Constructing Landscapes: in-conversation with artists Beate Gütschow & Dafna Talmor chaired by art historian Olga Smith

The work of artists Dafna Talmor and Beate Gütschow is distinguished by a labour-intensive, complex process that involves image manipulation in the post-production stage. This discussion, chaired by art historian Olga Smith, engages with leading themes and concerns in the work of the two artists, including convergences between photography and painting, collage and montage, verisimilitude and fabrication. A special place will be given to the discussion of the photographic landscapes, and the ways in which technologies and techniques are actively shaping contemporary conceptions of landscape, environment and ecology.

 

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Olga Smith is an art historian, based at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include photography and new imaging technologies, interchanges between art and intellectual ideas, cultural memory and, most recently, representations of landscapes and environmental cultures. With a PhD from the University of Cambridge, she has held positions at the University of Warwick and Humboldt University of Berlin, and at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. She has published on photography and contemporary art, including, as editor, Photography and Landscape (2019) and Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture (2009) and in journals including Art History, photographies and Hisory of Photography. She is currently preparing for publication a book on contemporary photography in France.

Dafna Talmor is an artist and lecturer based in London whose practice encompasses photography, spatial interventions, curation and collaborations. Her work is included in public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum and Deutsche Bank and publications such as Look at This If You Love Great Photography,Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera, Architectural Review, Elephant, FT Weekend Magazine, American Suburb X, c4 journal, 1000 Words, Camera Austria, ArtReview, IMA and BJP. Her first monograph, Constructed Landscapes, published by Fw:Books was released in October 2020, longlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award 2021. Recent solo shows include Straight Lines are a Human Invention (Sid Motion Gallery, 2019), Constructed Landscapes (TOBE Gallery, 2018) & (Photofusion, 2017) and group exhibitions Her Ground: Women Photographing Landscape (Flowers East, 2019) …on making (Gdansk National Museum, 2019), Moving the Image: Photography and its Actions (Camberwell Space, 2019). Her work will be included in the upcoming Known and Strange group exhibition at the V&A Museum in November 2021. Shortlisted for the BNL BNP Paribas Group Award (2019), the MACK First Book Award and Unseen Dummy Award (2018), Talmor was the recipient of a Breathing SPACE Bursary (2016) and several Arts Council England Grants for the Arts Awards. Talmor is represented by Sid Motion Gallery in London and TOBE Gallery in Budapest.

German artist Beate Gütschow (born 1970) studied at HFBK – the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (1993–2000) and at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway (1997). She was awarded the Ars Viva Prize as well as the Otto Dix Prize / IBM Art Prize New Media and received a residency grant for Villa Aurora in Los Angeles.
Her work has been presented in renowned art institutions, including Kunsthalle at Lipsiusbau in Dresden, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Her works are represented in many private and public collections, including the Art Collection Deutsche Börse, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Kunsthaus Zurich, SFMOMA – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the MMA – Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Beate Gütschow lives and works in Cologne and Berlin.