In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, Sasha welcomes two extraordinary guests: artist and curator Justine Kurland and Marina Chao, a curator at CPW. Together, they discuss their collaboration on The Rose, an exhibition that explores collage as a feminist form, strategy, and genealogy. Featuring works by over fifty contemporary artists and key figures from the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition examines collage as both a means of world-building and a survival strategy in times of crisis. Sasha, Justine, and Marina delve into the layered responsibilities of artists and discuss the assumption that interpreting a straightforward photograph is inherently simpler than reading and interpreting conceptual art.

Justine Kurland is an artist known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her early work comprises photographs, taken during many cross-country road trips, that counter the masculinist mythology of the American landscape, offering a radical female imaginary in its place. Her recent series of collages, SCUMB Manifesto, continues to make space for women by transforming books by canonized male photographers through destruction and reparation.

Kurland’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and abroad. Her work is included in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum, Pennsylvania; Getty Museum, California; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, among others. She works with Higher Pictures in New York.

Marina Chao has previously held curatorial positions at the International Center of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As assistant curator at ICP she organized the exhibition Multiply, Identify, Her (2018) and contributed to the publication Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture and ICP, 2018). She was awarded a 2019 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for Seeing Meaning, a project exploring the intersections of image, language, and technology.

Justine Kurland | Marina Chao - Episode 94

PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf | Conversations on Photography