Eighth Annual Berkeley/Stanford Symposium: “The fog comes ... and then moves on”: On Transience and Translucence

Schedule

10 a.m. Arrival and Coffee

Phyllis Wattis Theater, Floor 1

10:30 a.m. Opening Remarks and Panel I

Phyllis Wattis Theater, Floor 1

Resting Museum: Priyanka D’Souza, UC Berkeley, Art Practice and Shreyasi Pathak, National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

Brain Fog in the Archives: Cybernetics through Queer-Crip temporalities

Leeroy K.Y. Kang, UC Berkeley, Film and Media

Frequencies of Darkness: Exploring the “holographic” in Sandra Mujinga’s Flo

Matthew Lopez, Columbia University, Art History and Archeology

Opaque Atmospheres: Fog in the Photography of An-My Lê

Colton Klein, Yale University, History of Art

Ecologies of Metal: Photography, Disability, and Commemoration

12:15–12:45 p.m. Lunch Break

12:45–1:45 p.m. Gallery Sessions
Each talk will be given twice; once at 12:45 p.m. (session I) and once at 1:15 p.m. (session II). Space is limited. Please RSVP for one talk per session to guarantee a spot.

Gallery Talk by Delphine Sims, Assistant Curator of Photography
Eyeing Collaboration and Community

Floor 3, elevator landing
RSVP here

Gallery Talk by Alison Guh, Curatorial Associate

Walkthrough of What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms, episode 2
Floor 4, elevator landing

RSVP here

Gallery Talk by Natalya Swanson, Assistant Objects Conservator

Assessing and weighing values in contemporary art conservation
Floor 7, elevator landing

RSVP here

1:45-2 p.m. Coffee and Tea Break

Phyllis Wattis Theater, Floor 1

2 p.m. Panel II

Phyllis Wattis Theater, Floor 1

Aleisha Barton, University of Minnesota, Art History

Hidden in Plain Sight: Psychedelic Hand Lettering as Radical Rupture

Andrei Dumitrescu, Stanford University, Art and Art History

The Clouded Vision of the God-seer: The Theophany on Mount Sinai in Pal. gr. 381

Allyson Unzicker, UC Berkeley, Film and Media

The Vapor of Melancholy: Aesthetics of Political Depression in the Films and Art of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Paulina Choh, Stanford University, German Studies

The Spectre of the Brocken, or Nature’s Magic Lantern

3:40 p.m. Keynote Presentation

Phyllis Wattis Theater, Floor 1

Professor André Dombrowski, Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th-Century European Art at the University of Pennsylvania

Softening the Edge: Fog and Capital in Impressionism

Resting Museum is an India-based artist duo of Priyanka D’Souza (she/her) and Shreyasi Pathak (they/him) using rest, queerness, and disability as methodology in art, writing, and curatorial practice to intervene in art and design history discourse and archives. They are interested in how the aesthetics of the incomplete and the performativity of the missing body in disability theory can be used in institutional and infrastructural critique. Shreyasi works as an archivist at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and Priyanka is currently pursuing her MFA at UC Berkeley. They have published and exhibited their work widely.

Brain Fog in the Archives: Cybernetics through Queer-Crip temporalities

The oft-considered originator of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), imagined a world where there was eventually no “unknown” left to discover, “only an accumulation of records that must be recombined, analyzed, and processed” — a messy contemporary version of which we might call, an archive. But Weiner maintained that forming patterns to make sense of data requires an obscurity of vision that only distance allows … or perhaps, brain fog?

This paper uses cybernetics as a model to think through, process, and curate records around cybernetics (as a keyword) in the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. Cybernetics as a subject was introduced in NID in 1966, thereby making NID a node in the social and intellectual networks it shared with design/architecture schools like the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, and Centre for Environmental Design, UC Berkeley.

But if the archive in its function as a repository for retrievable data is determined by the forward flow of linear time, how does crip+queer time disrupt and expand its possibilities? If steady linear time like a steady linear ray of light cannot pass through a (brain)fog undisturbed, diffraction — the scattering of light waves through water droplets in a fog — must be used as a methodology.

Leeroy K. Y. Kang is an independent film curator, archivist, and interdisciplinary scholar living between Oakland and Los Angeles. His work is interested in how racialized forms of embodiment are situated historically and theoretically within experimental practices across film, media, and contemporary art. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Film & Media at UC Berkeley as a Chancellor’s Fellowship recipient.

Frequencies of Darkness: Exploring the “holographic” in Sandra Mujinga’s Flo

This paper explores Sandra Mujinga’s “holographic” work titled Flo (2019) to trouble the notions of “cohesive light” and “singular frequency” attributed to the technical constitution of the hologram. Featuring a projected spectral figure hovering in the dark, Mujinga’s immersive installation is a meditation on grief, digital afterlives, and the visual politics of the Black body as rendered both hyper-visible and invisible within the historical present. By reading Mujinga’s Flo through the conceptual motifs of darkness and frequency, I argue that the work refuses the Black body to appear, or to materialize as “holos” or “whole,” but rather, acts as a type of racial phantasmagoria. Drawing from the work of Black feminist theorists in the areas of visual, media, and performance studies, the paper posits how darkness and attunements to low, iterative frequencies allow for the sensorial and spatiotemporal dimensions of Blackness to emerge beyond the holographic.

Matthew Lopez is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University. His prospective research focuses on the entangled social, environmental, and technical histories of 19th industrial architecture in Europe and North America. He holds an MDes from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a BA in comparative literature from UNC Chapel Hill. He has published on topics that include the history of temperature regulation in British textile production and the use of diagrams in medieval scholasticism and contemporary psychoanalytic theory in Thresholds and RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics.

Opaque Atmospheres: Fog in the Photography of An-My Lê

Over the course of more than three decades of practice, the Vietnamese artist An-My Lê (b. 1960) has used fog to explore the ambiguous entanglement of war, landscape, and collective memory across global contexts. Moving from the jungles of Vietnam to the deserts of Southern California, Lê’s photographic work uses different forms of atmospheric opacity (mist, dust, smoke, etc.) to reveal how the deferred past and anticipatory future of armed conflict shape the visible present. Rather than providing a distant viewer with an immediate “window” into the suffering of others, Lê’s work instead encourages us to take a reflective step back. Fog interrogates the collective imaginary of contemporary warfare, occasioning a contemplative encounter with the cultural context of armed conflict that is simultaneously critical and affective.

In centering fog, this paper argues that Lê’s work is shaped by a dialectic between clarity and opacity, with mist, dust, smoke, and other forms of environmental occlusion providing a means of scrambling “clear” images that Lê, in her interviews, has compared to precise line drawings. Refusing the transparent apprehension of subjects that range from contemporary Vietnamese landscapes to U.S. naval wargames, fog gestures critically towards a web of relations that facilitate the reenactment and perpetuation of war.

Colton Klein is a PhD student in the History of Art and a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities at Yale University, where he studies the visual culture of the United States with interests in material and environmental histories. He previously worked as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he collaborated on the exhibitions Henry Taylor: B Side, Edward Hopper’s New York, At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism, and Labyrinth of Forms: Women and Abstraction, 1930–1950, and as the project manager of the Marsden Hartley catalogue raisonné.

Ecologies of Metal: Photography, Disability, and Commemoration

In September 1887, eighteen disabled Union veterans of the American Civil War posed for a studio photograph in St. Louis, Missouri. A caption beneath the resulting albumen silver print identifies the sitters, including Ernst Timme, who lost his left arm twenty-four years earlier at the Battle of Chickamauga in Tennessee. By conceiving of this photograph first as an object and then as an image, this paper follows the medium’s matter-flow to reveal the “submerged perspectives” of its materials. An attentiveness to the photograph’s underpinning in the silver mining industry points to related ecological networks of extraction embodied in the bronze badges worn by these Union veterans. Recast from Confederate cannons captured at major battles like Chickamauga, these badges are composed of Tennessee copper cast by enslaved metalworkers into the weapons that disabled Union soldiers like Timme. Building on recent studies in the environmental humanities, this paper applies ecologies of metal to mine the photograph’s material histories of labor, violence, and disability. More urgently, this paper calls for attention to the flow of metal in response to ongoing “events of liquidation” related to the Civil War, such as the recasting of Charlottesville’s 1924 bronze monument to Robert E. Lee in October 2023.

Aleisha Barton is a doctoral candidate in the art history department at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation, “Your Eyes Are Limited’: Psychedelic Aesthetics in the Post-War Age, 1966–1970”, examines ephemera and community networks in the Bay Area. Barton’s work on process and immersive aesthetics has been widely supported, including by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation, Harvard University, the University of Minnesota, and the Henry Luce Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her professional affiliations include the Association of Historians of American Art, the Association of Print Scholars, and the College Art Association.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Psychedelic Hand Lettering as Radical Rupture

In the late 1960s, San Francisco’s emerging music scene facilitated a surge of ephemera. Promoters hired artists to advertise weekly performances, presenting a rotating opportunity to reconsider the poster as a medium. Psychedelic posters reflected the spaces they promoted — dance halls filled with a smoky haze from smoldering joints and fog machines, with projections saturating the cloudy atmosphere. Coined “hippie hieroglyphics”, some artists renounced letters altogether, tracing only the negative spaces in between. This refusal of convention opened up a new mode of reading, modeled after obscurity to elicit affect. The posters’ distortion shared a vernacular with hallucinogens and celebrated indeterminacy as a creative release.

My paper reconsiders the functional role of posters established by mainstream advertising to illustrate San Francisco’s psychedelic aesthetic as a moment of rupture, fueled by radical imagination. Bypassing clarity in favor of an integrated design is a primary facet of this horror vacui milieu that both replicated and enforced its physical surroundings. I apply notions affect theory alongside discussions of craft, particularly hand lettering’s legacy as a commercial practice, to consider how drawing unlocked the sensorial potential of the printed surface amidst the postwar media art boom, aided by mid-twentieth century notions of optics and perception.

Andrei Dumitrescu is a first-year PhD student in Art History at Stanford University, specializing in Byzantine and Medieval Art. He holds an MA in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies from Central European University in Vienna. His research explores the visual and religious cultures of the Late Byzantine period (ca. 1204–1453), focusing on the role of wall paintings in shaping the liturgical experience of sacred space. Andrei’s interdisciplinary work bridges not only pictorial and literary sources, with a special interest in the performative genres of rhetoric and hymnography, but also the Greek, Slavonic, and Latin spheres of medieval Christendom.

The Clouded Vision of the God-seer: The Theophany on Mount Sinai in Pal. gr. 381

This paper explores the symbolic inflections of the “dark cloud” (nephelē gnophōdēs) as a visual medium of theophany and a metaphor for the divine glory revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, focusing on a Late Byzantine Psalter produced around 1300 (Vatican Library, Pal. gr. 381, pt. B). The manuscript contains a pair of full-page miniatures displaying symmetrical depictions of Moses’ first and second encounter with God (f. 171v–172r). The scenes are set against a luminous orange-pink background veiled by a translucent gray mist whose crackling texture radiates white flashes.

This unprecedented element, I argue, evokes the supernatural cloud that engulfed Mount Sinai when the prophet ascended to receive the Law. Byzantine exegetic tradition describes the cloud as celestial darkness (gnophos) that obscured Moses’ bodily sight but opened his mind’s eye, granting him mystical knowledge (gnōsis) of the divine. The cloud in the Vatican Psalter frames a symbolic progression between two antithetic modes of visualizing the Godhead. In the first scene, the presence of divinity is merely signified through a disembodied hand stretching down from the arc of heaven. The second composition, however, places Moses before an iconic figure of Christ, anticipating the completion of prophetic visions through God’s Incarnation.

Allyson Unzicker is an art and film curator currently pursuing a PhD in the Film & Media Department at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on decolonial aesthetics and the affective structures of fatigue and political depression in film and multimedia installations. She has held various curatorial positions at museums and institutions including the University Art Galleries, UC Irvine, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center for The Getty Center’s Pacific Standard Time Initiative, the Vincent Price Art Museum, and Frank Lloyd Wright Hollyhock House. She has contributed catalogue essays for UC Irvine, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

The Vapor of Melancholy: Aesthetics of Political Depression in the Films and Art of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

This paper analyzes the film Syndromes and a Century (2006) within Apichatpong’s (b.1970, Bangkok) larger filmic and artistic practice, as an intimate portrait of rural Thailand on the brink of rapid modernization all within the political and economic tensions of a country on the verge of a coup. Considering scholar Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism in tandem with political depression, this paper thinks through depression not as a pathology to be solved, but as a socio-political condition, an unseen force, at the center of political unrest between the urban-rural divide in Thailand. In this context, political depression is explored as a state of ongoing mourning and loss as the affectual structure for the “post” colonial condition of Apichatpong’s oeuvre, one that is constructed through the forces of censorship, loss of culture, land, and agency both on and offscreen. The recurring appearance of vapors in his work visualizes modes of temporal multiplicity, refraction, and boundaries that exist beyond merely allegorical interpretation as they are produced through the affective and often immaterial relations of reciprocity. In this way, Apichatpong’s works guide us towards thinking beyond individualism as produced through modernity and capitalism, a “syndrome” of the last century.

Paulina Choh is a doctoral candidate in the German department at Stanford who is interested in the intersection of art, literature, and theory. Her research is engaged with questions regarding visibility and immateriality, centered around the modern period but drawing inspiration from the pre-modern as well. She has a PhD minor in art history, works with photographers such as Michael Jang, and practices photography herself. Before coming to Stanford, she was at the Walther Collection in New York City and studied at Middlebury College, the University of Mainz, and Lincoln College at Oxford.

The Spectre of the Brocken, or Nature’s Magic Lantern

From Adalbert von Chamisso’s spiritual allegory to Ernst Gombrich’s overview of painting, shadows have guaranteed the subject’s integrity. But the optical phenomenon of the Brockengespenst or Spectre of the Brocken, where one’s shadow is projected in colossal proportions onto a wall of fog perpendicular to the sun, uneasily haunts travel accounts and scientific papers of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries.

This paper examines the aesthetic conditions of the phenomenon by comparing it to the popular devices of the magic lantern and panorama. It argues that a culture of spectacle combining pleasure and education was necessary to render the Brockengespenst a recognizable optical experience. Consisting of fog and shadow, the uniquely elemental medium of the Brockengespenst belongs in the art historical narrative stretching from the silhouette in Pliny the Elder’s origin myth of painting to early cinema. Yet, it also presented a troubled relationship to other media, defying capture by camera for instance. This modern spectre produced a secondary, epistemological fog, wherein fears of the Doppelgänger and reliability of perception lurked. Known in California legends as the “Dark Watchers,” the Brockengespenst asks us to imagine our shadows with lives of their own. What happens when the fog looks back at us?

Dr. Delphine Sims is an Assistant Curator in the Department of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She completed her PhD in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley (2023). She has held fellowships and positions at several museums including the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Eyeing Collaboration and Community

Discussing a selection of photographs from SFMOMA’s current exhibition Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, this walk through the galleries will focus on Muholi’s relationship to the people they photograph. Muholi never refers to these individuals as subjects, but rather describes them as collaborators. Muholi emphasizes their participation in the act of making the photograph, which allows for an intimate and vulnerable interplay between the photographer and their community. The resulting photographs are a tender exploration of their collective experiences and relationships in moments of solace and visibility beyond and amidst the violence and erasure of homophobic and transphobic realities in South Africa.

Alison Guh is the Curatorial Associate of Contemporary Art at SFMOMA, where she has contributed to exhibitions including New Work: Mary Lovelace O’Neal, What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms, Pacita Abad, and New Work: Toyin Ojih Odutola. She received an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art from Columbia University and an AB in Art History and Psychology from Dartmouth College, and has previously held positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Hood Museum of Art.

Walkthrough of What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms, episode 2

What Matters brings together contemporary works from across the museum’s collection that propose celebration, mourning, and transcendence. The second iteration of this multi-episodic exhibition includes recently acquired works by Patty Chang, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Sky Hopinka, Deana Lawson, Minouk Lim, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Oscar Murillo alongside those by Matthew Barney, Walter Hood, Byron Kim, Yoko Ono, and Ebony G. Patterson that remain on view from the first episode. This walkthrough will trace themes of healing, ritual, and self-determination as they manifest throughout the exhibition and provide insight into SFMOMA’s practices around collecting, exhibiting, and activating artworks.

Natalya Swanson (she/they) is the Assistant Objects Conservator at the San Fracisco Museum of Modern Art. Her work at the museum includes all stages of care and actions across the preservation to restoration spectrum for three-dimensional objects including sculpture, furniture, installations, and variable media. In conjunction with her role as a museum conservator, Natalya is an educator and community organizer. She frequently lectures and publishes on topics ranging from documentation and communication strategies to ethical decision making in the context of contemporary social practices.

Assessing and weighing values in contemporary art conservation

The preservation of material heritage is carried out by a network of actors who oversee objects at all stages of their biography. Conservators who care for historical collections often ground their advocacy for objects’ physical needs, but in contemporary art spaces, physicality is not always paramount, and the role of a conservator shifts to accommodate the needs of artists, community members, and staff in addition to the physical objects in their care. When making decisions, conservators grapple with open-ended and increasingly complex questions, like, “How do we determine preservation goals for works that are unfixed or intended to change?”, “What does it mean to assess risk in increasingly uncertain environmental conditions?”, and “How should the perspective of living artists affect the active development of care strategies?” This talk will provide insight into SFMOMA’s conservation practices, focusing on projects that embody foggy/nebulous attributes. It will take place in the museum’s Floor 7 conservation studio.

André Dombrowski is the Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Associate Professor of 19th Century European Art in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (University of California Press, 2013), winner of the Phillips Book Prize — a book about the artist’s strange early work, marked by themes of violence and fraught domesticity. His second monograph, Monet’s Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialization of Time, appeared with Yale University Press in November 2023. The book locates the rise of the Impressionist instant in the period’s innovative time-technologies and forms of time-management. Dombrowski has written many essays, including on such influential figures as Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Caillebotte, and Menzel, among other artists.

Softening the Edge: Fog and Capital in Impressionism

This talk will consider some of Claude Monet’s foggiest paintings, many of them done in the mid-1890s, a few years before his trips to London. In particular, we will focus on his series of Mornings on the Seine that depict the gradual lifting of fog over the site where the Epte river flows into the Seine, close to his Giverny estate. How and why did Monet begin to concentrate on the depiction of foggy landscapes, with wholly new pictorial effects of opacity and translucency, making hazy paintings that leveled and wiped the Impressionist surface and are often called among his most abstract pictures? Instead of seeing this rise of abstraction as an outgrowth of Symbolism, this talk will propose that Monet crafted, in both his themes of fog and techniques of smooth layering, a sensitive response to the standardization and the making uniform — and thus the growing abstract qualities — of modern time, space, and capital themselves.