MINI-SYMPOSIUM: The Challenge of The Bowery

Saturday 27 October, 12 PM
Adam Art Gallery, Kirk Gallery

In support of the one work exhibition of Martha Rosler’s The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974-75) the Adam Art Gallery, with the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, present the first of two practitioner-focused events exploring the history, politics, and contemporaneity of documentary practice.

Geoffery Batchen, Chair
Anne Noble
Gavin Hipkins
Wayne Barrar
Neil Pardington

Geoffery Batchen has written of The Bowery as a ‘fundamental’ work: a ground-zero point of reference for documentary photography since the 1970s. This symposium aims to exfoliate the implications of this claim from the point of view of practice, by bringing together a range of artists working in self-conscious relation to the tradition. How do photographers negotiate the challenge to traditional documentary embodied in Rosler's work (and reiterated in essays by herself, Allan Sekula, and others in this period)? And how does the answer to this question, in its permutations across generational lines, speak to the contemporary life of the form?
ends