on Sussex Drive...

These two images are in my collection. I put them together because...they were taken on Sussex Drive (not in the same date though). These images have nothing to do with Sandy Hill, where I went to work yesterday and today. They are chosen because of ... what I dreamt lastnight. An weird but interesting dream... I met and had some discussions with Trinh T Minh-ha. Ididn't read her books recently either. The day before yesterday I saw her name as one of the keynote speakers in AHH anual conference on CONTESTATIONS http://aah.org.uk/conference/index.php

...The theme for the 33rd Annual Conference has been motivated by the specific ‘post-conflict’ situation of Northern Ireland. Belfast, for instance, is a city in which both material traces and representations of competing historical formations are strikingly evident in everyday life. At a global level, contestation defines the present situation in which manifold interests, intentions and investments clash and grapple with each other. Art historians, artists, theorists, cultural and media analysts are invited to think about the idea of contestation: How do we experience it? What are its processes? How do we understand it in our various areas of activity?

No, actually I paid more attention to one of the sections which will be about photography:

The aim of this session is to examine a recurrent question in the recent literature on the place of the photographic medium in contemporary art. It concerns the multiformity of the use and ways the photograph manifests itself in diverse artistic practices today. Central to the debate is the question whether photography has a hybrid character because it can be part of entirely different multimedia/mixed media works of art, such as the combination of photographs and text, photography in painting, slides in video installations, digital photographs in computer art, photographs in installation art, etc. Or does the photo-image nowadays mainly serve as a useful tool to make a renewed kind of ‘tableaux’, often marked by a rather noncommittal and ‘poetic’ visual imagery? When photographic practices actively aim at raising a critical debate on the internal workings of the artistic system itself or on broader social problems, is the photograph then able to distinguish itself from a merely ‘political’ statement or a pamphlet? Does this ambiguity make photography a pre-eminently suitable tool for an artist in an ‘Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Krauss, 1999)’? Can we define the medium specificity or ontology of photography, or is its singularity contestable?

I like the fact that these questions are not new and have been asking all the time. Do we need conferences with brandy new questions? May be we do or I don' t know. It depends on how the questions will be asked?

Still, all of these have anything to do with my dream lastnight in which I had some chats with Trinh T Minh-ha, filmmaker, writer, composer, cultural critic, proferssor of Women Studies and Rhetoric?

Why it was Trinh T Minh-ha? Did I chat with her in English? Yes as much as I remember...I chatted with her in English when we both looked at a picture of a woman who has an 'Asian' face...