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Distance and Desire:Encounters with the African Archive A three-part exhibition series on photography from Southern Africa, Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive presents rarely before seen portraits, albums, cartes de visite, and books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The exhibitions stage a dialogue between ethnographic visions and contemporary engagements with archival imagery and feature recent work African and African American artists. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the archive, reimagining its poetic and political dimensions, its diverse histories, and its changing meanings. The series is curated by Tamar Garb.The Walther Collection Project Space, New YorkPart I: Santu Mofokeng and A.M. Duggan-CroninSeptember 13 - November 17, 2012The opening exhibition juxtaposes A.M. Duggan-Cronin's "The Bantu Tribes of South Africa" with Santu Mofokeng's "The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890-1950." Duggan-Cronin's eleven-volume study, published between 1928-1954, is renowned and contested for preserving an ethnographic vision of African heritage. In contrast, "The Black Photo Album," created in 1997 by contemporary South African artist Santu Mofokeng, is an archive of pictures - commissioned by black South Africans in the early twentieth century - and stories about the subjects, challenging fixed ideas of the "native type" most often associated with photographic representations of Africans.Gallery Talks: Jennifer Bajorek on Santu MofokengSeptember 25, 2012 at 7pmJennifer Bajorek is a lecturer in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University.John Peffer on Portraiture in South AfricaOctober 23, 2012 at 7pmJohn Peffer is Associate Professor of Contemporary and Nonwestern Art History at Ramapo College. Part II: Contemporary Reconfigurations November 30, 2012 - March 9, 2013This exhibition centers on photography and video art by contemporary African and African American artists who engage critically with the ethnographic archive by parodying, replaying, exposing, and dialoguing with its pictorial tropes and traditions. A stereotype or ethnographic vision in one era may provide material for an irreverent reworking, satirical performance, or elegiac reenactment in another. Addressing how the archive - broadly understood as an accumulation of representations, images and objects - figures in the practices of contemporary artists in Africa, the exhibition features recent work by Sammy Baloji, Candice Breitz, Samuel Fosso, Pieter Hugo, Zanele Muholi, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Andrew Putter, and Carrie Mae Weems.Gallery Talk:Awam Amkpa on Contemporary African PhotographyFebruary 12, 2013 at 7pmAwam Amkpa is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.Part III: Poetics and Politics March 22 - May 18, 2013A presentation of vintage portraits, books, albums, postcards, and cartes de visite, this exhibition reveals the complexity of the African archive, showing works produced in the 1870s to the early twentieth century. Focusing on the pictorial languages deployed by photographers and the contexts in which images are made to circulate, both historically and today, these portraits and figure studies depict Africans predominantly through the filters of European cameras and mentalities. The images make visible both the ideological frameworks that prevailed during the colonial period in South Africa as well as the extraordinary skill of photographers working in the studio and the landscape.Gallery Talks:Tamar Garb on Distance and Desire March 23, 2013 at 3pmTamar Garb is the Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art at University College London.Hlonipha Mokoena and Cheryl Finley in conversation on The South African Photo AlbumApril 9, 2013 at 7pmHlonipha Mokoena is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Cheryl Finley is Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University.The Walther Collection Project Space526 West 26th Street, Suite 718New York, NY 10001+1 212 352 0683contact@walthercollection.comThe Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African ArchiveJune 8, 2013 - May 18, 2015The culmination of the exhibition series will be an expanded presentation of Parts I, II, and III of Distance and Desire at The Walther Collection's museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany. For the first time the exhibition will be shown in its entirety, complete with additional contemporary works that will broaden the dialogues and juxtapositions staged in New York.The Walther CollectionReichenauerstrasse 2189233 Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany+49 731 176 9143info@walthercollection.comwww.walthercollection.comSource : le site de la Collection Walther.