Nostalgic Technologies

By Svetlana Boym

PRESS RELEASE

The Center for Government and International Studies Art Committee at Harvard University, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the Provost for the Arts Office will host an opening reception for the exhibition Nostalgic Technologies by Svetlana Boym on Wednesday, February 21.

The opening will take place at the Transit Gallery (1730 Cambridge St, CGIS South Building, Concourse Level, Cambridge, MA 02138) at 6 pm (artist talk and reception to follow). The exhibition, which will run until April 10, 2007, has been curated by José Falconi, Art Forum Curator at DRCLAS, Harvard University.

A culmination of a five-year project that developed along with Boym's main scholarly work, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), this Nostalgic Technologies features "Cities in Transit" and "Instant Allegories," hand-made prints with unrepeatable smudges, the traces of violated printing instructions, the "Images without Black," shadow boxes composing an uncanny family album, hybrid utopias and 16-second "multiburst" video projections of "Airport Ruins," "Not Working," and "Touching Writing."

Traveling with a camera, through the ruins of modern architecture from Sarajevo and St. Petersburg to Los Angeles and Detroit, Svetlana Boym stages her radical off-modern experiments between technology and nostalgia, between homesickness and sickness of home. She is a collector of accidents, technological blunders, and printing errors. For her the error has an aura.
 
Methodical with these errors, and a scholar of such devices, Boym uses them to call attention to the almost paradoxical nature of the technological jump within the photographic medium. Her images stare back, interrogating us with all their face value: Do these mistakes make us realize that we long for the real? Or better: do the pitfalls of digital photography make us nostalgic for a lost real in the same way we feel nostalgic for our lost home?

Svetlana Boym is a writer, theorist, and media artist. Her books include The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Common Places (1994), Kosmos: Remembrances of the Future (with Adam Bartos 2002), Death in Quotation Marks (1991) and the novel Ninochka (2003). Boym always tries to pursue parallel paths of scholarly and creative work, hoping that they intersect.

Recently Svetlana Boym lectured and showed her work at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Freud Museum in Vienna, ZKM Karlsruhe, Frieze Art Fair in London, Ljubljana City Museum, The Kitchen, NYC, the Temple Hoyne Buell Architecture Center of Columbia University, and at Stanford University. In the fall of 2006, her media art exhibit opened in Ljubljana Factory Rog Art Space during the City of Women Festival. At the same time she curated the exhibit "Territories of Terror: Memories and Mythologies of Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art" at the Boston University Art Gallery. Her work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Representations, Public Culture, Harvard Design Magazine, Poetics Today, Critical Inquiry, Artforum, Artefact and Artmargins, and on the cover of PMLA (Winter 2005).

Svetlana Boym is the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University and an associate of Harvard Graduate School of Design. A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, she now lives and works in Cambridge, USA.


For more information on the show please visit our website at:

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Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Harvard University
1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor, Suite 301B
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617.495.4037
Fax: 617.495.8319
http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu