work occupied three walls of the DG. Given its location, the work functioned as an introduction to the exhibition. The fourth wall of the space contained the title vinyl and intro panel for the show. [Figure 7: Installation view of The Bearable]
Figure 6: Chen Zhe, The Bearable, (2007-10). Installation view (Facing west), photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.
Figure 7: Chen Zhe, The Bearable, (2007-10). Installation view (Facing east), photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.
Our placement of The Bearable was shaped by our desire to affectively frame viewers’ encounters with the exhibition. We learned a year in advance that the exhibition would be beside an exhibition of sexualized representations drawn from the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies' Sexual Representation Collection. This raised the possibility of that project’s sexualized representations of women shaping audience encounters with the works in TTB. The final project, Archiving Public Sex, was accompanied by a warning that ‘This exhibition contains nudity and explicit sexuality.’(Art Museum 2014b)[28] In its exhibition of the archive’s holdings, APS presented bondage imagery, ephemera from the feminist porn awards, and archival documents relating to battles over film censorship in Ontario.[29] Because of concerns that APS, in its presentation of sexualized representations (particularly of women’s bodies), might structure viewers’ encounters with Up Front’s non-sexual nudity, we decided to place The Bearable as the opening (and closing) work of the exhibition. The hope was that The Bearable’s hard hitting, visceral, and un-erotic depictions of the female body would disrupt any expectations that might be created by viewing sexualized representations of women from the other show. We began with emotionally difficult work in order to prepare viewers to see the other work in the show in the terms in which it presented itself.
Photographic Affect and Sound Bleed
Our attempt to position the works based on their affective structure was modeled in part by our experience as curators working with sound bleed. One of the principal concerns with curating media art is spacing works with audio components to minimize interference (or in some cases to deliberately create discordance).[30] There were six works with sound in TTB and we needed to position them so that they could function effectively while minimizing their interference with each other. The six works were Ma Qiusha’s US, Ma Quisha’s From No 4 Pingyuanli to No 4. Tiangiaobeili, Funa Ye’s Family Albums I and II, Dong’s Husbands and I video, Lei BenBen’s Original Face, and Ladybird Theatre’s Riding a Roller Coaster, Flying into the Future. US had no dialogue and minimal sound but required three walls for the projections so it was given one of the smaller rooms at the beginning of the West Galleries. As a projection, US also needed low light levels that having its own room facilitated. Family Album I and II had voiceover and were subtitled in Mandarin. The pieces were intended to be in close proximity and the overlap of voices was intentional on the artist’s part. We placed these works in the first West Gallery and provided laminated translations of the dialogues. The volume of the individual works was low and the low light level of the room helped control the light levels for US. From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No 4. Tiangiaobeili had Mandarin dialogue with English subtitles and was presented using headphones to allow it to be in the same room with Riding a Rollercoaster, Flying into the Future which had music, dialogue, and voice effects (screaming). Both pieces were located in the room with Jin’s photographs. As this room had the largest uninterrupted wall in the gallery, it was used to foreground the large body of Jin’s work. [Figure 8: Installation view of Jin Hua, My Big Family] Riding a Rollercoaster, Flying into the Future was presented as a projection, making use of the alcove formed by the emergency exit door and using half walls to limit the effects of light bleed on the projection. From No. 4Pingyuanli to No 4. Tiangiaobeili was placed in the opposite corner with the hopes that its narrative of parental expectations would potentially reframe visitors’ readings of the scenes of mother and child studying together in Jin’s work. The Husbands and I video was a component of the larger installation which limited our ability to place it. Our positioning was determined more by affective concerns than by sound issues. However, the placement of Lei Benben’s work in the same room was shaped by our sense that her work’s minimal use of ambient sound would work well with the diegetic conversations of Dong’s video. In other words, sound from different pieces can materially affect the experience of other nearby works particularly those that also include sound. Some types of sound – particularly conversations and dissonant noise – can have a far greater effect on other works than other types – such as music and ambient noise. Similarly, we found that more contemplative emotional affects were more vulnerable to interference than more aggressive emotions. Like sound, the affective content of works shapes viewers’ experiences of space and is not neatly or easily confined to the immediate proximity of the work.
Figure 8: Installation view of Jin Hua, My Big Family (2010-). Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.
Conclusion: Thinking Photographic Affect Curatorially
The necessity of thinking photographic affect curatorially, and its difference from reading photographic affect art historically, emerged as part of the process of working on this exhibition. Curatorial engagements with photographic affect need to think affect prospectively or anticipatorily rather than offering a summative reading. They also need to think photographic affect in terms of series, collections, and their interactions rather than in terms of singular images. As Dewan and Hackett (2009: 338) note, 'Most studies on affect and photography tend to focus on single images and their power to “do things,” such as trigger response, provoke action, or make change.' If curation is about providing platforms for visitors to have experiences (Hennes 2010), then its engagement with photographic affect cannot be to assume that they will 'experience' a predetermined emotional content. Curators need to anticipate the possible range of viewers’ responses to works rather than simply describing or delineating the response that the work aims at. Spectator theory can describe how works position their viewers (or postulate an ideal viewer) but such readings are necessarily speculative (Rodowick 1991). Reading work speculatively encourages an overdetermination of audience response and an overemphasis on right reading – it frames the work of the curator as ensuring that the audience gets the work. While there is little literature on curating affect in the contemporary art literature (Fisher, 2006; Fisher and Reckitt, 2015, 2016), the museum studies literature on visitor experience has made affect a core consideration since the early 1990s (Roppola, 2014: 10-37). In Falk and Dierking’s (1992, 2012) Interactive Experience Model, museum visitors’ ability to make meaning with the exhibitions they encounter is shaped by three interacting contexts: personal, physical, and socio-cultural. The physical context includes the material structure of the gallery space and the exhibited objects. The socio-cultural includes the cultural background and expectations that the visitor brings to bear on the displayed material.[31] The personal context includes the visitors’ mood and affective state. If visitors are not affectively engaged by the displays they encounter they are unlikely to make meaning with them. The museum studies literature suggests that affective engagement is a necessity for a meaningful visitor encounter with a display of photographic works (or any other kind of display). Combining this literature, with its emphasis on visitors’ backgrounds and experiences in affective engagement, with the curatorial need to display images with strong affective contents means giving up the attempt to predetermine visitor responses. What is then required is a model for thinking photographic affect prospectively.
I want to argue that in attempting to think photographic affect prospectively, the most useful model is Lisa Cartwright’s (2008) model of empathetic identification. The most significant aspect of Cartwright’s model for understanding photographic affect curatorially is its separation of empathetic engagement with objects from right reading. Much engagement with empathy treats it as an exercise in feeling as. For example, in her discussion of the trope of photographic empathy in readings of Cindy Sherman’s work, Johanna Burton (2012: 58) defines empathy as 'an identificatory process by which one person not only understands or feels for another person but, rather, experiences with them, nearly as them.'[32] In the museum studies literature, Elif M Gokcigdem’s edited volume Fostering Empathy Through Museums (2016) similarly frames empathy as feeling as the other. Framing empathy as feeling as places the focus on right-feeling as a version of right reading. Cartwright (2008) proposes 'empathetic identification as an alternative to the model of identification that has presided in film theory for the past two decades,' which she sees as having been ‘tacitly based on the idea of feeling what the other feels, imagining oneself to be the other’ (2008: 2). Her alternative is 'empathetic identification, in which I do not necessarily feel the other’s feelings or imagine myself in his or her place, but rather recognize and even facilitate the otherness of the other' (2). Thus, in Cartwright’s model, empathy is not about right reading but offers an insight into the affective circuits of works.
My proposal … has not been to suggest that we identify and practice a ‘right optics’ of empathy or a moral politics of right looking and right feeling. Rather my suggestion is that we regard empathy in terms of its varieties of quality and dynamic, modality, temporality, and directionality, rather than subjecting it to measurement by degrees to assess the moral economy’s ebb and flow relative to good and bad, pride and shame. (2008, 247)
Cartwright’s model reframes empathy in an artwork as a work’s ability to make viewers feel (2008, 47). Following Cartwright, the curator’s task becomes identifying the ability of works to evoke feeling and the types of feelings they might evoke rather than specifying the emotional content and the visitor response. Visitors will coproduce their affective (and other) experiences using the photographs displayed in the exhibition, in Hennes’ (2010, 25) terms, as 'platforms for experiences.'
As the discussion of TTB has shown, contemporary artists are using affect as an element of their photographic and lens-based works. While, as Cartwright demonstrates, there is no (and should not be) guarantee that the affective experience of viewers will reproduce the affective intentions of the artist (just as there is no guarantee that they will reproduce any other artistic intentions), curators are responsible for engaging with that affective charge as part of their exercise of curatorial judgment. As Roger Simon notes, 'the scene of exhibition operates both as a provocation of affect and as a way of structuring affect’s relation to the possibilities of thought and judgment' (2011, 196). For Simon, writing in the context of exhibitions of suffering and trauma, the concern is producing exhibitions that foster ethical witnessing through the use of exhibition justification, mise-en-scene, and context (2011, 197-8). Similarly, for the curators of TTB, the exhibition's theme, layout, and context were shaped by our engagement with the works' affects in conjunction with the other concerns discussed. In our case, rather than experiencing affect as an emergent property of the difficult subject matter, affect was an intentional component of the works displayed. Thus, management of affect, while important, was not the central concern to ensure ethical witnessing by viewers. Like sound bleed, incorporating photographic affect in an exhibition requires curatorial balancing. Ultimately, dealing with photographic affect curatorially entails thinking of an exhibition as a whole (Bal, 2008) and not simply in terms of singular works or juxtapositions.
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[1] Photographic affect itself has been understudied until recently. As Brown and Phu (2014: 2) suggest, in the academic literature priority was given to "thinking photography" instead of feeling photography.
[2] As a member of the Toronto Photography Seminar (n.d.), I had been involved in discussions of photographic affect since 2007. TPS began exploring photographic affect in 2007 first by reading broadly in affect theory and then by beginning to apply that theory to photography. In 2009 the group published a special issue of Photography and Culture on Photographic Affect edited by Thy Phu and Linda Steer. In October of 2009 (Phu and Steer 2009). Elspeth Brown, Thy Phu and I organised the Feeling Photography conference at the University of Toronto. The conference was reviewed by Joy James (2010) and resulted in the book Feeling Photography edited by Brown and Phu (2014).
[3]Fu Xiaodong is an active curator and critic based in Beijing. She founded Space Station in 2009 and has served as the executive chief editor of the magazine Fine Arts Literature. She was the art director of CYAP (China Young Artists Project), director of T Art Space, and editor of the Lu Xun Acedemy of Fine Art’s Meiyuan magazine. Fu Xiaodong was a visiting curator at 24HR ART in Australia in 2010 and the Lorraine Foundation of France Pompidou Metz Centre in 2014. She received the French Photolevallois Pierre Huber Creation Prize, the South Korean "Asian Youth Art Award". She has curated many contemporary art exhibitions for institutions in both China and abroad, including Young Ink-The 8th International Ink Art Biennale of Shenzhen; The Third Hubei Fine Arts Literature Exhibition; the 2010 Get It Louder Exhibition, Beijing Sanlitun SOHO and Shanghai 100 Show; and Double Fly Egg Crushing Tournament at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. Fu Xiaodong has also curated the 13th and 15th OPEN International Performance Art Festivals, and beginning in 2012, the ongoing 8th Day series.
[4] Zhou Yan is an independent curator, a critic of art and literature, a poet and translator who currently lives in Toronto. She holds a Master of Museum Studies from the University of Toronto and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the same school. Zhou is the curator of several high profile international exhibitions and her shows participated in festivals including 2017 Lianzhou Foto Festival and Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival (2018 and 2014). They include: Idiorrhythymic: Canadian & Chinese Artists Urban Public Space Art Creation Project, Suzhou, China, 2016; Mediated Memory, a featured Canadian contemporary art exhibition at the 6th Beijing International Art Biennale, National Art Museum of China, 2015; Transformation of Canadian Landscape Art: Inside and Outside of Beijing, a touring exhibition in Xi’an Art Museum, Xian and Today Art Museum, Beijing in 2014-2015; among others. She is the recipient of Canada Council for the Arts grants and of an International Council of Museums Young Professional Fellowship. Her publications (books, articles and reviews) have been published in Canada, USA and China.
[5] For a discussion of the project’s development and its engagement with feminism see Brower, Fu, and Zhou (2018 forthcoming).
[6] In 2014, UTAC and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery were federated and today operate jointly as the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
[7] We followed Chinese naming principles for the artists except for Dong who had anglicised her name.
[8] Fu was familiar with the work and had arranged for Zhou and me to visit Fan’s studio.
[9] This has since changed. In the summer of 2017 the Chinese Government banned representations of homosexuality.
[10] This requires that there to be sufficient works displayed for them to not simply be read individually. In this exhibition, this was a concern with Dong's Photos, Li's Photos, Ye's videos, Chen's photos, and Jin's photos. Curatorially, we had to balance the need to present sufficient images with the limits of the available space, the varying production costs of the works, and the overall budget. Our goal was always to showcase the aspects of the work that expressed the theme. One of the common curatorial trade-offs is between exhibiting a few large images or more smaller ones. Mieke Bal (2007) raises a contrasting concern with the affective potential of exhibited photographs of suffering by arguing that exhibiting too many photographs that work in the same affective register empties the affective charge of the works: 'one cannot sustain the difficulty through the confrontation with so many photographs, and hence, one must shed it and move on' (2007, 97).
[11] The works were shown with the permission of the subjects. The different degrees of out-ness of the subjects meant that works in the series had different levels of permissions: Some could only be reproduced in print but not online, some images could be reproduced in Chinese language materials, some could only be reproduced outside China in non-Chinese language materials, and some images could not be reproduced at all. One work had its permission to be physically shown revoked by the subject during the exhibition. News of the exhibition also prompted one sitter to give in to pressure from her family and marry heterosexually.
[12] Ma (2007-12) received her MFA studying Electronic Integrated Art at Alfred University, New York in 2008, and completed prior studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She has participated in major exhibitions at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, the Pace gallery in New York, and the Tate Modern in London, amongst others.
[13] Ye (n.d.) completed her MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art in London. She has shown her work in institutions around the world including the CAFA Museum in Beijing, the Chongqing Contemporary Art Center, the Today Art Museum in Beijing, the galerie Anne de Villepoix in Paris, and the Fondazione Claudio Buziol in Venice.
[14] Jin (2017) is a visual artist who has lived in Shanghai and Vancouver, and is now pursuing an MFA in Photography at Concordia University in Montreal. She has exhibited her work in Canada, the USA, China and the Netherlands. Her work is in several public and private collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, and she has been the recipient of several awards, the most recent being the Emerging Artist prize at the 2012 Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award.
[15] Jin has a twin sister whose family she documents as part of the series. The series contains a number of images of solo children playing by themselves.
[16] Ladybird Theatre (n.d.) is an independent theatre group based in Beijing. Founded in 2008 by the theatre director Cao Kefei and poet Zhou Zan, the group’s core members come from a variety of creative fields including theatre, literature, music, dance, contemporary art, and design. They have performed a repertoire of original and adapted productions – with an emphasis on female playwrights – at locations across China including the Beijing Come and go Centre for Art, the Beijing 9 Theater, Shenzhen’s Hua gallery, the Chengdu Arthouse, and the Taipei Women’s Theatre Festival.
[17] Li (n.d.) is currently appointed to the Modern Art Department at the Tianjin Art Academy, having previously studied at the Harbin Normal University in China. She has shown her work in major exhibitions at institutions such as the Juhua Space in Shanghai, the Dingshun Space of Contemporary Art in Songzhuang, and the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, amongst others.
[18] Fang (2012) is the co-founder of Video Bureau, an independent video archive resource in Beijing and Guangzhou. She completed her MFA at the San Francisco Arts Institute in new genres in 2007, and her BFA in graphic Design from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Beijing and Guangzhou, and in group exhibitions in Shenzhen, Lisbon, and San Francisco.
[19] Lei (n.d.) graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 2006. Since then, her work has been displayed in major exhibitions at various institutions including the CAFA Museum in Beijing, the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, the Lianzhou International Photography Festival, Watergate gallery in Seoul, the Basel Art Fair, and the Műcsarnok Art Museum in Budapest, amongst other locations.
[20] She received the Inge Morath Award from the Magnum Foundation in 2011, the Lianzhou photo award in 2011, the Three Shadows award in 2011, and the Paul Huf award from FOAM in 2012.Her photobook of The Bearable and its follow up Bees won the Best Photobook of the Year award from the Kassel Photobook Festival in 2016.
[21] There are 325 photographs in the series.
[22] Dong had over 100 potential performers respond to her ad but only 11 were willing to be video recorded participating in the project.
[23] This component had been developed when the artist exhibited the series at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery in Montreal. The works were hung on the side walls of the gallery flanking a bed and the video was displayed on a monitor hung over the bed. We ultimately preserved this format in the display at UTAC. Because we were uncertain about including the performance element, the preliminary layout of TTB does not include the bed and has fewer photographs than the final display.
[24] The photographs had been printed in Toronto and sent to the gallery rolled up in a tube. The paper retained a memory of being rolled that it slowly released over the course of the exhibition.
[25] In conjunction with the performance, as a public programming event, I interviewed Dong and Fan Xi on the last Saturday afternoon of the performance at the close of the day. Dong and I were in the bed and Fan and her translator sat beside the bed. One member of the public who had been performing in the bed with Dong at the start of panel stayed in the bed throughout the discussion.
[26] While some reviewers responded positively to the work, others found it offensive. In her review of the Festival, Cynthia Foo (2014: 2) saw the work as a ‘ham-fisted’ engagement with ‘existing stereotypes of Chineseness.’
[27] The series was awarded the Three Shadows award in 2011. Works from the series had been shown at the Lianzhou Photography Festival (2010); Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing (2011); J Gallery, Shanghai (2011); He Xiangniang Museum, Shenzen, China (2011); the Fotohof Gallery, Salzburg, Austria (2012); and the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2013).
[28] Archiving Public Sex ran concurrently with TTB. Curated by Nicholas Matte, Lisa Kadey, Jessica Martin, Ana Martins, it was a Feature exhibition of the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival. ‘Archiving Public Sex is a look at what sex is publically encouraged, celebrated, restricted or permitted within the context of a prevailing social climate and some of the ways that people have produced and fought for greater sexual freedoms. In turn, the exhibition demonstrates the importance of preserving key records and archival ephemera, especially for minority and marginalized groups. How have mainstream, minority and niche sexualities been shaped by diverse commercial, legal, artistic and activist contexts and social interventions? And how do these sexual histories remain relevant to our understanding of sexuality today?’ (Art Museum 2014b). Martin and Martins were Museum Studies graduate students under my supervision who worked with the collection’s curator, Nicholas Matte, on the project.
[29] The exhibitions corresponded with the Berkshire Women’s History conference in Toronto and one ambition of the archival project was to showcase the range of the collections holdings to the visiting scholars.
[30] For example, when mounting Mieke Bal’s multi-channel video installation, Nothing is Missing (2006-10), the artist asked me to position the monitors and adjust the volume so that the voices interfered with each other (Art Museum 2009; Bal 2006; Bal 2012).
[31] An awareness of the importance of socio-cultural context for meaning making shaped our selection of works for the project as we wanted works that would be legible to a North American audience. This meant that we did not select works which required a depth of contextual cultural knowledge of Chinese History and Culture to be meaningfully engaged with.
[32] Emphasis in original.