People

Susana Medina

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:05:26 +0100

Susana Medina writes both in Spanish, her native language, and English. She is the author of Cuentos Rojos/Red Tales published by Araña Editorial) which includes The Max Aub International Short Story Prize; the acclaimed poetry collection Souvenirs from the Accident and Philosophical Toys, her first novel in English - an offspring from which are the highly praised short films Buñuel's Philosophical Toys (24 mins), shown internationally, as well as Leather-bound Stories (co-directed with Derek Ogbourne, 30 mins), recently shown at The Freud Museum. She is currently writing Spinning Days of Night, which has been awarded a substantial Arts Council Writing Grant.

Medina has published a number of essays on literature, art, cinema and photography, curated various well received international art shows, written art catalogues, exhibited at Tate Modern and collaborated with artists. Her PhD thesis, Borgesland, A voyage through the infinite, imaginary places, labyrinths, Buenos Aires and other psychogeographies and figments of space, explores imaginary spaces in the oeuvre of Jorge Luis Borges. She teaches at the Open University.

Kristina Hoge

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:42:01 +0100

Stefanie Boos

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:43:19 +0100

Stefanie runs Galerie Kunst2 in Heidelberg and sort out potential spaces in Heidelberg to show the MoO. In the end it was decided that the Kurpfälzisches Museum der Stadt Heidelberg (Palatinate Museum of the City of Heidelberg) was the most suitable venue for the Museum of Optography, Stefanie’s great enthusiasm and energy along with Kristina Hoge’s made for a successful show.

Alexandra Veith

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:45:49 +0100

One day I found myself in a library office somewhere in the University of Heidelberg, I met Alexandra and, as she has pointed out, one in a short line of optography related Alex’s. She has been an enthusiastic accomplice with me regarding research on the history of optography and without her inside access and keen detective instinct, the MoO wouldn’t be quite what it is today.

Jan Woolf

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:46:41 +0100

Jan Woolf's new book, Fugues on a Funny Bone (muswell-press.co.uk) draws from her varied day jobs as teacher of 'troubled' children, events producer, fund raiser and film censor. It also reflects her engagement with political activism and collaborations with visual artists; Fugues contains images of sculptures by Richard Niman. Jan held the first Harold Pinter writers residency at the Hackney Empire (2009 - 10) where her first play Porn Crackers was produced. Her creative writing teaching includes Circle of Misse (France) and various Arts Award projects with teenagers. She is working on her second book.

Jan’s website: http://www.janwoolf.com/

Brigitte Schenk

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 00:46:12 +0100

Brigitte Schenk gave me the opportunity to show my first Museum of Optography in 2007 and was generous in paying for my first, rather primitive catalogue, The Shutter of Death, Museum of Optography.

Neil Handley

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 00:45:04 +0100

Neil Handley is the current Curator of the BOA Museum and the first full-time museum professional to hold the post. He joined the College in August 1998, the year after its move to 42 Craven Street and inherited a museum in boxes with only a minimal number of items (almost exclusively pictorial) on display. Appointed originally as 'Museum Documentation Assistant' he ran the BOA Museum Documentation Project which produced the first full inventory of the collection since 1932. In 2000 he was appointed 'Curator' and went on to open the first display of the museum for six years (in the Sutcliffe Room, November 2003). He was also responsible, with Carol Hayward, for setting up the Museum's first website after the College site was brought in-house in 1999, having previously been hosted on its behalf by the University of Bradford. The 'MusEYEum' a virtual museum website-within-a-website was established at Neil's instigation in 2003 and has now been fully integrated into this website.

Neil worked previously at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester on a project to plan the future for museum-quality collections within the various scientific and medical departments. The collections in the Stopford Building included some spectacles! Prior to this he was Exhibition Officer at the John Rylands Library. He also worked for shorter spells at other museums in Manchester, Salford and the Isle of Man as well as for an interactive exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, just a few hundred yards from Craven Street.
Neil was awarded the Associateship of the Museums Association in 2002 and was one of the first 17 museum professionals in the country to gain the AMA+ qualification in May 2007. He now serves as a Museums Association Mentor for younger curators.
The Curator is available for lectures and informal talks off-site as well as guided tours of the museum gallery and College Meeting Rooms. Considered to be an authority on ophthalmic history he can also advise on items on optical and optometric heritage including their identification and dating.
Neil has recently written a great book entitled 'Cult Eyewear' published by Merrell, here is the link to it:

Nikola Suica

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 00:45:32 +0100

Nikola Šuica is the Associate Professor of Art History at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. He graduated and finished his masters degree in Art History at the Art History department at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. He is actively working as an art critic. His recent published texts include "Beyond Cynical Reasoning - Encompassing the Contemporary Arts in Serbia" in Res, no.3, Dirimart, Istambul, 2009; "Logos of the media age (the phenomenon: the relation between the photography and motion picture) in Remont Art Magazine, no. 16-17, Belgrade 2007.

Ali Hossaini

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:44:47 +0100

Ali Hossaini is an executive, philosopher and artist who works at the cutting edge of media. Having collaborated with talent ranging from Robert Wilson to Brad Pitt, his personal work and his productions have been exhibited in museums, galleries and festivals internationally, winning acclaim from The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Cool Hunting and many other outlets. He has been involved in the launch of several television channels, including LAB HD, the only TV channel devoted to video art, Equator HD, Gallery HD, Oxygen, TechTV, NOW and LinkTV. He is currently proprietor of Pantar, a consultancy that specializes in business strategy and talent?driven productions of artistic merit. In 2010 he focused on 3D video projects, and he created the Enterprise & Innovation Hub, a revenue generating initiative for FACT, a Liverpool based arts organization. Hossaini’s productions include the Voom Portraits, which includes performances by Johnny Depp, Salma Hayek, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey, Jr, Princess Caroline of Monaco, Sean Penn and other cultural icons. He has produced numerous documentaries and factual television series relating to travel, natural history, culture and sustainable living. In 2008 he produced Self Portrait, a short film by Dennis Hopper. The American Museum of the Moving Image maintains a permanent exhibit devoted to LAB HD. Other productions have been exhibited at the Lincoln Center, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Montreal Festival of Film on Art, PS1/MoMA, The Hackney Empire, SF Cinemateque, Pacific Film Archives, the Beijing Borderlines Festival, Couvent des Cordeliers and many other international venues. His production of Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30 appeared in the 2006 Whitney Media, Hossaini developed numerous initiatives related to programming and social networking. At TechTV, he launched Chat Day!, the first application to merge chat, webcams and live TV in a virtual environment. Hossaini is a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the National Association of Television Program Executives. He serves on the Board of Advisors for Anthology Film Archives, White Box and the Pacifica Vanuatu Foundation. He is an Associate of FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, where he serves in a development role. He regularly speaks at conferences in the United States and Europe. In the 1990s he was a regular guest on The Site, an award?winning MSNBC newsmagazine. Hossaini recently completed a manuscript, Vision of the Gods: How optics shaped history, and he contributed three entries to the Encyclopedia of Photography, published by Routledge in 2005. His writing has appeared in Open Democracy (UK), The Village Voice, New York Newsday, Maclean’s Magazine (Canada), Logos Journal, The Nation, Al?Ahram Weekly (Egypt), and Verlag Spotlight (Germany). He is anthologized in the textbooks Passages and Considering Cultural Difference, and his essays on photography are frequently included in college coursebooks. While working as an acquisitions editor at the University of Texas Press, Hossaini published one of the first electronic books in conjunction with the Coalition for Networked Information. He also developed Surrealist Women, an anthology of suppressed female artists, and he successfully funded the Texas History Series. As a graduate student Hossaini was awarded fellowships for poetry, photography and philosophy. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994. His dissertation, Archaeology of the Photograph, traces the history of geometric optics from Sumer to the Classical Era.

Phew!!!

Olly Beck

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:43:53 +0100

Using ambivalent figuration and what I see as a kind of somnambulist formalism, my painting uses recurring motifs chosen deliberately for their hallucinogenic and abject connotations. Through the treatment of these motifs with lush swathes of peculiarly coloured paint, as well as the use of different levels of surface (things cut under, texture leaking on top, lines and ciphers of flight/stratification) they become mutated and ambiguous in terms of what they normally signify.

These works are an ongoing exercise in re-examining painting’s iconographic/iconoclastic heritage and obliquely reference a wide ranging lineage: from Grünewald and El Greco, through to Van Gogh, Malevich and Baselitz as well as writers such as JG Ballard and Henri Michaux.

Following this tradition of what one might call a tradition of disfiguring and dissemblance, my intention is that they echo in someway contemporary life's implosion of meaning from a theatrical and semiological perspective.

Sibylle Scholtz

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:20:35 +0100

Sibylle is owner of the newly founded Rampensau&Ferkel-Verlag (www.rufverlag.de) which will be specialised in publishing books and audio books on history of medicine. Sibylle did her PhD at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in the history of ophthalmology. When pursuing her research she came across Derek and his Museum of Optography as the history of optography is one of her major fields of interest.

Paul Sakoilsky

Thu, 4 Aug 2011 17:39:32 +0100

Paul is an artist and friend. Over the years we have collaborated on a number of art projects together.
Paul’s tattoo art work ‘Piece of Work’ appears in my encyclopedia along with a spontaneous interview he did with me.

Richard Niman

Wed, 3 Aug 2011 19:31:56 +0100

Born 1932 in Middlesborough, England
 “I frequently work with dolls, mannequins, shop window installations and other readymades. I regard such objects in their original state as aesthetically dead. I have always tried to administer some sort of surprise or shock to the viewer, but in order to do this I have tried to being the dolls to life. This I do by transforming them – by decontextualising, stripping them of certain things and bringing in other parts of other objects that don’t normally fit with them. I believe my function is to make the incredible believable”.