Carla Liesching

Carla Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking and design. Grounded in experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, her practice considers the intersections of representation, knowledge and power, with a focus on colonial histories and enduring constructions of race and geography. A central concern in her research is photography’s role in the building of social, political and ideological systems, and she uses photographic archives as sites of investigation and intervention. Carla’s current project, Good Hope, was released as a full-length book of image and text by London-based publisher Mack in November 2021, and was recently shortlisted for the Arles 2022 Prix du Livre in the Photo-Text Category. An excerpt adapted from Good Hope is also featured in a forthcoming publication, On Whiteness: The Racial Imaginary Institute, by SPBH Editions. Carla was a 2021 winner of the Open Walls Arles competition presented by The British Journal of Photography, and exhibited work during both the 2021 and 2022 Rencontres d’Arles Festival. She is a 2021 Light Work Grant recipient and is the 2022 recipient of the Silver Eye Fellowship, culminating in a photo-sculptural installation at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, USA. Carla was recently named a 2022 Foam Talent and awarded publication in Foam Magazine’s Talent issue, along with upcoming exhibitions at Foam Museum in Amsterdam and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Frankfurt. Carla is currently based between South Africa and New York, where she works as faculty at the International Center of Photography and coordinates the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University. As part of her socially engaged practice, Carla is also a youth educator focused on photography, visual literacy and self-publishing as vehicles for expression and empowerment. She has worked intermittently as a visiting lecturer at the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg, as a guest critic in the Image Text Ithaca MFA program at Ithaca College, as a visiting artist at Falmouth University in England, and she will be presenting as a guest lecturer at the inaugural Word and Image Workshop hosted by The Photocaptionist in late 2022.



Photo: Ports Bishop