Tangible Photography: artist talk by Batia Suter and Delphine Bedel

Page Not Found is delighted to invite you to a talk by artists Batia Suter and Delphine Bedel.

This event marks the sixth and final instalment of our Tangible Photography program, which started at the beginning of 2020 and was postponed due to the pandemic. The dematerialization of the image created for some artists with a photographic practice a desire for tangibility, that is: for a materiality accessible by touch. Publishing appears in this context as a natural strategy to answer this desire and to reinstate the photographic image in its materiality. This program presents a large selection of publishing practices to show the diversity of their approaches.

Delphine Bedel will present her research on the emergence of the term “feminism” and its historical relation to publishing. Batia Suter will discuss her practice together with Delphine.

Delphine Bedel is an artist, lecturer, writer, and publisher. Her principal topics of interest are media, feminist publishing, politics of memory and the global circulation of images. Known for her cutting-edge publications and feminist education projects, Bedel works with leading cultural institutions, photography festivals and art and design academies. She is the founder of Meta/Books, and co-founder of the Roadmap for Equality in the Arts in the Netherlands. She currently teaches Speculative Design at AKV | St Joost (NL) and is a member of the German Photography Academy. Her work is exhibited internationally.

The Swiss-born, Amsterdam-based artist Batia Suter (b. 1967) studied at the art academies of Zürich (CH) and Arnhem (NL), and was also trained at the Werkplaats Typografie. Suter produces monumental installations of digitally manipulated images for specific locations, and works on photo-animations, image sequences and collages, often using found historical pictures. In 2007 and 2016 she published the artist books Parallel Encyclopedia and Parallel Encyclopedia #2, based on compositions of images taken from old books she has collected along the years. Her other books, published by Roma Publications; Surface Series (2011), Radial Grammar (2018), Hexamiles (Mont-Voisin) (2019), and Cloud Service (2019, together with Printed Matter Inc) are evocative montages of found images exploring the diverse resonances of geological shapes and landscapes, visual surfaces and image structures. The underlying themes of Batia Suter's practice are the 'iconification' and 'immunogenicity' of images, and the circumstances by which they become charged with new associative values. Her work intuitively situates old images in new contexts to provoke surprising reactions and significative possibilities. By this method, and with an attuned sensitivity to hidden harmonies and expressive accidents, Suter thus generates hypnagogic spaces where pictures can communicate by their own logic, in a force field of imaginative metamorphosis.