Sean Snyder | Disobedience in Byelorussia

“I have often placed myself in precarious situations in order to access information and images for my work. I have been thrown out of places, been arrested, had cameras confiscated, have faked journalist credentials, paid bribes, and so on. A compulsion? A ‘research-based art practice’? Well, more the former, supported by the notion of the latter.” US artist Sean Snyder (* 1972) investigates in his work the technological and institutional conditions of Modernist and contemporary visual cultures: how images are created, put into circulation and withdrawn from the public view, how the production of visual documents is structured, stimulated and suppressed, discursively and politically, how visual propaganda is organised. Earlier this year, Snyder exhibited four video and photo installations in the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. On analytical display were a cultural film from a Soviet-Ukrainian archive, footage shot during the soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a video about the current blurring of the boundaries between professional and amateur photo journalism in Iraq and Afghanistan and a reflection on the digitization of his own archive. Snyder prominently partakes in a younger, research-based art practice and will continue in his talk a “self-interrogation on ‘research-based art’” that he started recently with an article in e-flux journal ( http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/57 ), speaking about how artistic research may be considered as a methodology and a problematic.