Ian Wiblin
20082018

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Teaching interests

Theory and history of photography, and of photography considered in relation to, and in combination with, film and video. Critical approaches to practice, regarding still photography, installation, film and video.

Research interests

Ian Wiblin studied at the London College of Printing under the experimental filmmaker and graphic designer, Stephen Dwoskin, with whom he also worked as art director and camera operator.

Wiblin's internationally exhibited work in photography and video investigates place, history and memory. Wrocław, his first exhibited body of photographic work (The Photographers' Gallery, London, 1990) responded to the legacy of the German past visible in this Polish city(formerly Breslau). Recovered Territory (The New Art Gallery Walsall, 2007), was a photographic revisiting of Wrocław concerned with the 'recovery' of place and its history through memory. Wiblin was, in 1995, Kettle’s Yard Artist in Residence at the University of Cambridge. The resulting exhibition and book, Night Watch (Kettle's Yard Gallery / Arts Council of England, 1996) comprised a series of black and white photographs that placed the mediaeval institution of the university back into the darkness of the surrounding landscape. In 2020, Night Watch was shown in exhibition at Sprengel Museum (of modern art) Hanover, Germany. 

Wiblin's feature-length collaborative film works with Anthea Kennedy, shot in Trieste and Berlin, experiment with the representation of place and architecture in relation to real or imagined histories. These films, Stella Polare (2006), The View from Our House (2013) and Four Parts of a Folding Screen (2018), have all been premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam and screened internationally at other festivals. Four Parts of a Folding Screen (2018), partly based on archive documents, concerns the loss of citizenship of a woman in Nazi era Berlin and the state theft and auction of her family’s household possessions. The film maps sites in Berlin related to the woman's family, the auction and the bureaucratic offices of state that processed her ‘case’.

Screenings of Four Parts of a Folding Screen (UK 2018, 83 mins) (Funding Arts Council of England) include: International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018), IndieLisboa (2018), Jewish Film Festival Berlin and Brandenburg (2018), Crosskultur Berlin (2018), Cinema Flagey Brussels (programmed run of 9 screenings) (2019), Docpoint Helsinki (2019), Prelude screening to Essay Film Festival (Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, London University) / Outsiders-Insiders Festival London (2019), One World Romania (2019), Close-Up Film Centre London (2019), Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow (2020). Wiblin gave a paper, 'Radical matter-of-factness in the film Four Parts of a Folding Screen', on this film at the Radical Film Network (RFN) conference, Dublin (2018).

Face of an Angel (a short film based on a Puccini opera, 2008) and For Children (two-screen installation on shared themes of filmmakers P. P. Pasolini and R. W. Fassbinder, 2009) are also works made in collaboration with Kennedy. 

Wiblin's exhibition, BANK (Schwarzwaldallee Gallery, Basel, 2015), combined still photography and video imagery which considered its subject, the Bank of England, in relation to invisible notions of wealth and power. The book chapter, ‘The Bank of England in Ruins: Photographic Speculation and the Abstract Nature of Money’, was co-authored with Dr C. J. Müller (‘Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money’, Müller, C. J. et al (eds.), 2017).

Wiblin has also published book chapters and articles (and conference papers) on photography considered in relation to architecture (in Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, 2012) and cinema (in Cinema and Architecture, 1997). He has also written on his own work, in Wrocław ('The Journal of Architecture', 2006), Naples ('History of Photography', 2006), and in the City of London ('Performance Research', 2015). An article written collaboratively with Anthea Kennedy on Erika Koch, assistant to photographer Umbo (Otto Umbehr), was published in the book Umbo, Photographer, (Snoeck Verlag, 2019).

Education/Academic qualification

BA Media Production Design (Graphic Design, Video and Photography) 1987

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics where Ian Wiblin is active. These topic labels come from the works of this person. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
  • 1 Similar Profiles