About Face Symposium
10 March 2017
Wimbledon College Merton Hall Rd, London SW19 3QA
PROGRAMME
17.00 – 17.10 Introduction by Mark Fairnington
17.10 – 17.30 Jelena Bekvalac, Curator of Osteology at the Museum of London
17.30 - 17.50 Dr Suzannah Biernoff, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture
17.50 - 18.10 Nelson Diplexcito, Senior Lecturer in painting, Wimbledon
18.10 – 18.30 Jason Bate, Lecturer in the Histories and Theories of Photography, Falmouth College of Art
18.30 – 18.50 Alex Veness, Senior Lecturer in Painting, Wimbledon
18.50 - 19.00 Geraint Evans - Summing Up
Abstracts
Jelena Bekvalac: Seeing faces from the past
Synopsis:
An osteologist is in a unique position for literally seeing the faces of people from the past, in terms of visualising them in their anatomical form and as a representation of their face in life. The bone structure of the skull is a valuable insight to each individual, providing an array of information about each person, revealing impacts affecting them in life and death. All of which effects the potent visual picture of them as people from the past.
Biography:
Jelena Bekvalac is a Curator of Human Osteology at the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology (CHB), Museum of London. Jelena has worked at the CHB since it was established in 2003 with funding from Wellcome. The curatorial role involves working with c. 20,000 archaeologically derived human skeletal remains, providing a rich diversity of opportunities for research, teaching, publications, out reach events and public engagements. Jelena has a particular interest in the Post Medieval period and is currently working on a funded project by the City of London Archaeological Trust (CoLAT) investigating the Impact of Industrialisation on London Health
Suzannah Biernoff: Facelessness in Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage
Synopsis:
The first facial transplant, using a donor’s nose, chin and mouth, was performed on Isabelle Dinoire in France in 2005, but the idea of removing or replacing the face – either with a mask, or a living face – has been around for much longer. This article begins to map the cultural ‘pre- history’ of the face transplant, focusing on the idea and image of facelessness in Georges Franju’s classic horror film Les yeux sans visage (1960). Franju’s film sits uneasily within the academic history of plastic surgery, but as a cultural text it reveals a great deal about popular perceptions of disfigurement and experimental surgery – and the intimate relationship between disgust, horror and visual pleasure.
Bio:
Suzannah Biernoff is a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research has spanned medieval and modern periods: she is the author of Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (2002), while her recent publications pursue the themes of corporeal history and visual anxiety in the context of First World War Britain. In 2007 she was awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award for a project on the cultural history of disfigurement. Open Access articles from this project have been published in the journals Visual Culture in Britain, Social History of Medicine and Photographies, and an essay on Nina Berman’s Marine Wedding appeared in the edited volume Ugliness: The Non-beautiful in Art and Theory. Her book Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement will be published by the University of Michigan Press in May.
Edith Scob as Christiane in Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Edna Grüberg (Juliette Mayniel) moments before her face is lifted off. without a face), 1960. Screen capture. Screen capture. Nelson Diplexcito: The Deeper You Go, The More Byzantine It Gets
Abstract:
Portraiture is accepted and understood as a form of recording and representing visually the figure and the face. The position of portraiture in contemporary painting has been questioned against technology, yet portrait painting persists. This presentation initially explores the commonality between painting and photography, between what is seen, experienced, understood and remembered. It will go on to illustrate, describe and analyse through my own research paintings separateness. That in theory, this most conventional of activities, to record, ‘capture’ and represent with paint is in practice the most mysterious and evasive. It is this paradox of seeing and not seeing that interests me in this most maligned and misunderstood of painting activities. Portraiture is more than mimesis or a form of equivalency; for me, it is the telling of a state between what is known, that which is present and what is locked and cannot be seen.
Bio:
Nelson Diplexcito studied BA Fine Art: Painting and Drawing (1984-88) Grays School of Art, MA Painting (1988-90) The Royal College of Art. Selected solo and group exhibitions include: Failed Utopias, Malvern, England (2016), Nanjing International Art Exhibition, China (2014), Painting, Smoking, Eating, Arthouse, London, England (2014), Dirty Pop: Contemporary British Painting, &Model, Leeds England (2013), The Perfect Nude, Charlie Smith, London, England (2013), Minderwertig Gemälde, Galeria Cadaqués - Huc Malla, Cadaqués, Spain (2012), Half Cut, Lamb and Lion, London, England (2012), London Local, Gallery Stock Berlin, Germany (2012), Nelson Diplexcito: New Paintings, Galleri S7, Stockholm, Sweden (2011). Nelson Diplexcito is currently a Senior Lecturer in Painting at Wimbledon College of Art.
Portrait Painting 36, oil on paper 69 x 51cm (2016) Jason Bate: Material Confrontations with Facial Disfigurement and the Shaping of Historical Interpretation
Synopsis:
This paper examines how photographs of facial plastic surgery cases from the First World War can challenge our assumptions about certain historical photographs and make us rethink our notions of the photographic face. I will explore the connections between photography and our understanding of the past; how the photographs elicit readings, affect historical imagination, and shape their content for the viewer. The photographs in question seem in some sense to disrupt historical understanding, they unsettle the way a viewer can understand, negotiate, and articulate their perceptions and sense of the past. I will argue that the facial injury photographs contain such traumatic references that they unsettle my sense of history as chronological progression, a sense of the photographs being safely in the past, metaphorically ‘far’ away. My response to these photographs is a tangible encounter in the present, they affect me now and make their recorded past into a contemporary concept because it is active, it has a presence. I will defend the claim that the photographs cause me to reflect on and interpret history in a specific way. They are not so much windows into the past but infinitely repeatable projections. These photographs project the problematic nature of history forward through a forecasting that forces me to identify with and examine my ideas and understandings about how I connect to the past.
Bio:
I hold a PhD in Photographic History from Falmouth University, UK. I am a part-time lecturer in the histories and theories of photography at the University of Exeter, and an independent researcher. My core research interests are in photographic history, and concern five overlapping fields: the social history of medicine, cultural history, visual and material culture, First World War studies, archival studies. My research is based on photographic archives and collections. Drawing interdisciplinary approaches to visual images and material culture, I seek to contribute to debates across a range of disciplines, including photography and visual culture, history, art history, and the medical humanities.
Figure 1: RAMC album 2, Sergeant George Butcher, 1918-1919, photographs by Dr Albert Norman, 1915-1919. Welcome Library, London.
Figure 2: George Butcher, 1920-1921, Gillies Archive, BAPRAS, Archive of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Alex Veness - Sybille, Almost in Space
Synopsis:
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, the East German lifestyle magazine Sybille (deemed borderline subversive by the totalitarian state) published images and articles about women’s life in the GDR that differed notably from contemporaneous western ideals of female identity. In the 1960s and 70s, the Italian designer Emilio Pucci was commissioned by a U.S. airline to design its every aspect, including faux astronaut helmets for female cabin staff. Images from each of these sources became subjects for portraits, in a larger sequence of paintings of individuals spanning female employees at Bell laboratories in the 1960s to Russian email-order wives in the 2000s.
Bio:
Alex Veness graduated from The Royal College of Art in 1994 with an MA in Painting, and from University of Westminster in 2002 with an MA (Distinction) in Hypermedia Studies. He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art (Painting) at Wimbledon College of Arts, UAL. His work has been exhibited widely, including Tate Liverpool, Camden Arts Centre, The Latvian National Museum of Art, The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Exeter and The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Alex is a director of Figureband Ltd, which operates Occupation Studios, a not for profit charitable trust providing affordable studio space in London.
A Night Shift, Alex Veness
The Headwind, Alex Veness
The Fog, Alex Veness