Swiss Art Talks: Daniel Schwartz

Daniel Schwartz will present on his recent project While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey (2009–2017), which traces the artist’s journey along humanity’s troubled path of progress. Global in thrust, as have been all the artist’s projects hitherto, it is the first to make Switzerland its main focus of concern.  From the relics of Holocene glaciation in Switzerland, it leads into the milieu of the Anthropocene, to collapsing glaciers on three continents. As both photographic inquiry and awareness project, it visualizes the green Alps of the future. The biographically connoted glacier becomes a metaphor of memory.

Following his talk, Schwartz will be in conversation with Jim Quilty, journalist at the Daily Star.

This talk is organized in parallel to the Beirut Art Film Festival (BAFF). Beyond the Obvious. Daniel Schwartz. Photographer, a documentary film on the artist’s life and work, directed by Vadim Jendreyko will be screened as part of the festival on Wednesday 21 November at 21:15, at Metropolis Empire Sofil Cinema, in Ashrafieh. For information on ticketing, click here. 

Daniel Schwartz graduated from Zurich School of Arts and Craft in 1980. One of the internationally most renowned photographers of his generation, he concentrates on book projects, with exhibitions, based on extensive travels, photographic essays, and reportages. Schwartz’ photographic work defies categorization. He moves with ease and persuasiveness between the realms of culturally and historically important topographies and current conflict zones, between reportage, the photographic essay and conceptual art. Widely read and conscious of the past, Schwartz often works in places before stories break, and returns when places slip from the map. He travelled along the entire Great Wall of China (1987-1988), documented the condition humain in the Delta regions of Asia (1991-1995) and the war in Afghanistan and beyond (1998-2012).

Jim Quilty is a Beirut-based Canadian journalist and writer. For over a decade he’s written about the arts, cultural production and politics of the Middle East and North Africa. Nowadays he edits the arts and culture section of The Daily Star newspaper, Beirut’s English-language daily. He’s published work in a number of magazines, including ArtReview, FlashArt, Bidoun, Variety, Middle East Report and Middle East International, and has a number of long-form projects he’s keeping hidden from public view.