Worked as a Chef in different commercial restaurants, Worked as a Chef in a community project with families in poverty. Studied Art History and Philosophy at KU Leuven. He is currently working as a Ph.D. student and Research Assistant in the Art History Department; He has taught Art History in the St-Lucas University College of Art and Design (Antwerp); His current research focuses on Allan Sekula’s last and unfinished project Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum, within the context of a research project funded by FWO-Flanders and KU Leuven, and pursued jointly by KU Leuven and M HKA (Antwerp); recent publications: The Politics of the Rear View Figure in the Films of John Akomfrah in Black Camera 2015; Reverse Magellan (2010). Allan Sekula’s Last Slide Sequence in Photoresearcher (together w/ Hilde Van Gelder, 2015 forthcoming).
This Gallery section will explore a recurrent visual trope in John Akomfrah’s films that seems to... more This Gallery section will explore a recurrent visual trope in John Akomfrah’s films that seems to refer to a painterly rather than a cinematic tradition . This is most notable in his depiction of the human figure, filmed from behind. Theater scholar George Banu has conceptualized this motif as L’Homme de dos (Rear view figure). In Banu’s analysis of the presence of such a figure throughout the history of Western painting and theater, he observed that L’Homme de dos confronts the viewer with a “cyphered poem” as opposed to the explicitness of the gaze or the clarity of the face in portraiture. Banu describes this as a metaphor that, on the one hand, sets forth a coherence of posture and, on the other, entails uncertainty and openness in interpretation. In this section, the appearance of such rear view figures in three recent films by Akomfrah and the variety of political meanings these figures entail will be explored.
Rooted in an extensive theoretical and curatorial path of research on Sekula’s Ship of Fools / Th... more Rooted in an extensive theoretical and curatorial path of research on Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum, pursued jointly by the University of Leuven and M HKA, the present short essay serves to bring out a preliminary contextual reading of Reverse Magellan —the last, uncompleted slide sequence within the artist’s oeuvre. We first give an account of the Global Mariner campaign and of how the artist integrated its voyage in Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum. Secondly, we situate Reverse Magellan within Sekula’s wider scope of thinking on the centrality of the port, as both a pivotal space for the global market system and a historically important locus of labor militancy. Thirdly, we argue that, through a focus on port iconography, union activism, and “the lulls, the waiting and the margins” of the Global Mariner voyage, Sekula tries to retrace social solidarity, interdependencies, and civil alliances connected to waterfront labor in order to perceive a “democratic and global vision from below”.
Editorial for the PhotoResearcher No 24, published by the European Society for the History of Pho... more Editorial for the PhotoResearcher No 24, published by the European Society for the History of Photography in October 2015 and guest edited by Jelena Stojkovic
This Gallery section will explore a recurrent visual trope in John Akomfrah’s films that seems to... more This Gallery section will explore a recurrent visual trope in John Akomfrah’s films that seems to refer to a painterly rather than a cinematic tradition . This is most notable in his depiction of the human figure, filmed from behind. Theater scholar George Banu has conceptualized this motif as L’Homme de dos (Rear view figure). In Banu’s analysis of the presence of such a figure throughout the history of Western painting and theater, he observed that L’Homme de dos confronts the viewer with a “cyphered poem” as opposed to the explicitness of the gaze or the clarity of the face in portraiture. Banu describes this as a metaphor that, on the one hand, sets forth a coherence of posture and, on the other, entails uncertainty and openness in interpretation. In this section, the appearance of such rear view figures in three recent films by Akomfrah and the variety of political meanings these figures entail will be explored.
Rooted in an extensive theoretical and curatorial path of research on Sekula’s Ship of Fools / Th... more Rooted in an extensive theoretical and curatorial path of research on Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum, pursued jointly by the University of Leuven and M HKA, the present short essay serves to bring out a preliminary contextual reading of Reverse Magellan —the last, uncompleted slide sequence within the artist’s oeuvre. We first give an account of the Global Mariner campaign and of how the artist integrated its voyage in Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum. Secondly, we situate Reverse Magellan within Sekula’s wider scope of thinking on the centrality of the port, as both a pivotal space for the global market system and a historically important locus of labor militancy. Thirdly, we argue that, through a focus on port iconography, union activism, and “the lulls, the waiting and the margins” of the Global Mariner voyage, Sekula tries to retrace social solidarity, interdependencies, and civil alliances connected to waterfront labor in order to perceive a “democratic and global vision from below”.
Editorial for the PhotoResearcher No 24, published by the European Society for the History of Pho... more Editorial for the PhotoResearcher No 24, published by the European Society for the History of Photography in October 2015 and guest edited by Jelena Stojkovic
Uploads