Events
Freedom for Astrid Proll, Friends of Astrid Proll, London, 1979
Join us on Thursday, April 20, from 7pm to 9pm at the Villa Vassilieff for the conversation between researcher-in-residence Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe and Dr. Stephanie Schwartz, Associate at the University College London, film projections and drinks with the researchers.
The conversation will be held in English.
As part of the AWARE residency programme for research on women and non-binary photographers and video artists, researcher-in-residence Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe will publicly present “The Opposite of Experience” on the 20th of April, in conversation with Dr Stephanie Schwartz. Symons-Sutcliffe’s research is focused on Astrid Proll, a former member of the West German terrorist group the Red Army Faction. Who, having escaped from Prison in Germany lived and worked under an assumed identity, amongst radical political and feminist groups in London from 1974–1977. This project plots the story of Proll’s life and work via her relationship to documentary portraiture, presenting the image of Proll as both a political and photographic subject, whose transgressions act as a vector for a wider historical discussion of our political inheritances from the 1970s.
Prior to her association with RAF Proll had been a photography student, and later in life she became a picture editor for newspapers and magazines including The Independent (UK) and Tempo (DE). Though closely involved with photography and photographers throughout her life Proll’s time in London was conditioned by an anxious and ambivalent relationship to the camera, unable to be photographed for fear it could lead to her identification and re-arrest. In 1977, on the publication of a book containing a police photograph of her, Proll enlisted a group of female friends to go to as many bookshops as possible and steal the book or tear her portrait from it. This act of de-documentation, a fugitive strategy of obfuscation, provides a pivot point for this research project, around which questions of the function and definition of documentary portraiture can be negotiated. Told through the story of a woman, who for a period of time, could not possess her own face or name.
In addition to the conversation between Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe and Dr Stephanie Schwartz a screening event will run concurrently at AWARE between 6 and 9 pm.
Films:
SUBJEKTITÜDE, Helke Sander, 1966, 16mm black and white transfer to digital, 4mins 20 seconds
To the Dairy, Annabel Nicolson, 1977, 16mm colour transfer to digital, 3mins 2 seconds
Der Zug aus Leipzig, Astrid Proll with Claudia Richarz, 1988, 16mm black and white transfer to video, 32mins
This residency received the support of Neuflize OBC Foundation.
Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe is an art historian who writes and curates. She is currently a PhD candidate at Birkbeck University, London where she is completing a dissertation on British documentary photography from the 1970s and 1980s. She has organised and contributed to exhibitions and events programmes at organisations including Halle für Kunst Lüneburg (DE), Four Corners (UK), MayDay Rooms (UK), Gallery 44 (CA), Cabinet Magazine (DE), The Kitchen (US) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (US).
Stephanie Schwartz is Associate Professor of American Art at the University College London. Her research and teaching address photography and its histories, with a particular emphasis on American documentary. Stephanie is the author of Walker Evans: No Politics (University of Texas Press, 2020) and the editor of Modernism After Paul Strand, a special issue of the Oxford Art Journal (2015). She is currently writing Forgetting Reagan: Allan Sekula’s Documentary for MACK Books Discourse series.
