Mitra Abbaspour- Visiting Artist Lecture #3

Mitra Abbaspour did a lecture in Callicott, She is a curator for the Museum of Modern Art in NY. The lecture was titled, In the Studio: Photography, Modernity, and the Middle East. I guess I did not realize that this was not going to be about artwork that she made because she is not an artist, but an art historian. Her presentation was very boring and hard to follow. She basically read some sort of thesis while stumbling over her words and not keeping up with her slides. I followed her a little bit at the beginning. She was speaking about how important it was to stay with current events of the Middle East and how there are gaps between documentation and narratives. She went over some images starting at 1845 that were the first documentations of people and buildings through photography. Around that time is when I got lost in what she was speaking about. It was difficult for me to get back into what she was saying. I felt bad for her because I could not tell if she was nervous or just not rehearsed. It made me not want to see another lecture from a curator or an art historian. I just felt like she was reading a paper that I had no interest in to begin with. If she had a better way to go about her reading by showing the images and stopping to explain them before continuing on with what she was reading then I may have enjoyed it a little more.