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Carla Liesching

Department

Academic Research Areas

  • Collaborative practice
  • Digital media
  • Installation art
  • Interdisciplinary art
  • Photography
  • Print media
  • Sculpture
  • Technology and art
  • Visual representation
  • Anti-colonial struggles in South Africa
  • Intersections of visual representation
  • Knowledge and power
  • Politics and ethics of photography

Carla 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, focusing 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, 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. She 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.

A woman with light skin

Academic Research Areas

  • Collaborative practice
  • Digital media
  • Installation art
  • Interdisciplinary art
  • Photography
  • Print media
  • Sculpture
  • Technology and art
  • Visual representation
  • Anti-colonial struggles in South Africa
  • Intersections of visual representation
  • Knowledge and power
  • Politics and ethics of photography

Publications

  • Good Hope

    Liesching, Carla. London: Mack Books, 2021.

  • On Whiteness: The Racial Imaginary Institute

    Berlant, Lauren, Sadhana Bery, Daniel Borzutsky, Jane Caflisch, Jeff Chang, Aruna D’Souza, Lori Gruen, et. al. London: SPBH Editions, 2022.

Classes

  • Introduction to Photography

    ART 2601

  • Media Art, Performance, and Sound: Intersections

    ART 2701

  • Thesis I

    ART 4003

Selected Awards, Grants, and Fellowships

  • Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award, shorlist

    2022

  • Rencontres d'Arles Prix du Livre, photo-text category, shortlist

    2022

  • Foam Talent

    Amsterdam, NL
    2022

  • Silver Eye Fellowship Winner

    Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    2022

  • Light Work Grant Winner in Photography

    Syracuse, New York
    2021

Selected Exhibitions and Presentations

  • Good Hope

    Solo exhibition, PhMuseum, Bologna, Italy, 2022.

  • Foam Talent

    Group exhibition, Foam Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and the Deutche Börse Photography Foundation, Frankfurt, Germany, 2022–23.

  • Aperture Paris Photo Book Award Touring Exhibition

    Paris, New York, Seoul, + additional locations, 2022–23.