Todi Circular Nº 6 - Pari pessu

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Lunch at Acquaghiaccia, 2021

A new year begins, and I wish everyone well. From my correspondence with many of you, I have no doubt many projects are in the works, even if some are stalled briefly.
In this first Circular of the year,

Visual artist Mishka Henner has managed to have a full slate of exhibition projects, and explains how he has miraculously given birth to dozens of children—and parents—and is offering them all up for adoption!
Museum director Nathalie Herschdorfer reveals how she’s managed to make her fine gem of an art museum one of the top photo institutions in Europe.
Gallerist Robert Morat notes how one of the upsides to restricted opening hours is seeing lines forming outside! Isn’t that every gallerist’s dream?
Producer Susan Bloom looks over her productive career since her early museum days in Berlin and New York, and muses over the rewards and pitfalls of major travelling shows, one of the rewards being hitting the million visitor mark.
Photographer Charles Traub, speaking as Department Chair at New York’s School of Visual Arts, talks of his struggles at getting young people educated online, while announcing the culmination of a personal project he had first undertaken in 1973.

MISHKA HENNER ARTIST MANCHESTER / UK

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Recently
Projects I’ve been most proud of in the last 18 months include Your Only Chance to Survive is to Leave with Us, a solo show at Milan’s Galleria Bianconi in the autumn of last year; I’m Not the Only One at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco this fall; Potential Worlds at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; and Countryside, The Future at the Guggenheim, New York.

The Milan show brought together lots of new work I’ve been making since 2017, focusing on real and imagined apocalypses told through photographs, picture discs, sculpture, and video works. I’m Not the Only One was the outcome of a 2015 studio visit from Fraenkel Gallery’s Frish Brandt; I’d completed the eponymously titled video work just a few nights before Frish landed in Manchester. Present circumstances have given the work new life and meaning, and it was thrilling for me to see it inspire a group show that included so many of the greats represented by the gallery.

If the catalogue was anything to go by, Potential Worlds in Zurich looked like a fascinating show. In events consistent with the themes covered, the exhibition was postponed just hours before it was set to open in March this year.

Rem Koolhaas’s current Guggenheim show opens with a sign that reads “This is not an art exhibition,” and it’s not inaccurate. In typical OMA style, the show is a sprawling infographic colliding masses of research materials with declarations and propositions. Rem has used my Feedlot pictures to illustrate his ideas in the past and despite the cacophony of this latest exhibition, seeing the series included in this context was another highlight of the year.

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“The Fertile Image”, installation view,Jean-Kenta Gauthier | Vaugirard, Paris.
Photo © Jean-Kenta Gauthier, Paris

Currently
I’ve been working with artificial intelligence systems for the past twelve months and an outcome of that work, The Fertile Image, has just opened in the group show Free Lunch at Jean-Kenta Gauthier Gallery in Paris. Essentially, a supercomputer is fed two photographic ‘parents’ and creates an infinite variety of photorealistic descendants of those two images. The results are uncanny and unsettling, in part because they look like photographs but are nothing of the sort. Jean-Kenta wanted to open the new gallery space with works that are given out for free to visitors, so my contribution is seven pairs of ‘parents’ and 2,100 of their ‘children’, presented as 5×4 inch prints. If you’re in Paris, go pick up a free child! The show runs until the day before Valentine’s Day next year.

I’ve also been invited to create a work for Ecran Total at Centre de Design de l’UQAM, Montreal next year, as part of a celebration of the life and works of the writer Jean Baudrillard. I’m collaborating with Vaseem Bhatti, an artist based in Manchester, on an immersive video installation consisting of natural disasters captured by CCTV cameras, live streams, and phone cameras. This show opens in May 2021.

Finally, as a way of keeping in touch with friends and colleagues during the pandemic, I started a new podcast called Artworks with Joe Gibson, another Manchester-based colleague. Our first episode was launched just a couple of weeks ago and features Todi alumni, friend and mentor, Joachim Schmid. You can find it anywhere you get your podcasts (Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.).

Is there anything you’d like some form of help with?
We think there’s lots of potential in bringing art and photography to new audiences via the podcast, so if you’re a curator, gallery or institution that has a show or an artist you’re working with, you think could work well through the medium of sound, let us know. Collaborations with curators, galleries, and institutions is something we’d love to explore.

I’m also working with Erik Kessels on the design of a monograph of my works made over the last decade and will soon be ready to approach publishers. If you’re open to proposals or are interested in helping in any way, we’d love to hear from you.

NATHALIE HERSCHDORFER DIRECTOR/CURATOR LE LOCLE

Position
Since 2014 I have been director of the Museum of Fine Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, where I have shown many important photographers including Eamonn Doyle, Todd Hido, Jeff Mermelstein, Vik Muniz, Alex Prager, Viviane Sassen, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Garry Winogrand and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Being an art historian specialized in photography, I can’t help but program a lot of photography!

I also teach the history of photography at ECAL, the art and design school based in Lausanne. I enjoy teaching more and more, finding that I also learn a lot about our medium from my students.

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Stanley Kubrick as installed at the MBA. Le Locle, on currently.

Recently
As all people working in a cultural institution well know, 2020 has been hectic in terms of programming. At MBAL, due to the closure of the museum for several months—first in Spring, and more recently this Winter—we extend, postpone, and reschedule…

In late October, one week before having to close again, we were able to open new shows, one being dedicated to Stanley Kubrick, photographer – an exhibition organized by the Museum of the City of New York. To be shown together with the Kubrick show, I organized an exhibition over a couple of weeks documenting three months in NYC during the Covid-19 pandemic. My idea was to create a show bringing images made in NYC in 2020, but images made by very young New Yorkers, as Stanley Kubrick had worked as a photographer in NY from the age of 17 to 20! Kubrick published his photographs in Look Magazine. I went on Instagram to find images made by teenagers! For that project, I collaborated with a very talented art director based in New York, Ruba Abu-Nimah, who gathered hundreds of images made during the quarantine. The images gathered in this exhibition, originally posted on Instagram, are the result of a collective documentation that took place over 100 days: those of Ruba Abu-Nimah and of teenagers from New York met at the skatepark. Together, they travelled and filmed the city caught in the turmoil of one event after another (quarantine, protests, the presidential campaign…). The result is very powerful. This project would never have existed as an exhibition without the Covid-19. We made it in 6 weeks!

Currently
In addition to preparing for the year 2021 at the MBAL, I am working on various exhibition projects that I am conducting as a freelance curator. One of them is a fascinating exhibition dedicated to the photographic collections of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. I am currently going through thousands and thousands of photographs from 1863 (foundation of the Red Cross) to today. The show will be held in Arles at next Summer’s Festival, and then in Geneva at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in the Fall.

I am also working on a small show for Paris in February 2021. It is entitled “Les Résistantes” (The Resistance fighters) and it brings together six female artists whose work reflects a feminist commitment. One of them is the Spanish artist Laia Abril, who works on a History of Misogyny.

On my pile of projects to complete in 2021, there is a book dedicated to fashion photography. The focus is on Carla Sozzani and Franca Sozzani and how they shaped fashion photography from their base in Milan. The book focuses on how the two sisters discovered and worked with photographers from early on in their careers (1980s) and on the impact they had on their creative lives showing their work through the magazines’ pages of Italian Vogue and Italian Elle and onto the walls of the Galleria Carla Sozzani, founded 30 years ago in Milan. Among the many photographers are Helmut Newton, Sarah Moon, Deborah Turbeville, Miles Aldridge, Peter Lindbergh and Paolo Roversi, all of whom worked with Carla and Franca Sozzani on a regular basis. The book will be published by Thames & Hudson, in London, and could also be developed in an exhibition…

Lastly, I am working with William Ewing on a major show of mountain photography, from 1840 to 1940. We decided to stop at 1940 because the early period turned out to be so rich, it needed space to be properly appreciated. This show will draw only from many collections here in Switzerland, both public and private.

Life during the pandemic
Stay flexible and creative! 2020 was a challenging year and I expect to face some financial difficulties with my museum in the future. Unlike US museums, Swiss museums receive financial assistance from the state. So far so good. But we must remain vigilant and be ready to review our programming. it’s not necessarily bad to think of our way of working differently as long as talented artists can be exhibited, and most important remunerated for their work.

ROBERT MORAT GALLERIST BERLIN

Position
In Berlin, running the gallery. It has been 5 years this year that I moved the gallery from Hamburg to Berlin – and I’m still happy I did or rather upset I didn’t earlier.

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Roger Eberhard’s show, “Human Territoriality”, at the gallery last summer.

Recently
In a difficult year we mounted three shows at the gallery and I’m happy to say they all went quite well, all things considered. The gallery year kicked off with a survey show of Dutch photographer Bertien van Manen, specifically focusing on her contributions to the medium of the photo book. We titled the show „Book Stories“, and it ran from January to mid-March, while the StedelIjk Museum in Amsterdam showed a large-scale retrospective that ran simultaneously. Swiss artist and photographer Roger Eberhard published his new project Human Territorialities with Edition Patrick Frey in March – so just in time for the lockdown during the first wave of the pandemic here in Europe! It’s a landscape project on former borders, borders that have shifted or disappeared through the course of history. It’s also a project on the arbitrariness of borders as man-made demarcations, and a statement against the nation state – quite ironically, when we were finally allowed to open the show in May, the artist who lives in Zurich couldn’t attend, because for the first time since WW2, the border between Germany and Switzerland was closed.

Currently
Our current show, Max Pinckers’ Margins of Excess, opened at the end of September and was our contribution to this year’s “European Month of Photography“ here in Berlin in October. After most European countries experienced a somehow easy summer with loosened regulations and almost no travel restrictions, the fall season started almost like every year. Berlin Art Week was held, visitors traveled to the city, local museums and galleries opened big shows and business picked up. We were happy to have a show up that received a lot of attention and was popular with visitors. Margins of Excess is a project about life in the US in a post-truth era, the blurring lines between news and fiction, fittingly scheduled during the US elections. The press picked it up. It was a successful start into the second half of the year and it felt good to be busy at the gallery, working. Since we could not have more than 10 people in the space, lines formed outside. People queued to see the show. We were thrilled. Then the second wave of the pandemic hit, new restrictions are in place since November 2nd and our days at the gallery got quiet again. All museums and exhibition spaces in Germany had to close, theatres and concert halls are closed as are bars and restaurants. Amidst all of this, galleries, who are regarded as retail stores in Germany, are allowed to remain open. Business is slow but steady and right now it feels like we will quietly fade out of this year, happy that it is behind us.

Life during the pandemic
Over the last couple of years, friends took “sabbaticals“ and I envied them. That’s the one thing you can’t really do, when you run your own business. I can’t just take a year off and spend it in India. So, looking back at 2020, I guess this is the closest I will ever get to a sabbatical. I worried about sales for a while, until I realised that collectors are loyal and new clients approach the gallery despite the difficulties of travel restrictions, and thereafter I relaxed a bit because sales went on even during the lockdown, I must say I actually enjoyed not having to get on an airplane every other week! No fairs, no festivals – of course I missed the encounters and the conversations, but I also enjoyed the quiet days and the slow pace. Once the market is back on track, once the circus picks up again, I hope that I can keep a little of that calm, quiet focus – this is what I will take away from this experience. Learning to exhale, once in a while.

SUSAN BLOOM PRODUCER NEW YORK

Position
Taking my lead from Bill, I can’t believe I left American Express 25 years ago. For those of you who may not have known me then, I had what the then-Chairman considered to be the best job in the company – working with and funding projects at visual and performing arts organizations around the world. I agreed!
I never could have foreseen that career path. I began it wanting to be a museum director, so spent two years in Berlin at the Museum für Völkerkunde and another two at the Metropolitan Museum in NY under Philippe de Montebello when he was Curator in Chief.

I then moved toward the business side of the arts, first at RuderFinn and later at American Express; I represented the Company in supporting arts activities in ways from which it also benefitted. It wasn’t difficult to select great projects and partners that served everyone, and I had a great team to help me. To my knowledge, American Express was the first firm ever to support photography when we partnered with Cornell Capa at ICP on a Cartier-Bresson exhibition in 1979. That show went on to travel to 80 cities on five continents; as you can imagine, I got to know Henri quite well.

After 15 years at American Express, it was hard to find another corporate position that compared, so I set out on my own. I was fortunate to have clients in both the arts and business sectors. Corporate sponsors like Boeing, Eli Lilly, Chrysler, GTE and others were terrific to work with. With them, I was able to produce some great orchestra tours, exhibitions of Van Gogh and Art Nouveau, and the GRAMMY Awards when they were in NY in 1997 and 2003.

In photography, I have been fortunate to work with Annie Leibovitz, first in 1990 and again since 2004, on her traveling exhibition tours: Annie Leibovitz: 1970-1990; A Photographer’s Life; Pilgrimage; and New Portraits, each of which traveled extensively. I booked Annie’s show, A Photographer’s Life, starting at the Brooklyn Museum in 2006 and ending at the Hermitage in 2012 – 16 cities in all with a total attendance of over a million visitors! That was quite a journey.

Other photography exhibitions I worked on over the years included Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Paul Strand, Tim Walker and others.

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Annie talking to students at her “WOMEN. New Portraits”, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London,
back in 2016

Recently
2016 already seems like a long time ago but I was pleased to partner then with Larry Schiller and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on an exhibition to celebrate the centennial of JFK’s birth. A small but compelling exhibition of 77 images celebrated the life, political career and extraordinary vision of one of the country’s most admired and charismatic presidents. Stephen Kennedy Smith was actively involved and historian Douglas Brinkley collaborated with Stephen and Larry on a book. The exhibition opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in May 2017 and at the New-York Historical Society in the fall before touring to seven cities around the US. It was one of my favorite projects!

Together with Larry Schiller again and the New-York Historical Society, we produced an exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassinations of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. This exhibition of photographs and artifacts honored these visionary leaders who had an irrevocably influence on the United States. It was comprised of approximately 60 photographs and 30 documents and artifacts that uncovered the relationship between these two historic figures. This was another small but special exhibition, which also toured to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas.

Annie’s most recent exhibition, New Portraits, was something unique! Commissioned by UBS, it focused exclusively on women, featuring portraits of such influential figures as Gloria Steinem, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Misty Copeland, Jane Goodall, Agnes Gund and Aung San Suu Kyi, to name a few. Conceived as a “pop up” exhibition, it launched in January 2016 in London and spent a month in each of 10 cities, internationally. Shown in non-traditional spaces like an abandoned railroad station or a former turbine engine plant, each opening presented a major new installation challenge. The exhibition was accompanied by workshops, master classes, educational programs and partnerships with local schools. Portraits newly taken were added at every venue, starting with 24 and ending with 42. Access to the public was free.

Currently
As you all know, the demand for space for photography exhibitions has traditionally been exceptionally high. With the covid pandemic having put so many exhibition plans on hold, or cancelled them altogether, I have not actively sought new shows at this time.

While I’m still up for a large, interesting project, lately I’ve instead been working behind the scenes advising, volunteering my expertise, and making introductions where I can. I’m also using the time to polish my language skills in German, French and Spanish and doing more than my fair share of cooking like I am sure many of you are doing. I look forward to reuniting with friends and getting back on the road. I miss traveling terribly. For now my husband and I are spending most of our time in Sag Harbor where we have plenty of space, the great outdoors, nearby beaches and the freedom to move about fairly easily. Looking forward to a better 2021 for all of us!

CHARLES TRAUB FOTOGRAPHER / EDUCATOR NEW YORK

Position
Nothing has greatly changed in terms of my pursuits, titles, and occupations since COVID fell upon us. I haven’t been out of the city, and I rarely get above 23rd Street. In fact, I find the aura of the Village rather remarkable and reminiscent of Jane Jacobs’s model of the community, as people are friendly and responsibly social distancing, etc. There’s little traffic and consequently little noise, and it’s invigorating to walk around, look, rediscover and photograph.

Most of my time for the past months has been consumed by the two hats I wear: photographer/artist and department chairman.

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Fellow Todi guest Teju Cole talking at the SVA.

Recently
My creative pursuits have revolved around an exhibition which opened in the spring 2020, sans visitors, at the Historic New Orleans Collection and curated by John Lawrence; Cajun Document 1973. The photographs were taken jointly by myself and fellow photographer, Douglas Baz. Back then…1973… we spent 6 months in Louisiana, photographing everything and everybody that comprise the unique enclave of American Folk culture. Presently, the exhibition is up, and a book has been published, but both have been affected by frequent closing of the Museum by either Covid or 4 major storms. Unfortunately I have not seen this exhibition which is beautifully installed with artifacts and 140 images. (See here:The Virtual Tour). We are very proud of this document which has never had a formal museum exhibition; it is important to note, that this selection plus the 3000 additional images which comprise the archive now in possession of the Museum, will be a lasting record of a vanishing culture and a landscape severely threatened by global warming. The book, Cajun Document 1973, is distributed by Unicorn in Europe, and the University of Virginia Press in the US.

The publication Skid Row, of my up-close portraits of the indigent inhabitants of the missions of Uptown Chicago and of the Bowery, New York, made in the late 1970’s has been prominently featured in Steidl’s Catalog for the last two seasons. However, I have not gotten the call that he is ready to print it! This is a frustration many others have endured, and I’m sure it is further impacted by the restrictions of COVID. Nevertheless, I keep waiting! Lastly, I’ve been making many images using my cellphone to further a project about the existential conditions of our times. I began this about 4 years ago, and have amassed hundreds of images, which I have weeded down to about 200, though everyday, a new one is made, and has to be considered. This is a project I titled Tickety-Boo. Damiani will publish a book next fall as a square block, 8 inches x 8 inches, and about an inch and a half thick with all of the pictures bled. The English expression tickety-boo loosely translates ‘Everything is okay, but everything isn’t!’ Therein is the enigmatic crux of the images contained in the book. They are about things ambiguous and displaced, yet reorganized by the camera in a kind of pictorial completeness, both soothing and disquieting. The mundane becomes animated, and in the end, the project is a product of my walks and travels.

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Currently
In regard to my other role, it seems that my staff and I are inundated with the ever-pressing need to rearrange and reorganize the educational pursuits of our visual art for learning and practice online. It’s a daunting task, as the goalpost keeps getting moved. SVA has decided that all classes should be online. We are conducting in a hybrid manner and our instructors can meet individually with our students in our facility. Students do have access to our department, the studios and our equipment, closely monitored for safety and distance. Given that we have many international students, working out online classes to accommodate time differences, and individual schedules is a big juggling act. Instructors have had to change their syllabi, refocus their digital skills, make videos for online presentation, and pre-arranged lectures etc. The big challenge is how to do a critique using Canvas and its attached Zoom. Given that the critique is the centerpiece of our education, much is lost in the absence of people just being able to spontaneously move around, look, exclaim, and challenge each other. Somehow, we have been able to do it. The faculty have adapted beautifully to the challenge over the last months. In some ways there is a new intimacy, more one-on-one, and given the lack of other distractions, students have been very productive. Yes, the tactile exchange is missed as well as the presence of an object, the print, the book or installation. They are most often lost to the virtual experience though new means of creativity it delivery to an audience are developing in the realm of the circuit.

All this purports that essentially, arts education, and particularly photography education, will radically change as an outcome of the COVID delirium.We must ask do students need to pay the high fees and tuition necessary to be on-campus in-person? Do art schools and the like need to put huge amounts of capital into structures to maintain the conventional learning of academia? My suspicion is that these costs cannot be justified if the outcomes of our online teaching and learning result in a positive experience. Hands-on demonstrations and access to expensive technology may be accomplished with limited amounts of people in smaller structures. One-to-one feedback is possible as the technology evolves for making vivid presentations of work-in-progress. This next semester, and maybe the semester to follow, will tell all schools about the essentials of learning in a new world of screen preoccupation, social distancing, and a lack of physical intimacy. Inevitably, the technology will continue to improve to heighten the simulation of the older physical exchanges and we will find ourselves in a new reality that will become commonplace. I used to say, we practice on the web for experience in the real world. But for some years now, I’ve been saying, we practice in the real world for living on the web. This is the new ‘now’!

Virtual exhibition
Exhibition info
The Times-Picayune
Purchase book

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