*/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:
www.svetlanaboym.com
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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