Thursday, 22 October 2020
Milan 6pm / London 5pm / NYC 12 noon / Los Angeles 9am / Shanghai 12 midnight
2-hour Masterclass
Live on Zoom
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The outbreak of the Covid19 pandemic prompts us to think about humans as the dominant and invasive species in an ecosystem that is under pressure. Our disenchanted, secular and rational world has little room for magic and for sensitivity to flora and fauna for their own sake. Curator, writer and art historian Kim Knoppers will take us on her own journey in search of a closer connection with the earth and non-human beings through photography. How can we reconnect with the great conversation between humans and the rest of nature? How can we understand and respect nature, comprehend our place in the whole and experience nature as part of ourselves? To answer these big questions we desperately need the imagination of writers and imagemakers. In this Masterclass Knoppers tries to find out how the camera is used to create an animated language of images that attempts to engage our entire being with the earth and non-humans. She will chart her questioning by focusing on the work of writers like Paul Kingsnorth and Eva Meijer and visual artists and photographers such as Melanie Bonajo, Jonathas de Andrade, Zheng Bo, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, Sheng-Wen Lo and Suzette Bousema.
Kim Knoppers is a curator at Foam in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has worked on solo exhibitions by contemporary photographers including Melanie Bonajo, Anne de Vries, Lorenzo Vitturi, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs and Sheng-Wen Lo. and group exhibitions such as Collectivism – Artists’ Collectives and Their Quest for Value (2017). She is also interested in bridging the (artificial) gap between historical and contemporary photography through a transhistorical approach to curating, such as in the exhibition Back to the Future: The 19th Century in the 21st Century (2018). In collaboration with scholars, curators and collectors, she has initiated a series of exhibitions on historical photography studios worldwide, their photographic archives and their meaning for our contemporary world. Kim is a lecturer on the MA Photography program at ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she initiated and developed the course Do Not Disturb – Curating in Progress. She lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (with a view on a highway) and in Selçuk, Turkey (with the remains of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, in the backyard).