Jill Glessing

Wolfgang Tillmans, From Banal to Beautiful – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Wolfgang Tillmans

[Winter 2024] From Banal to Beautiful By Jill Glessing [Excerpt] To Look Without Fear – the title of the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans’s traveling exhibition presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario1 – is an invitation to look around us, unflinchingly, at the real world that we inhabit, an approach modelled throughout Tillmans’s career and […]

Documentary Genealogies: Photography 1848–1917 – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 125 – AGGLOMERATIONS | Book Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing

[Winter 2024] By Jill Glessing Edited by Jorge Ribalta Madrid, Museo Reina Sofia, 2023, 263 pages [Excerpt] Important technologies are designed for and controlled by those holding wealth and power. Photography, as a potent information medium, is one of these. It was developed during the mid-nineteenth century in France and England – Europe’s imperialist heartland […]

Olga Smith, Contemporary Photography in France: Between Theory and Practice — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 123 – THE POWER OF INTIMACY | Book Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Olga Smith

[Summer 2023] By Jill Glessing Olga Smith Louvain, Leuven University Press, 2022, 230 pages [Excerpt] France, as a birthplace of photography, dominated surveys of the medium until the early twentieth century. It lost its primacy when the centre of the art world crossed the Atlantic, after the Second World War. Since then, international hegemony has […]

Hiwa K, Do you remember what you are burning? — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 122 – NIGHT ROUNDS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Hiwa K

[Winter 2023] By Jill Glessing The Power Plant, Toronto 20.05.2022 — 28.08.2022 [Excerpt] Hiwa K manages an uneasy balance among being an artist, an activist, a teacher, a philosopher, a musician, and, since his recent return to Iraq, a farmer. Resistant to the professional and academic boxes that most artists and intellectuals inhabit (he calls […]

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 45th Parallel — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan

[Fall 2022] By Jill Glessing Mercer Union, Toronto 26.03.2022 — 4.06.2022 [Excerpt] Territorial borders function as economic technologies, designed to protect regional resources and wealth. As borders become increasingly porous for transferring capital and goods thanks to globalized free trade agreements, they correspondingly tighten against human migration. The dissolution of the Berlin Wall in 1989 […]

Shirin Neshat, Dreams as Acts of Resistance — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 121 – WANDERINGS | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Shirin Neshat

[Fall 2022] Dreams as Acts of Resistance By Jill Glessing [Extract] Displacement, loss, longing – these existential experiences settle in us as we settle around the globe. Contemporary surges of human migration – forced either by conditions of war or poverty or in voluntary search of new opportunities – make these states of dislocation increasingly […]

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 117 - SHIFTED | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: John Akomfrah

[Summer 2021] John Akomfrah Vertigo Sea The Design Exchange Trading Floor, Nuit Blanche, Toronto 2.10.2016 Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal 10.02.2021 – 4.04.2021 By Jill Glessing [Excerpt] The sea, wild and wet, the womb that bore us, from which we slithered eons ago. We return to that birthplace – for crossings, sustenance, profit, and pleasure. […]

Hito Steyerl, This is the future — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 115 - THE MARCH OF THE WORLD | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Hito Steyerl

[Fall 2019] Art Gallery of Ontario October 24, 2019–February 23, 2020 By Jill Glessing Artist and cultural critic Hito Steyerl, widely recognized for her writing and video works, explores the mostly invisible relations among contemporary art, networked digital technology, and the power structures that aim to control them. In her exhibition This is the future […]

The Walther Collection: The Way She Looks — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 114 - MASSES | MONUMENTS | Critiques d'expositions, Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim, Jodi Bieber

[Winter 2020] Ryerson Image Centre, Guest curator: Sandrine Colard September 11–December 8, 2019 By Jill Glessing Photography extends the gaze, making material its spectrum of desires and subject positions – whether violence, control, submission, negotiation, or resistance. Once etched as image – on plate, print, or screen – the momentary exchange circulates and is entrenched […]

CONTACT 2019. Violence — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 113 - TRANS-IDENTITIES | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Carrie Mae Weems

February 28, 2023 [originally published in CV113 in Fall 2019] — By Jill Glessing. Violence runs through our lives, experienced directly or through media representations. We are subject to its power to varying degrees depending on our geographical location, race, class, gender, and access to high-speed internet. We are well acquainted with the variety of ways that humans inflict harm – whether physical, social, or psychological – upon one another…

Basma Alsharif — Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 112 - COLLECTIONS REVISITED | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Basma Alsharif

August 16, 2023 [originally published in CV112 in Summer 2019] — By Jill Glessing. Basma Alsharif asks a question for our time. Increasing human migration prompted by wars and climate change means, for many, an experience of cultural displacement. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian refugee parents who had ﬂed Israeli occupation, Alsharif migrated ﬁrst to France then to the United States…

Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics, Freedom Rocks: The Everyday Life of the Berlin Wall – Jill Glessing, The Mobile Ruin and The Labour of Commemoration

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Blake Fitzpatrick, Vid Ingelevics

December 1, 2021 [originally published in CV109 in Summer 2018 ] — Movement is elemental to existence. Since we made our slow crawl from sea to land we’ve been “on the road” seeking better environments. But another force – territorialism – counters that drive and stems our free flow with walls, great and small…

Contact 2017, Focus on Canada – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: 2fik, Johan Hallberg-Campbell, Katherine Knight, Luis Jacob, Margo Pfeiff, Mark Lewis, Michael Snow, Michelle Latimer, Sandra Brewster, Suzy Lake

June 15, 2021 [originally published in French only in CV108 in Winter 2018] —
Promotion for “Canada 150” – marking the inception of the colonial enterprise of the “Dominion of Canada” and its unequal union with Quebec – was tepid, perhaps foretelling the inevitable response: a hundred and fifty years old – really? The land, of course, had been inhabited a little longer than that – about twelve thousand years – by Indigenous peoples…

Uprisings, Images Unleashed: An Archive of Resistance – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing

August 25, 2020 [originally published in CV106 in Spring 2017] — Resistance to oppression takes many forms. Antonio Gramsci, incarcerated during Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, struggled to understand the workings of power. Developing his concept of hegemony, published later in Prison Notebooks, Gramsci proposed that power is always in flux and unstable, hence always vulnerable to popular contestation…

Thomas Ruff, Object Relations – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Thomas Ruff

February 10, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — A desire to produce and circulate images drove the invention of photography. Almost two centuries later, the dream verges on nightmare as archivists and image theorists scramble to find space and meaning for all the photographs that have been produced. It’s a good time for collectors…

Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s  – Jill Glessing. Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin and a Few Others . . .

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Garry Winogrand

March 10, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — The title that brings together the wild and woolly works in Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s–1980s1 is worthy of consideration. The word “outside” depends on its semiotic partner in crime – “inside.” . . .

PHotoEspaña 2015, Madrid.  Open Veins – Views from Latin America – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Ana Casas Broda, Janek Zamoyski, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Luis Arturo Aguirre, Luis González Palma, Martín Chambi, Ray Govea, Rodrigo Moya, Tina Modotti

October 9, 2019 [originally published in CV102 in Winter 2016] — You can read it by switching over to the French version of this page.

PHotoEspaña 2014: Shining Light on Spanish Photography – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Paco Gómez Martínez

March 4, 2019 [originally published in CV99 in Winter 2015] — “Mother and teacher mine, my sad and spacious Spain”: this is how the poet, Blas de Otero described his country’s vast geography and serial suffering under the double yoke of monarchy and religion, and then under fascism…

MaryAnn Camilleri, The Magenta Foundation – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Interviews
Authors: Jill Glessing, MaryAnn Camilleri | Artists: Adam Makarenko, Alma Haser, Evgenia Arbugaeva, Simon Roberts

November 12, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — MaryAnn Camilleri is the executive director of the Magenta Foundation. After completing her BA in photographic arts at Ryerson University, Toronto born Camilleri moved to New York, where she worked at Magnum Photo for ten years. In 2003, she returned to Toronto and, with the goal of publishing high-quality art books and promoting Canadian photographic artists, she started up Carte Blanche…

CounterIntelligence – Jill Glessing

Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Jill Glessing

December 17, 2018 [originally published in CV98 in Fall 2014] — The rich-text title CounterIntelligence that introduces an exhibition, writings, workshop, and film screenings considers two cultural nodes and production modes – art and military activity. The project’s formal and thematic eclecticism befits the Berlin-based Canadian curator, Charles Stankievech, whose own work traverses the fields of sound and visual art, writing, and publishing…

CONTACT 2013 : FIELD OF VISION – Jill Glessing, Expanding our Field with Contact Festival

Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Essays
Authors: Jill Glessing | Artists: Adam Broomberg, Andrew Wright, Arnaud Maggs, Marie Cosindas, Marlene Creates, Meryl McMaster, Oliver Chanarin, Robert Flaherty, Sebastião Salgado

August 15, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — In its fifteenth year, Contact, the world’s largest photography festival, offered an expanded schedule of photography-based adventures that included films, workshops, 174 exhibitions, and a three-day symposium featuring international curators and critics. Following a line-up that included Geoffrey Batchen and Joel Snyder…

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