In conjunction with the exhibition Photographic Recall: Italian Rationalist Architecture in Contemporary German Art at the Anderson Gallery (through May 12), this panel discussion Staging Fascism: Contemporary Artistic Practice and Rationalist Urban Space will take place on April 11, 5:30-8pm at the Anderson Gallery, 1 Martha Jackson Place, Buffalo, NY.

This panel tackles the complex interrelation between artistic practices and their historically charged subjects in urban environments. Three of the participating artists, Heidi Specker, Eiko Grimberg (both Berlin) and Caterina Borelli (Rome) and UB faculty from the departments of Art (John Opera), History (Camilo Trumper), and Architecture (Charles Davis) discuss tensions and ambivalences at sites that once served as propagandistic stage sets of Fascist power. How can artists, historians, and architects address these issues as critical observers rather than accomplices?

Organized by Miriam Paeslack, Media Study/Arts Management.
Sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences/Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Kurt Weill Collaboration, with additional support by the UB Humanities Institute

PHOTOGRAPHIC RECALL: ITALIAN RATIONALIST ARCHITECTURE IN CONTEMPORARY GERMAN ART
(February 9 – May 12, 2019)
UB Anderson Gallery

How do contemporary artists use photography to engage with Italian architecture of the Fascist era? What lures them today into the remains of this “Rationalist” style? Where is the tipping point between a self-proclaimed critical observation and complicity with Mussolini’s propaganda project of the 1920s-1940s? These and other questions occupy the minds of the seven artists in the exhibition Photographic Recall: Italian Rationalist Architecture in Contemporary German Art. We encounter Rationalism in this exhibition through its “photographic recall”: active memory formed in combination of an artist’s imagination and collective reckonings with the past.

This exhibition is the first to showcase these mostly German photographers, independently all drawn to Italian architecture and urban spaces of the era of architectural modernism. Caterina Borelli, Johanna Diehl, Günther Förg, Eiko Grimberg, Thomas Ruff, Hans-Christian Schink and Heidi Specker represent themes that vary in genre between street photography and lush interiors, synthetic architectural documentation and carefully pre-planned and measured urban scenes. Their use of media ranges from analog to digital processes, black-and-white to color imagery, while all works are created in series. Each artist engages these built environments with his/her own visual language, demonstrating photography’s intense involvement with aesthetic and conceptual trends in contemporary art of the last three decades. The ten bodies of work (ca. 130 images, 1 video) address how photography operates as both a documentary and fictionalizing medium. They reveal ambiguous responses toward monumentality, propaganda and avant-gardism of the period. By exploring how these approaches translate across cultures and time, Photographic Recall aims to provoke dialogue around the aesthetics of totalitarianism and democracy. It asks, by extension, how these concepts are manifested in contemporary public discourse.

Photographic Recall is curated by Miriam Paeslack, Associate Professor in the department of Media Study and is organized by UB Art Galleries.