This panel brings together two mixed-media artists whose practices play with photography’s ambivalent status between fact and fiction to speculate on imagined events from the past. As a child, Laura Chen was always fascinated with investigating and solving crimes. This passion finds full expression in Being Framed, a multi-layered project that plays within a narrative of imagined crimes investigated by a protagonist police detective in the 1970’s. Interweaving staged photography, collage, ransom letters, newspaper clippings and faked archival documents, the artists explores themes of speculative documentary, criminology, psychology, parafiction and the medium of photography itself. Chen will be joined by Duncan Poulton, whose immersive installation Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow takes viewers back to the year 2000 and invites them to image an alternative scenario in which the Millennium Bug did cause global digital meltdown. Made exclusively with found materials, his work addresses a visual culture of overabundance and ambivalence, exploring the compression of histories and meaning engendered by the internet. 

The talk will be chaired by Ravi Ghosh, Deputy Editor of the British Journal of Photography.

Laura Chen’s Being Framed will be on display in Copeland Gallery 17th-26th May

Duncan Poulton’s Imagine What We Can Do Tomorrow will be exhibited in Unit 8, Copeland Park between 17th-19th May.

Book your ticket here.