Writing to Images: The Practice of Corresponding with Art

Please note this event will be live streamed to allow those outside London access to the event. All those who wish to access the event via this online method should book a ‘Livestream’ ticket rather than ‘Lecture Theatre’ ticket.

Booking closes 30 minutes before the event start time.

In her most recent monograph, A Black Gaze, Tina Campt describes her practice of writing not as writing about, but rather writing to images. In this way, it constitutes a form of correspondence that aspires to dialogue with artists and artworks. In her keynote, Campt will expand upon this practice through an engagement with a series of works by black contemporary artists. She will explore the multiple frequencies and frequential valences of correspondence as an affective interchange and a dynamic of resemblance and re-cognition that is in no way limited to textual or epistolary forms. On the contrary, correspondence amplifies and enlivens the work of visual artists of color in ways that highlight the stakes of an ongoing conversation between the past, the present, and our aspirations for a future lived otherwise.

Tina M. Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities Brown University, and is currently Visiting Professor in the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University. Campt heads the Black Visualities Initiative at the Cogut Institute for Humanities and is the convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She is the author of four monographs and one edited collection: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), Listening to Images (2017), Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Hirsch, Hochberg and Willis, 2020) and A Black Gaze (2021).

Organised by Dr Alice Butler (The Courtauld) as part of the “What a Hazard a Letter Is”: Correspondence in Feminist Art, Art Writing, and Art History, from Emily Dickinson to Now series.