Curator-in-Residence 2012/13

As part of the 2012/13 TPW R&D project, Gallery TPW presents “Coming to Encounter”, a series of discursive programs organized by TPW curator-in-residence Gabrielle Moser that examines the aesthetic strategies employed by artists and photographers to prepare viewers for an encounter with difficult knowledge. “Coming to Encounter” aims to elaborate on conversations about photography and difficult knowledge that have taken place at Gallery TPW over the past several years. Throughout her residency Moser reflects and reacts to the different programs in a series of blog posts, adding to TPW R&D’s growing online archive.

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Unshowable Photographs
Thursday, September 20, 2012, 7:00 pm

Working from Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the event of photography, and Susan Meiselas’s writing about untaken and unshowable photographs, this panel discussion asks respondents to discuss images that are difficult to show, have been withheld, or which we know exist but do not circulate. Panelists will be asked to speak about an untaken or unshowable photograph, to think about why these images are difficult to present and to ask what is at stake in designating an image as “unshowable.”

As a follow up to the pannel discussion Unshowable Photographs, Curator in Residence Gabrielle Moser, will be spending the next three weeks in the Gallery TPW R&D space, testing out how to transform the questions raised by the panel discussion into an experimental gallery exhibition.

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No Looking After the Internet
January – July 2013

A monthly “looking group” that invites participants to look at a photograph (or series of photographs) they are unfamiliar with, and “read” the image out-loud together. Chosen in relation to an exhibition, an artist’s body of work, or an ongoing research project, the looking group will focus on difficult images that present a challenge to practices of looking. If these images ask the viewer to occupy the position of the witness, No Looking offers the space and time to look at these photographs in detail: to return to these difficult scenes in another context where we can look at them slowly and unpack our responses to the image.

Premised on the idea that we don’t always trust our interpretive abilities as viewers, the aim of No Looking is to examine the differences between witnessing and looking. How does a slower form of looking allow us to be self-reflexive about our role as spectators? How do we look at these images differently when we interpret them with a community of others?

No Looking takes its inspiration and name from No Reading After the Internet, an out-loud reading and discussion group facilitated by cheyanne turions and Alexander Muir that meets regularly in Toronto and Vancouver (http://noreadingaftertheinternet.wordpress.com/).

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T.H.T.K. (Toronto) by Jason Lazarus
July 5 – August 10, 2013

Gallery TPW is pleased to present “Too Hard to Keep,” a site-specific installation by Chicago artist Jason Lazarus, drawn from a growing archive of photographs donated by owners who find them too painful to live with any longer. Initiated in 2010, “Too Hard to Keep” (T.H.T.K.) is a repository for photographs, photo-objects, and digital files that are too difficult for their owners to hold onto, but which are too meaningful to destroy. Bringing together a wide range of anonymous images—including portraiture, landscape and still life—the archive also includes “unshowable” photographs: photographs donated by participants with the stipulation that they are not exhibited publicly, and are instead shown face-down, obscuring the image.

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