Christian Vium’s proposal “Revisited” selected as the winner of the 23rd RPS Grant

11/19/2023

©︎Christian Vium / Revisited

The 23rd RPS Grant recipients, whose applications closed in September 2023, have been selected. The proposal “Revisited” by Christian Vium. The jury is Teun van der Heijden.
A photography exhibition is planned for late 2024. Please stay tuned.

The exhibition presents excerpts from the three parts of the ‘Revisited’ project, inviting audiences to consider how cultural encounters unfold in time and to reflect upon questions regarding representation and power through dialogues between ancestors and descendants across time and in space. Juxtaposing new images and film with unique and rare archives in palimpsest montages, the exhibition effectively collapses 150 years of history into an immersive physical experiences that asks audiences to question the authority of images and historical narratives, and to reflect on their own position as spectators/voyeurs.

Revisited’ is a tripartite audio-visual research project, comprising material generated during anthropological fieldwork among indigenous peoples in Central Australia, the Brazilian Amazon, and Siberia over the past decade.

In each place, I repatriate a careful selection of archive photographs produced in the period between 1867 and 1912 to the locations where they were originally made. Together with descendants of the people photographed I conduct in-depth conversations around the images, which serve as points of departure for our subsequent collaborative photographic and filmic re-interpretations of some of the archival photographs. This method opens an affective and reflexive space for cultural critique, in which the descendants enter an embodied dialogue with their ancestors across time and in space. The project offers new insights into epistemological and ontological questions related to the photographic image.

The project is published in three volumes by Spector books (Leipzig), spring 2024.

The three parts/volumes are:

Wake
In May and June 2014, I was working in Central Australia, re-interpreting elements of the renowned photographic work of anthropologists and photographers Frank J. Gillen and Sir Baldwin Spencer, who produced one of the most influential records of aboriginal life over a period of 40 years between 1875 and 1912. Together with Arrernte and Warlpiri people of the Central Desert, I analysed the images, and we produced a series of new photographs.

Revelations
In April and May 2015, I retraced the journey of the German botanist and photographer Albert Frisch, who in 1867 took some of the first photographs in the Amazon. Together with indigenous people inhabiting the areas along the Alto Solimôes river visited by Frisch, I made a series of re-interpretations of his original images.

Shadows
In the winter of 2017, I went to Nelemnoye, a small settlement in the Verkhnekolymsky District of the Sakha Republic in Russia. With me I brought a selection of photographs made by Waldemar Jochelson and Dina Brodskaya as part of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition at the turn of the nineteenth century. But the people of Nelemnoye had their own vast vernacular archives, which soon became the focus of our collaboration.

The above is an excerpt from the exhibition proposal and statement by the artist

©︎Christian Vium / Revisited

Profile|Christian Vium

Christian Vium is a visual artist and Associate Professor in Anthropology at Aarhus University (DK), where he directs the Multimodal Anthropology Lab and coordinates the Multimodal Anthropology MSc-track. Vium primarily works on long-term research-based projects based in in-depth collaboration and participatory approaches. His work has been exhibited in 35+ exhibitions and encompasses immersive film installations, sound, repurposed archive material, and a dynamic approach to photographic image production. He is Principal Investigator on the research projects ‘North Atlantic Everyday Stories’ (In 2023-24, he is an Associated Research Fellow at the Film Studies Center, Harvard University (US) and part of the CPH:LAB incubator for experimentation and collaboration in creative, cross-disciplinary partnerships across film, the creative arts, science, technology and social entrepreneurship.

https://christianvium.com/
IG: christian_vium_studio

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