Calendar

Venue:
HGB, Room 2.34

Partner:
The presentation is in part funded by the Prince Claus Award


Artist, writer, educator, and image theorist Ronnie Close presents excerpts from his recent book Decolonizing Images, which repositions Egypt’s photographic legacy within the context of political struggles, vernacular media, and visual forms of resistance. Drawing from revolutionary iconography and informal visual economies, Close outlines a counter-history of photography that challenges Eurocentric timelines and foregrounds local practices as active contributions to global visual discourse. In ihrer gemeinsamen Präsentation Ronnie Close and Farida Youssef present a theoretical and historical inquiry into photography in Egypt, engaging decolonial perspectives from "Decolonizing Images". While the 2011 uprising placed Egypt center stage in the global debates on image culture, Egypt and photography share a longer, richer history rarely included in the histories of the medium. Their analysis reveals the photograph as a contested site of negotiation shaped by modernity and coloniality. In this framework, the photographic canon is both reconceptualized and critically challenged, situating the image within local histories and epistemologies.

Close has been teaching for 13 years at the American University in Cairo and has previously worked in Ireland and the UK.

Farida Youssef is a researcher and curator based and Cairo. She is interested in the value of spatial theory for artistic inquiries. She was a Merut Fellow at the British Museum where her research sought the inclusion of a local perspective on the Modern Egypt collection by problematizing object provenance and data collection. She received a master's degree from the UCL with a focus on contemporary aesthetic theory.

The presentation will be in english.