Please join us for the 2024 Ruth K. Franklin Lecture on the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, featuring Dr. Ileana L. Selejan. Dr. Selejan will be presenting “Recursive Archive: Haunting and the Return of the Image in Latin America,” followed by a conversation with artist Enrique Chagoya, Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford. This program is presented in conjunction with Más Allá: Beyond Here: The Judy and Sidney Zuber Collection of Latin American Photography, on view through January 28, 2024.

Latin America has historically been portrayed as an exuberant tropical landscape, against which countless military coups and revolutions have unfolded—a “reality” that continues to reverberate photographically. Yet this image can be flipped, reversed, refracted, its underlying politics exposed. In this talk, Dr. Ileana L. Selejan discusses the complex ways that photographs gain political significance, often retroactively. Dr. Selejan considers the social and political lives of images, and the multiple interpretations that unfold at different points in time.

Dr. Selejan will speak about Nicaragua and the fundamental role that documentary photography had in shaping political identities and ideas around citizenship in the aftermath of the Sandinista revolution. Highlighting the resurgence of revolutionary images and tropes within the context of the 2018 student rebellion, Dr. Selejan contemplates the long-term impact of photography and the political dynamics it sets into play intergenerationally. Parallel to the Nicaraguan case, Dr. Selejan will be discussing examples from Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, and the broader Latin American context, where photography has been central to processes of remembering while contributing, at the same time, to the imagining of alternative political futures.

Dr. Ileana L. Selejan is a writer, researcher and curator, currently Lecturer in Art History, Culture and Society at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. A member of the PhotoDemos research collective and of the experimental arts collective kinema ikon, she has held curatorial, research and teaching positions at various institutions including the Department of Anthropology at University College London, the Decolonising Arts Institute, University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins, The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts and the Parsons School of Design.

All public programs at the Cantor Arts Center are always free! Space for this program is limited; advance registration is recommended. Those who have registered will have priority for seating. RSVP here.

We gratefully acknowledge support from the Ruth K. Franklin Lecture and Symposium Fund.

Image: Keystone View Company, "A Nicaragua Paradise, C.A." (c.1902). Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.  

Accessibility Information or Requests

Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is committed to ensuring our programs are accessible to everyone. To request access information and/or accommodations for this event, please complete this form at least one week prior to the event: museum.stanford.edu/access.

For questions, please contact disability.access@stanford.edu or Kwang-Mi Ro, kwangmi8@stanford.edu, (650) 723-3469.

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