Appropriating pasts, attempting to develop visual strategies that present photographs from a culturally specific context to culturally diverse audiences

Andrea Stultiens (Speaker)

Image in Context

Activiteit: Oral presentation

Description

This paper presents (part of) an illustrated letter to Musa Katuramu (Uganda, *1916 / †1983), whose photographs I appropriated and present in a book. Appropriation is an important but problematic gesture. Through it I try to do justice to the social biographies of images I work with, and to make them readable for audiences with different connections to, and potential identification with what is presented.

In my presentation I question my position as a researcher and as an artist, that is in different ways an in between one. Between my Dutch background and the Ugandan context in which I partly live. Between art and science. Between disciplines. Both the opportunities rising from this position, as well as the blind spots that are inevitably there, are brought forward in relation to the multi-vocal mode of visual storytelling, present in my work.