skip to content

Department of History of Art

 

For over ten years, Edmund Clark has sought aesthetic strategies to explore new and unseen processes of contemporary conflict. His work engages with state censorship and control, and is itself shaped by these processes, as it tries to reconfigure subjects we normally see as distant or threatening stereotypes on our screens. In exploring these issues, Clark examines the relationship between photographs, images and text, and between forms of evidence and visual communication. Clark uses photography and print publications as a vehicle for such experimentation to create objects that represent their subjects through form as well as content, while at the same time creating site-specific installations when given the opportunity to bring these subjects to museum or gallery audiences. In his seminar lecture, Clark will refer to works in his current exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London (on until August 2017) and from his recent exhibition at the Zephyr Raum für Fotografie at the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Mannheim. These presentations include Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition about the CIA secret prison programme, Letters to Omar and Guantanamo: If the light goes out about the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay, and Control Order House about a form of detention without trial for terrorist suspects in the United Kingdom.

 

Speaker Biography:

Edmund Clark is an award-winning artist whose work links history, politics and representation. His work has been published and exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and acquired for national and international collections including, in Britain, The National Portrait Gallery, The Imperial War Museum and The National Media Museum. Clark's awards include the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for Outstanding Photography for Public Service, The British Journal of Photography International Photography Award and being shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Pictet for the theme of power. His new book Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition recently won the inaugural Photo Text Book Award at the International Rencontres D'Arles Festival in France. In addition to his work as an artist, Clark teaches at the University of the Arts London.

Date: 
Wednesday, 25 January, 2017 - 17:00 to 19:00
Event location: 
Lecture Room 2, Department of Art History