Screen Cultures / Photography

Join us for the second event in Screen Cultures, a new forum exploring the evolving forms and futures of the screen.  

This session explores the photograph as and through the screen. Since photography's origins in the 19th century, the flat surface of the screen has served as a crucial support for the imprinting and projecting of images, both still and moving. The material properties of the screen allowed photographic images to be not only seen, but also held and circulated between hands and places.  In our contemporary media environment, however, this type of photographic screen seems to be giving way to another - the screen not as a surface to project/print images on, but rather a portal through which we access a virtual panoply of images. 

Screen Cultures is convened by Nick Croggon, Andrew Sully and Will Mu, and is part of the 2025 SACE Research Event Series, with support from the Power Institute.

People

Yvette Hamilton

Dr Yvette Hamilton is an Australian interdisciplinary artist and academic of Mauritian descent. She is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and has been a practising artist for more than fifteen years. Her research and expanded practice probe the limits and expectations of representation within photography, exploring the ontological paradoxes inherent in the medium. This inquiry is underpinned by sustained material experimentation with photographic processes—past, present, and potential futures—and a commitment to sustainable, collaborative practice. Awarded the 2024 Art Association of Australia and New Zealand PhD Prize (Practice-led), Hamilton investigates photography’s thresholds of appearance, disappearance, and re-imagination across artistic, scientific, and philosophical contexts. Her outputs span peer-reviewed publications, interdisciplinary collaborations, and a substantial record of nationally and internationally recognised exhibitions. 

Antares Wells

Antares Wells is a curator and writer with a specialisation in photography. She is Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, where she works across exhibitions, commissions and publications. Previously, she was Curator at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Her curatorial and research interests are consciously broad, spanning nineteenth-century photographic practices through to international contemporary photography, film, archive-based practices, and installation. Antares has presented research in photography at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; University of California at Riverside; Concordia University, Montréal; and University of St Andrews, and is the recipient of awards from the University of Virginia, the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the Lucie Foundation, New York. 

Jennifer Yang

Jennifer Yang is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Sydney researching the (re)production and circulation of painted photographs across British and Dutch occupied Southeast Asia. Her writing has been published in journals including Southeast of Now and Trans Asia Photography as well as Australian and international arts publications including Asia Art Archive’s Like a Fever, Art Asia Pacific, and Artguide. Jennifer has also curated exhibitions which include Our Grandfather Road (2022) at 16 albermarle project space, Sydney and Everything We Inherit (2024) at ISA Art Gallery, Jakarta.