US-Based Artist and Filmmaker Crystal Z Campbell’s overarching interest resides in the underloved, or places, persons, and events that the artist intends to amplify in their work. In Campbell’s short form digitized 16mm film, REVOLVER, they explore the concept of pareidolia, or a situation in which someone sees a pattern or image of something that does not exist. Place and displacement are central to the work––Campbell filmed in the Netherlands as well as Nicodemus, Kansas, which is the ‘longest-lasting Black homesteader’ enclave established by Exodusters fleeing the Jim Crow South after the Civil War. Speaking with a direct descendent of the original founders, Angela Bates narrates the film in a fragmented odyssey spiraling from historical anecdotes of the town, towards a psychogeographic rendering that meshes with Bates’ visions and dreams. With Rorschach-like imagery appearing and disappearing across the cinematic frame, the film gestures towards ideas of self-determination paralleling abstraction as a radical potentiality. In tandem with the film screening of REVOLVER, Campbell will share a brief artist talk referencing other uses of abstraction in their multidisciplinary practice.

Crystal Z. Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose archive-driven works center the underloved. Campbell’s works have screened and exhibited internationally: MIT, SFMOMA, Walker Art Center, ICA-Philadelphia, MOMA, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, National Gallery of Art, and others. Awards include a Creative Capital Award, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell,  Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, and Whitney ISP Fellowship. Campbell’s writing has been published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo.

Participation via Zoom Link

Part of the International Lecture Series 

Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary

From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.

Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series „Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary“ is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.

For any updates see https://www.medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de/lehrveranstaltungen/abstraction-today-1 

Organized by Svea Braeunert (Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam & University of Bonn), Birgit Mersmann (Art History, University of Bonn), Jens Schröter (Media Studies, University of Bonn).

With the support of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM), the Gielen-Leyendecker-Foundation, and Studium Universale at University of Bonn.