Sparking Past

THNK TNAK & Institut Français d’Autriche-Vienne present

SPARKLING PAST - Book presentation and discussion with the authors and Prof. Noit Banai

For this publication, Benjamin Hugard and art critic Klaus Speidel appropriate preparatory images for studio photography that advertising photographer Jean-François De Witte only made to optimize his shots of mouth-watering beer, subtle dishwashers or carefully lit motors, pictures never published before, icons from the age of analogue, when a sparkle you wanted to see in a photo first had to be created in the world.

All these pictures lack something or have something more than the final shots chosen by the ad agencies at the time. But it’s precisely in the diversity and quality of their blemishes that the authors see their critical and poetic potential.

Beyond its documentary aspect, Sparkling Past is a visual and verbal essay that raises deep questions about authorship and the artworld?s paradoxical relationship to advertising. With a text by the authors, a preface by Raphaël Cuir and a foreword by Catherine Bédard

Panel:

Noit Banai is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Vienna. She works on the status of the image as the pre-eminent medium for the constitution and distribution of value and thus its potential for being radicalized. She is a regular contributor to Artforum International and Texte zur Kunst

Klaus Speidel is an image and art theorist. In 2015, he won the AICA France prize for art-criticism. He directs a research project on narrative pictures at the Lab for Cognitive research in Art-History (CReA) at Vienna university.

Benjamin Hugard is a commercial photographer and an artist.

Dialogue in French and English