Allan Sekula : "Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum"

Jeu de Paume and Les presses du réel invite you to meet Hilde Van Gelder, Sophie Kaplan and Bruno Serralongue to talk about Allan Sekula. Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum (published in March 2015).
This book edited by Hilde Van Gelder comprises a representative selection of images and objects that are part of Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum, and follows as scrupulously as possible the instructions left by the artist before his early death in summer 2013.

Ship of Fools/The Dockers’ Museum comprises a corpus of thirty-three framed photographs and two slide shows, all made by the artist (Ship of Fools), followed by a collection of objects, visuals, postcards, prints and photographs that he purchased, mostly on the Internet (The Dockers’ Museum). Sekula carried out this project in homage to the historical and contemporary solidarity of dockers and those who work with them.

Allan Sekula (1951–2013) was an artist, writer, critic and poet. After obtaining his doctorate from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) in 1974, Sekula started publishing articles in Artforum that were noted for their analysis of the social use of photography. After a short spell in the film studies department at New York University, he spent five years teaching at Ohio State University before returning to Los Angeles in 1985 and joining the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught for thirty years. The essays collected in his first work, Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984) brought about a significant change in perceptions of photography’s documentary function. His later writings, and his works, challenge and extend our perception of the effects of capitalism, globalisation, work and social class.
His long-standing interest in maritime economies and their relation to globalisation inspired an important series of photographs which were exhibited at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007). The work he began to make in the 1970s, with its combination of photographic sequences, texts, slides and sound recordings, was close to cinema in its spirit. Apart from Gala (2005), Sekula’s other creations in the field of video and cinema include Tsukiji (2001), Lottery of the Sea (2006) and, with Noël Burch, The Forgotten Space (2010), which won the special jury prize in the Orizzonti section at the Venice Mostra in 2010.

Bookstore meeting in the educational space, Thursday 22 October at 7 pm. Admission free, capacity allowing.