Join us for an online conversation on the relationship between photography and sculpture, organised as part of “mould the wing to match the photograph,” currently on view at AAA’s library.
What role does photography play in shaping artistic practice? How do reproductions function independently and impact our experience of a particular artist and their artwork? What new perspectives on photography of sculpture are formed through analogue and digital circulation? This session brings together art historian Emilia Terracciano and researcher Michelle Wong to explore the multifaceted relationship between photography and sculptural practices.
Photographing sculptural objects challenges the notion of a unique and singular artwork and reshapes the mediums and methods involved, influencing one another in the process. Drawing on AAA Collections, this session aims to address these questions by examining two archives with extensive photo-documentation of sculpture: the Mrinalini Mukherjee Archive and the Ha Bik Chuen Archive.
In this session, Emilia Terracciano reflects on the interplay between photography and sculpture, focusing on Mrinalini Mukherjee’s sculptural practice. Terracciano explores the concepts of multiplicity and scale, emphasising photography as a means to study the artist’s practice. Michelle Wong, having extensively engaged with the personal archive of the late Hong Kong–based artist Ha Bik Chuen for over a decade, raises inquiries about the artist’s role as a documenter. Wong addresses questions of self-representation and site within the context of photo-documentation of Ha’s sculptures in addition to sculptural works of his contemporaries.
This talk is organised in conjunction with “mould the wing to match the photograph,” currently on view at AAA’s library. This exhibition draws on the archive of Mrinalini Mukherjee, one of the most prominent sculptors in India, and stages an encounter between Pari (1986), the artist’s monumental hemp fibre sculpture, and archival materials showing detailed installation instructions and extensive photographic documentation.
The session will be held online via Zoom, and is free and open to the public with registration.
Dr Emilia Terracciano is a Welsh-Italian multilingual writer, teacher, and art historian committed to expanding and amplifying the ecosystems and publics for art history. In 2020 she joined the Art History Department at the University of Manchester; her areas of specialty include modern and contemporary South Asian art and its diasporas, colonial studies, postcolonial criticism, and critical ecologies. A Linnean Society Fellow, Terracciano received numerous grants including from the Paul Mellon Centre, Sasakawa Peace Foundation, University of Oxford John Fell Fund, and Nehru Trust for the Indian Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Terracciano is the author of Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India (London: IB Tauris, 2018). She edited the volume Nasreen Mohamedi: From the Glenbarra Art Museum (Himeji: Glenbarra Art Museum, 2022) with contributions from Geeta Kapur and Nina Sabnani, amongst others.
Michelle Wun Ting Wong is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Hong Kong, exploring modernity in post-WWII Hong Kong. Her writing is published in Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945–1990 (2018), and the journal Southeast of Now (2019), amongst others. From 2012–20 she was a researcher at Asia Art Archive, focusing on Hong Kong art history and histories of exchange and circulation through exhibitions and periodicals. Curatorial projects include Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys at Tai Kwun Contemporary (2021), Afterglow at the 8th Yokohama Triennale (2020), and the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016). She runs the independent space New Park with artists South Ho Siu Nam and Billy HC Kwok.
This talk is moderated by Noopur Desai, Researcher at Asia Art Archive in India.
“mould the wing to match the photograph” is generously supported by Mimi Brown & Alp Erçil, and Virginia & Wellington Yee.
