Paul Pfieffer & Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa: 'Dark Mirrors' [Talk & book signing]

Join us in New York at Giorno Poetry Systems, where photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa will be in conversation with artist Paul Pfeiffer. Having recognized a kinship in their aesthetic and political sensibilities, the two have engaged in a years-long dialogue about how to animate the edges and contours of an image—the threshold that links an image to all that it doesn’t contain.

As an extension of this ongoing exchange, Pfeiffer will be asking questions to Wolukau-Wanambwa about his work, his writing, his recent exhibition, his new film, and his books.

Tuesday 9 September 
18:30 

Giorno Poetry Systems
222 Bowery
New York, NY
10012 

About Dark Mirrors

Dark Mirrors assembles sixteen essays by photographer and critic Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa focusing on contemporary fine art photographic and video practices that are principally, though not exclusively, rooted in the United States, written between 2015 and 2021. Wolukau-Wanambwa analyses the image’s relationship to the urgent and complex questions that define our era, through the lens of artistic practices and works which insightfully engage with the ongoing contemporaneity of disparate histories and the ever-changing status of the visual in social life.

The book sets out an argument that one of the most dynamic sites of artistic invention in photographic practice over the past decade has been the photographic book, and thus many of the essays in the volume assess artistic works as they are bodied forth in that form. Among the recurrent themes that emerge from these rigorous, probing essays are the complex interrelationship of anti-blackness and visuality, the fragility and complexity of embodied difference in portraiture, the potency of verbal and visual media as social forms, and the politics of attention.

With essays on Deana Lawson, Dana Lixenberg, Paul Pfeiffer, Arthur Jafa, Katy Grannan, and Robert Bergman among others.