Carla Liesching: Mythmaking Machines

Abstract

Carla Liesching will share her image-text assemblages that confront colonial legacies and mythologies. She will weave together personal anecdotes, research, speculation, theory, and performance to reflect on the central questions animating her work: How does photography shape our ideologies and practices? How do images create concrete conditions? How can artists disrupt power?

Biography

Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking, and design. Grounded in experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, she considers the intersections of representation, knowledge, and power, with a focus on enduring constructions of race and geography. In resistance to dominant forms of knowledge production, Liesching's practice reveals ways of knowing that are fragmented, contested, contingent, subjective, and in constant negotiation. She is the author of Good Hope (Mack, 2022), a hybrid image-text memoir chronicling centuries of empire and struggle that was shortlisted for the Aperture Paris-Photo First Book Award and the Arles Prix du Livre in the Photo-Text Category. She contributed to On Whiteness: The Racial Imaginary Institute (SPBH Editions, 2022) as part of a collective of artists, writers, and activists committed to examining whiteness as a dangerous ideology that has been intentionally positioned as neutral.

Liesching has installed exhibitions and public works both domestically and internationally, most recently at the PhMuseum in Bologna (2024), the Deutsche Börse Foundation in Frankfurt (2023), and the Foam Museum in Amsterdam (2022). Liesching lives between South Africa and Ithaca, NY, where she works as a Visiting Critic in the Department of Art at Cornell University, as a Lecturer in the Department of Art at Ithaca College, as faculty at the International Center of Photography, and as coordinator of the School of Criticism and Theory. As part of her socially engaged practice, Liesching is also a youth educator focused on image-making, visual literacy, and self-publishing as vehicles for expression and empowerment. She is a contributing editor of PUZZAZZ Mag and Chief Editor of the Book Arts Review, published by the Center for Book Arts in New York City.