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David Spalding, SF Camerawork Guest CuratorGhosts in the Machine is a thematic group exhibition investigating how elements of the past return to haunt the present in works of contemporary photography, video and digital media. The exhibition brings together eight well-known contemporary artists from different parts of the world—Finland, Lebanon, Vietnam and the United States—all of whom utilize unique
innovations to conjure the haunting faces and shattered places that flicker at the far reaches of personal memory and cultural history.Ghosts in the Machine is unique in its curatorial approach. Unlike previous shows, it is not an exhibition about the paranormal, the aesthetics of ghosts, or the history of photography, though it will raise questions about all of these things. Rather, Ghosts in the Machine explores the
notion of haunting as a set of cultural conditions that arise when estranged moments in national histories and collective memory are not given their due, and examines how contemporary artists
have developed inventive strategies to revive and assimilate what might otherwise be forgotten.
The title of the exhibition is meant to evoke the Latin deus ex machina, a term that describes the sudden appearance of a supernatural figure who reverses the course of a narrative’s
otherwise imminent tragedy. The power of Ghosts in the Machine lies in the possibility that by reclaiming lost histories and understanding the ways they haunt the present, the living may emerge from a state of cultural amnesia, to consider the historical ruptures and ethical concerns that are embodied by the crucible of the ghost. As Jacques Derrida has written, we must
“exorcise not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right to a hospitable memory, out of a concern for justice.”Ghosts in the Machine was developed by independent curator David Spalding for San Francisco Camerawork – one of the United States’ oldest non-profit art spaces dedicated to photography and related media. The exhibition is the inaugural show for SF Camerawork’s new gallery space.
Artists and Artworks
Photography has often been accused of freezing moments in time, effectively draining its subjects of life. Yet the artists in Ghosts in the Machine challenge this characterization through
their innovative, poetic creations. For her Ghost Stories series (2005-2006), Los Angeles-based emerging artist Claudia Kunin begins with daguerreotype portraits from the mid-nineteenth century, renowned for their uncanny ability to capture every detail of the sitter. Reflecting her own recent photographs off the daguerreotype’s mirrored copper plates, Kunin takes pictures of the interaction between the two images, inviting her long- deceased subjects to inhabit the space of the present. For Ghosts in the Machine, Kunin has printed the resulting images onto layers of translucent fabric, which she suspends in customized frames that reference antique woodwork. As the viewer moves around the works, the layered images align, creating a striking three-dimensional effect, as if a presence has suddenly materialized.The Greater Good (2000) is the title of San Francisco Bay Area artist Tony Hooker’s photographic series that envisions the ghosts of American racism. The works focus on the infamous Tuskegee experiments, which took place between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, where the U.S. Public Health Service conducted medical research on 399 unwitting African-American men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in United States, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness, despite their debilitating symptoms. Instead, they were informed that they were being treated for “bad blood.” “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”
Superimposing archival images of the study’s unwitting subjects onto recent shots of the hospital’s ruins, Hooker’s work allows two distinct moments in time to commune in a single moment. Returning to the scene of their demise, the figures in Hooker’s photos demand that their stories not be forgotten.
During the late 1970s, the Khmer Rouges photographed, tortured and executed over 14,000 men, women and children at Tuol Sleng, the notorious prison on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.
Today, Tuol Sleng stands reborn as Cambodia’s Museum of Genocide. Inside, the mug shots of the terrified detainees have been enlarged, and now cover the walls of the building’s narrow
corridors and interrogation cells. After visiting the museum, Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê toured the temples of Angkor Wat, but recalled “I couldn’t get the images of the prisoners out of my head. Wherever I looked, I saw their faces.”Lê returned to the Tuol Sleng photographs a few years later, having them embroidered exactingly in white thread on large panels of white fabric for his series The Texture of Memory
(2000-2001). White signals surrender, but in Southeast Asia, it is also the color of mourning. In some of the works, several ghostly faces overlap, heightening their sense of translucency and
weightlessness. As if reading Braille, viewers are invited to run their fingers over the faces. Over time, the oils from many hands will slowly darken the threads, conjuring the prisoners back into
the present.
Ghosts in the Machine will also present another of Lê’s projects never before exhibited in the Bay Area: the 2003 wall-sized installation Untitled (From Vietnam to Hollywood), which contests our received histories of the American-Vietnam War and its Hollywood depictions. Combining a powerful array of images—found photographs, stills from Hollywood movies such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, iconic photojournalistic images from the Vietnam era—
by cutting multiple images into strips and fusing them into a single work using a technique based on Vietnamese grass matt
weaving), Lê challenges the notion that histories can be fully conveyed by a singular voice or vision.
Understanding that much of our sense of history is wedded to our experiences with photographs, Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom work collaboratively between the genres of photography, installation and performance to reanimate the past. Using actors, costumes, props and lighting, Carlson and Strom transform archival photos into ghostly tableaux vivants. Their restaged photographs challenge the ways that photography constructs the historical record and collective memory.
For this exhibition, SF Camerawork commissioned a new work by Carlson and Strom: a single-channel video entitled Bells (2006). Depicting five women performing ritualized acts of
production within a 19th century cotton mill, the video links the history of photography to the development of industrial labor and its impact on the worker’s body. Drawing on photographic
studies from early industrial efficiency experts, such as Etienne Marey, Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Gilbreths, Bells offers a poignant reminder that the consumer goods that we enjoy are haunted by labor practices that sought to transform people into machines – a history that was aided by photography.
Archives may be the final resting place for photographs, but what of those photographs that refuse repose? In 1884, a French photographer named G. Roche traveled with Prince Roland
Bonaparte’s expedition to Finnish Lapland, where he made ethnographic portraits of the region’s native people, the Sa?Lmi. More than one hundred years later, Finnish photographer
Jorma Puranen visited the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, in order to locate 400 of Roche’s images entombed in an archive. Haunted by the spectral faces that stared at him through dust
and time, Puranen began work on Imaginary Homecoming (1991-1997), a series of black and white photographs that reunites the estranged portraits of the Sámi with their icy homeland.
To create the series, Puranen printed Roche’s photographs onto transparency film and situated them dramatically within the Lapland countryside, often on or near the sites where the
originals were taken. In the resulting images, past and present overlap as the Sámi gaze at the viewer from snow covered fields and dells, asking that we consider ethnographic photography’s role in their violent displacement. As Puranen writes, “Although Imaginary Homecoming excavates vanished cultural states, it also seeks to suggest a sort of historical ‘counter- memory.’ Indeed, this is the aim of Imaginary Homecoming: to offer an alternative way of looking at a landscape and the concomitant facts.”
Images that haunt defy and defile the very notion of the archive. Since 1999, Lebanese-born, New York-based artist Walid Ra’ad has been working under the name The Atlas Group, an
archival endeavor where the line between fact and fiction blurs. Under this guise, Ra’ad collects, produces and displays videotapes, films, notebooks and other forms of documentation that evidence recent Lebanese history, focusing on the Lebanese wars (1975 - 1990). The Atlas Group is dedicated to subverting the model of the archive and standard modes of historical documentation in order to exceed and reveal their limits. As Ra’ad has said, the Atlas Group “does not document what happened, but what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, what can appear as rational and thinkable about the wars.”
Several related groups of documents, including notebooks, photographs and films, are attributed to Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, a fictitious historian of the Lebanese wars, who purportedly died
in 1993. Fakhouri’s Notebook Volume 38: Already Been in a Lake of Fire (1999-2002) is a scrapbook containing 145 cutouts of cars corresponding in make, model and year to those used
in car bombings between 1975 to 1990 (seven of these are displayed as digital color prints in Ghosts in the Machine). The exhibition will also premier Ra’ad’s poetic, troubling single-channel video and sound installation, We Can Make Rain But No One Came to Ask (2006), which merges and animates archival documents related to the car bombings with a morphing montage of a Lebanese cityscape. With their radical erasure of people and places, wars end not with a cease-fire, but only when we begin to address the ghosts left in their wake.
San Francisco Bay Area artist Mildred Howard works with found and archival photos to commemorate the hidden histories of African Americans. Her mixed-media works and installations invite apparitional figures to tell their stories. The point of departure for her installation In the Line of Fire (1997) was an old family photograph of Cousin Ickles Rugeley, a relative of Howard’s who returned from the First World War shell-shocked, and spent much of his adult life in an institution. Howard’s installation, for which she has transformed the image of Cousin Ickles into a series of life-size figures, forges an historical link between the battlefields of WWI and the urban war zones that threaten young black men today. Standing at attention and
configured like bowling pins, the ghostly, sepia-toned soldiers have bull’s eyes printed on their backs. The soldiers confront viewers with a strange contradiction: while asking to be counted
among those who fought for their country, they seem unaware of the grim fate that awaits them.
About the Curator
David Spalding (d_spalding@hotmail.com) is an independent curator, arts writer and educator from San Francisco, California. An active art critic, Spalding is a Correspondent / Contributing
Editor for Flash Art (Venice), Contemporary (London) and Art Papers (US), and the China correspondent for Artforum. His writing regularly appears in these and several other publications, which have included Artweek, ART Asia Pacific and art/text, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. Spalding is an adjunct Professor of Art History and Criticism at both the California College of the Arts and Mills College. In 2004, he curated the Chinese component of Rogue Nations: Contemporary Art of Cuba and China, at MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura
Latino Americana). In addition to Ghosts in the Machine, which has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Award for Artistic Excellence, Spalding is currently working with co-
curator Pauline J. Yao on The Amber Room, an exhibition featuring newly commissioned works by artists Won Ju Lim, Liu Ding, Shirley Tse and Wang Wei, opening at the Luggage Store
Gallery in San Francisco in September 2006. Spalding holds an M.A in Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts, received a B.A. in classics and philosophy from Saint Mary's
College of California in 1994, and also studied at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Keble College, Oxford University, Monterey Institute for International Studies and the
Beijing Language University. Spalding was the recipient of a 2005 Asian Cultural Council Fellowship to research contemporary art in Beijing, where he is currently based.
Exhibition Title: Ghosts in the Machine
Artists: Tony Hooker, Mildred Howard, Claudia Kunin, Dinh Q. Le^, Jorma Puranen, Walid Ra’ad / The Atlas Group, Ann Carlson + Mary Ellen Strom
Curator: David Spalding
Venue / Dates: SF Camerawork , Opening October 5, 2006
About SF Camerawork
Founded in 1974, SF Camerawork has historically been an artist-driven organization focused on supporting emerging and mid-career photographers. Its mission is to push the boundaries of what constitutes photography and image-making while serving as a launching pad for careers in the photographic arts. While SF Camerawork has been offering exhibitions and programming for the past five years in a gallery space it formerly shared with New Langton Arts at 1246 Folsom Street, the decision to relocate began in 2001 after leaving their previous long-term site at 115 Natoma. SF Camerawork’s 6,500-square-foot new location on Mission at Third Street, designed by Donna Schumacher of X: architecture/Art and with lighting design by Rebecca Foster, features a new 3,000-square foot gallery space, which can be divided into several separate gallery areas depending on the exhibition schedule, nearly doubling SF Camerawork’s previous exhibition and programming spaces.
Media sponsorship for SF Camerawork's Grand Opening in October 2006 is provided by 7X7 Magazine, ABC7/KGO-TV, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and SF Station.
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