Contact: Craig Campbell or Stephanie Takaragawa
Phone: Craig (512) 226-3972
E-mail: ethnographicterminalia@gmail.com
Website: www.ethnographicterminalia.org
ETHNOGRAPHIC TERMINALIA 2012: SAN FRANCISCO
Exhibition & Opening Reception

Audible observatories are points of sensory convergence.  They are nodes where worlds perceived through the senses intersect and begin the labor of transforming independent events into knowable and meaningful claims. They speak and they are spoken to.

Ethnographic Terminalia is a curatorial collective that hosts an annual exhibition of international artists and researchers working at the intersection of art and anthropology. In November 2012, the Ethnographic Terminalia Curatorial Collective welcomes visitors to the Audible Observatories exhibition. This year’s show is organized in collaboration with Thor Anderson and is scheduled to coincide with the 111th annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA).

Ethnographic Terminalia brings anthropologists and artists together in the gallery space to investigate the borders and blurrings of contemporary art practice and alternative modes of cultural inquiry and representation.  Ethnographic Terminalia is an exploration of what it means to exhibit anthropology - particularly in some of its less traditional forms - in proximity to and conversation with contemporary art practices.

Now in its fourth year (following Montréal, New Orleans, and Philadelphia), Ethnographic Terminalia represents an international array of creative material, conceptual, and new media engagements where anthropology and art intersect. For Ethnographic Terminalia 2012: Audible Observatories the curators have selected over twenty five artists and cultural researchers including: Steve Feld, John Wynne, Rupert Cox & Angus Carlyle, and Roxanne Varzi.

We seek submissions for Artless Photographs, an exhibition to be held during October 2012 in Cincinnati as part of the Fotofocus Biennial (http://www.fotofocuscincinnati.org/).

Artless Photographs examines documentary photographs taken in a range of institutional contexts that record exacting details about individual bodies and identities while also generating diagnostic and predictive typologies. Taking the viewer from events as distinct as model castings in New York’s fashion industry to exhumations in post-conflict Spain, the show compels viewers to think critically about the power and utter mundanity of photography and the practices that produce them. Arguing that these seemingly “artless photographs” are anything but straight-forward representations, the exhibition explores how the standardization and routinization of these images’ production simultaneously de-emphasizes the role of the photographer while also elevating the expertise required to interpret and read the small details and auratic potential of these images. Exhibiting these collections alongside audio, visual, and textual documentation of the processes of their production, the show will juxtapose what appears to be the placelessness of these images with their embedded institutional ecologies to explore the multiple temporalities and mediations of identity.

We are looking for research-based submissions of both “artless photographs” and documentation of their production processes.  This may include ethnographic vignettes, audio or video recordings, and/or photographs.

We are particularly interested in medical and scientific imaging (CT scans, MRI, histology, x-rays, forensic photography), government and institutional identification imaging (driver’s licenses, passport photos, criminal booking photographs, biometric measurements), and commercial and media images (stock photography, photojournalism), but are open to submissions beyond these areas, as well.

The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2012.

Each submission should include a pdf cover sheet with the following information:

1)     The author/artist/anthropologist’s name, institutional affiliation, and contact information;

2)     A brief 250-word statement explaining the collected materials and their relationship to the show;

3)     An annotated list of submission materials (photographs, audio files, vignettes, video, etc.) including file names and sizes and whether the submission is exhaustive or representative of a larger body of work;

4)     A statement affirming that the author/artist/anthropologist has the right to exhibit the included work.

All video footage, audio recordings, photographic images, and ethnographic vignettes should be submitted as files or links (dropbox) with this cover sheet via email to artless.fotofocus@gmail.com. If your materials do not fit into a single email, please send them via dropbox and include the corresponding link to the public file.  Please note that at this initial stage of the process, we do not need high-resolution images. 

Please contact the show curators, Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, sadreose@ucmail.uc.edu, or Lee Douglas, lee.douglas@nyu.edu, with questions or for more information.

Ethnographic Terminalia seeks submissions for Audible Observatories, an exhibition to be held in San Francisco in November 2012. Artist-researchers, collaborators, anthropologists and other artistically inclined scholars are encouraged to submit their proposals prior to July 15, 2012.

Audible Observatories makes a playful connection between research-based art and place-bound exhibition in order to animate a curatorial vision that foregrounds audio-centric works within a broader rubric of site-specificity. We conceptualize the audible observatory as either a mobile or a stationary site of perception that is sensible to others just as it is a place from which sensing the world happens. Audible observatories are points of sensory convergence. They are nodes where worlds perceived through the senses intersect and begin the labour of transforming independent events into knowable and meaningful claims. They speak and they are spoken to.

Audible Observatories will be a distributed public event in San Francisco with an amalgam of location specific points and zones of exhibition. We are looking for research-based audio focused works to exhibit. These might include digital media, image, and sound files, websites and other interactive media, video works where audio figures prominently. Sculptural and other works will also be considered. In some cases we may be able to support installation. As in past shows, we will work with our exhibitors (if necessary) to develop installations and short statements about their work which point to larger interpretive frameworks.

This project ties in with and is supported by the meetings of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Visual Anthropology. A round table discussion featuring Steve Feld, John Wynne, Angus Carlyle, and Rupert Cox has been organized and will be taking place during the course of this event. We also expect to be exhibiting work by these artists.

Ethnographic Terminalia is an initiative designed to celebrate borders without necessarily exalting them. Now in its fourth year of exhibition, it is meant to be a playful engagement with reflexivity and positionality; it seeks to ask what lies beyond and what lies within disciplinary territories. Ethnographic Terminalia is an exploration of what means to exhibit anthropology - particularly in some of its less traditional forms - in proximity to and conversation with contemporary art practices.

Go to the Call for Submissions Form

The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the border.
It is also a beginning, its own place, a site of experience and encounter.

Contact: ethnographicterminalia@gmail.com
http://www.ethnographicterminalia.org

Artist and Curator Talk: Friday 18 Nov., 5:30 PM

Opening Night Reception/Vernissage: Friday 18 Nov., 7:30PM

FREE SHUTTLE from AAA Conference to Eastern Bloc–see schedule here.

Full a full list of events and timetable, please visit the Ethnographic Terminalia website…

field, studio, lab

Submission deadline: 24 June 2011 @ 5pm PST.

www.ethnographicterminalia.org

ethnographicterminalia@gmail.com

The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the border; of course the terminus is also a beginning as well as its own place, its own site of experience and encounter.

Ethnographic Terminalia is an initiative that brings artists and anthropologists together to engage emerging research through installation and exhibition. As a platform from which divergent modes and methodologies of inquiry are articulated, Ethnographic Terminalia asks what lies within and beyond disciplinary territories, and how those boundaries shape the representation of cultural practice. Organized as a para-site to the annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the gallery show will take place in Montréal, Canada, at Eastern Bloc Centre for New Media and Interdisciplinary Art (14-20 November 2011). Now in its third year, Ethnographic Terminalia represents a diversity of material, conceptual, and creative engagements with art and anthropology, capturing a multiplicity of mediums where anthropology and art intersect. These include: sound, drawing, sculpture, photography, printmaking, video, film, internet and multi-media, and engage both gallery spaces and site-specific locations.

Panamanian artist Humberto Vélez has accepted our invitation to anchor the 2011 exhibition with a documentation of his collaborative work, The Awakening. The Awakening activates questions at the heart of collaboration, ethnographic methods of investigation, and aesthetic production emerging from his “Aesthetics of Collaboration” project developed with curator Emelie Chhangur at the Art Gallery of York University, the Mississauga New Credit First Nations, and Monkey Vault Gym Parkour artists in Toronto, Canada. In Ethnographic Terminalia 2011, Vélez’s work will be exhibited alongside work selected by the curatorial collective, and works produced by our local partnering organizer, Concordia University’s Center for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the aftermath of Violence (CEREV), http://cerev.concordia.ca/.

We seek projects in any medium for inclusion in Ethnographic Terminalia 2011 that take up the theme:  field, studio, lab. These three locations–the field, the studio, the lab–comprise both their own communities of practice, and form sites of inquiry and production for artists and anthropologists. Field, studio, and lab are not only places where knowledge is produced, or ethnographic data gathered, but are spaces of everyday life and local cultural production; they are generative sites of encounter, negotiation, conflict, celebration, failure, disappointment and revelation-all of which can unsettle (or ossify) discursive, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries. (more…)

Deadline Friday, June 3, 2011

The Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) in cooperation with the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and its Festival of Social  Science will be holding two upcoming events on the anthropology of sport during Oct 19-Nov 5, 2011. (http://www.esrc.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/festival/index.aspx)

1.       The main event will be an interdisciplinary conference with sociologists, anthropologists, NGOs talking about their research within the themes of:
globalization, identity and the body. Topics linked to dis/ability are encouraged.
2.       The other event will include films and a photo exhibit of the RAI finalists and other images to be shown at the RAI, or at a gallery. Included in this exhibit are the winning images from
the recent Anthropology of Sport competition which received submissions from 25 countries with the same themes of globalization, identity and the body.

This initiative is part of the RAI’s outreach program Discover Anthropology and linked to the upcoming 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games. The organizer Nafisa Fera needs an expression of interest (details can follow) to meet the funding application deadline of June 3rd.  If you are interested in participating or would like to make suggestions please email Jill Le Clair asap at jill.leclair@sympatico.ca

Photo by Ellen Garvins, all rights reserved. Re-posted from http://www.umbc.edu/research/blog/2011/05/anthropologist_and_artist_coll.html

Read the full article here: http://www.umbc.edu/research/blog/2011/05/anthropologist_and_artist_coll.html

http://www.viarch.org.uk/2011-outpost.asp

OUTPOST
Curators: Ian Kirkpatrick & Sara Perry

Poster presentations have become ubiquitous features of archaeological conferences, acting simultaneously as informational, decorative, architectural, and ritual devices.

In their supposed succinctness they can persuade, deceive and mystify - whilst employing image and text to compress vast quantities of data into highly conventionalized fields of vision.  As archaeological tools they can stand unaccompanied by their author as the sole representative of an idea or body of research, or can be used in tandem with performance as a form of prop or mobile stage-set.

OUTPOST examines the possibilities of this genre as an intermediary between information and art, monument and meaning.  It seeks innovative and creative interpretations of the archaeological poster presentation which push the boundaries of this format, both physically and conceptually.

We invite artists, illustrators and academics to respond to this call for posters/artworks as a means to invite discussion and debate about the form, function and future of this frequently overlooked sub-genre of the archaeological intellectual toolkit.

Please send a 50-200 word artistic statement for the creation of an A0 or other-sized/shaped poster presentation and CV, to Ian Kirkpatrick (iankirkpatrick@shaw.ca) by 23 March 2011.

Final decisions will be made by 25 March 2011.

Sara Perry & Ian Kirkpatrick
Archaeology, University of Southampton
http://www.viarch.org.uk/2011-outpost.asp

s.e.perry@soton.ac.uk
iankirkpatrick@shaw.ca

Society for Visual Anthropology
2011 AAA Annual Meeting Call for Submissions
Dowload PDF here: 2011-sva-cfs

Details for Invited Sessions, Sponsored Sessions, Media Submissions, and the Visual Research Conference are below:
The SVA welcomes paper and poster session proposals for consideration at this year’s Annual Meeting in Montreal (November 16-20, 2011).  The theme for the meeting is “Traces, Tidemarks, and Legacies,” which provides a rich context for exploring the innovative and exciting work conducted under the broad rubric of visual anthropology.  Last year, SVA sponsored sessions explored such diverse topics as urban visualities, participatory media research, Australian aboriginal media production, the ethnography of television, and the anthropology of religion in Haiti.

For the 2011 Annual Meeting, the SVA programming committee consists of:

Jenny Chio (Jenny.Chio@uts.edu.au) and
Jonathan S. Marion (jsmarion@gmail.com)

Both Jonthan and Jenny are more than happy to work with you on your paper, poster, or roundtable sessions - please be in touch early, and as often as necessary, with us! We’re happy to assist session organizers with the structuring of their proposals. The SVA encourages innovative formats, including poster sessions, extended screening of visual materials, and fostering more dynamic discussion periods.
Because the SVA sponsors a number of events during the Annual Meeting, here is a breakdown of upcoming deadlines and the appropriate contacts for each. (more…)

For all attendees of this week’s American Anthropological Association meetings, please keep an eye out for the event below:

Sensate, a new journal for media production and criticism, invites you to AmbleNOLA with us, as part of this year’s AAA Inno-vents. AmbleNOLA entails a sensory walk and cell-phone recording of your own design, followed by a screening/mixer event.

-Consult the specially-designed AmbleNOLA map for points of interest (pick one up at the AAA conference site from someone wearing a colorful “Engage Sensibly” T-shirt or visit sensatejournal.com for a digital version)

-On your city walk, call 877-587-2572 and follow prompts.

-Listen for your recordings at
Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center
1618 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd.
New Orleans, LA 70113
on Friday, November 19th, starting at 5PM.

For more details and map, visit: sensatejournal.com