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Kaja Silverman

Silverman is a visual and film theorist and the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of nine books, including The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part I (2015), Flesh of My Flesh (2009), Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992) and Speaking about Godard (1998).

Her current writing and teaching are focused primarily on photography, time-based visual art and painting. Her most recent book, The Miracle of Analogy, is the first installation of a three-volume reconceptualization of photography. Reconceptualizing photographs made during the first three decades of chemical photography and their contemporary resonance, she positions photography as the agency through which the world reveals itself to us, in which the photographer played only a nominal role. The forthcoming second volume, A Three-Personed Picture, is about the gradual emergence of a very different kind of image: one that is pictorial in nature. This image has two very unusual features. First, it is shaped both by the aesthetic intelligence of the photographer, and that of the world. Second, it depends for its existence as much upon the sitter and the beholder as it does upon the author, and it links them to each other through a three-person chiasmus.

The recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim fellowship, she was recently awarded a Distinguished Achievement Award by the Mellon Foundation, which has enabled her to organize and fund a series of conferences, lectures, artist talks and residencies in Philadelphia. At Slought, these have included public conversations with Allan Sekula and Achille Borchardt-Hume, a series of site-specific installations by Knut Asdam, and retrospective of works by Victor Burgin. She is also the recipient of the 2017 Distinguished Scholar Award from College Art Association.

Kaja Silverman, PhD

Faculty Committee

Professor
Department of the History of Art
University of Pennsylvania
3405 Woodland Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6208
kajasilv@sas.upenn.edu www.kajasilverman.com

Values

Primary programs
Local
Begins Sep 15, 2016

Three looped videos and a photo series exploring the relationship between real and virtual spaces

Values
Begins Apr 5, 2016

Walid Raad and Kaja Silverman in conversation about critical and aesthetic engagements with arts institutions and organizations in the "Arab World"

Values
Begins Oct 13, 2014

A conversation with T.J. Clark about art and capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall

Values
Begins Jan 17, 2012

A conversation with Allan Sekula on the politics of occupation and the shifting relationship between photojournalism and global capitalism

Values
Global
Begins Oct 16, 2013

An installation with Knut Asdam exploring architecture and cinema at the conjunction of the personal, the paranoiac, and the public

Values
Cloud
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