Rainer Ganahl
- Artist Statement
- Curator Statement
- zingmagazine project
- Website
Artist Statement
My S/L is an ongoing project attempting a “representation of intellectuals” within their working environment. Since 1995, I have been auditing classes and attending public lectures of interest to me and taking photographs from the subjective position of a participant.
These photographs are an observation of a field, namely critical cultural education, that is important for the productive reproduction of society. Education and knowledge are sites of contest and conflict as well as mirrors of tensions and fractions in society. Usually, they reproduce biased structures of privilege through high cost, selective access, and uneven distribution of material and informational resources. Education, pedagogy and knowledge are embedded in an ideological setting of the public and private sphere and often contradict their own content and liberal drive.
It is no surprise, then, that I am encountering a variety of contradictions. As much as I am interested in the type of knowledge I am auditing, knowledge itself doesn’t usually show in a picture, with the exception of visual materials presented by the lecturer. It remains indexical and hinted at only through the title of the class or lecture. My visual records remain open to a variety of readings and don’t allow for knowledge consumption.
I am not interested in rendering these sometimes well recognized figures and their intellectual practices spectacular but, after all, the archive contains intellectual celebrities, and sometimes famous and spectacular visual material in the form of slide projections or films. A spectacularization of knowledge and its institutions is something more often undertaken by these institutions themselves, since they are mostly now inscribed in the competitive logic of the educational industry and performing outside their usual confines. I try to also address these questions, as well as the question of the overlapping of fields: theory in the arts, in architecture, etc.
My fragmented and somehow dilettante encyclopedia of S/L photographs doesn’t just map my interests, but also my local movements and presence. The list of the visited seminars and lectures can be read as an intellectual as well as topological travel log.
This ongoing S/L photo series is part of a larger body of work called, Reading Seminars, Studying of Foreign Languages, Writing, etc, that I have been developing for more then a decade concerning similar issues: language and knowledge—its media and power—and the struggle of a critical public sphere.
Curator Statement
Rainer Ganahl’s series S/L, Seminar and Lecture Series consists of 30 photographs documenting the intelligentsia and the audience that attends their seminars. This series has been an ongoing project since ’95, as the artist has attended multi-continental engagements at Universities, Museums and Cultural Institutions, photographing imminent figures such as Jacques Derrida, Coco Fusco, Julia Kristeva, Rem Koolhaas, Jenny Holzer, Robert Storr, Manthia Diawara, and their respective audiences. A plethora of reactions is the result, recording boredom and enthusiasm, notoriety, and anonymity—simultaneously.
