Naomi Salaman

• • • Naomi Salaman is an artist, curator and lecturer. Her work investigates art practice, pedagogy and cultural institutions using historical, critical and feminist perspectives. She has a doctorate in Visual Arts Practice, on the history of art theory in the art school from Goldsmiths College, supervised by Victor Burgin. She is currently working on a community archive the history of the Fine Art Critical Practice course, and is developing SWEETSHOP an artist run window gallery in Lewes, where she lives.
http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/sweetshop/

Contemporary art 

Contemporary art and feminist perspectives

The history of vision

The Art School; art education; art theory.

• Naomi Salaman is a British artist, curator, writer and lecturer whose work is has a particular focus on feminist critique, the politics of vision, and the structures of art education. Her practice is known for its rigorous engagement with the relation between theory and practice, photography and lens based media, materialist critique and the interrogation of institutional and cultural frameworks.
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• Artistic Practice and Themes
• Since 2017 Salaman has been organising Sweetshop - a contemporary art space in the windows of a shop. http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/sweetshop/.  The Sweetshop programme of over 25 exhibitions, (one linked artist’s screening at Depot Cinema), has run over the last 8 years.  The identity of the place has grown over time. Salaman works to organise and curate the space as well as showing her own work.  She has developed an exhibition format for the space based on the window frames of the shop. Her background in critique of the photographic image and her exploration of the visual essay fed into an initial exhibit format using larger than AO black and white photocopies/digital prints. This scale of work led on to drawing/copying photographs in pencil from projection. This approach to enlarging the image slows the process of reproduction down while also making this process time a sociable collaborative time with the image. She has worked with Sophie Gibson on this drawing from projected photos. And sometimes others join in. Other artists’ work on display has been topical and critical. Invited artists select from their current projects, they work with Salaman to show work most fit for the shop window space.   
  Who is it for?
  The space faces the street so passerby on the street here in Lewes are the main audience for this gallery. The focus or address to the passerby, and the intention is to hold their attention for a short time. This is an art gallery, but not only for an art crowd. The site is very central; next to the train station, a new arts cinema, the public library, a popular café and pub; one of the main streets into town, passed by many pedestrians and cars carrying local populations as well as many visitors national and international. 
  What is it for?
  The space emerged for Salaman out of an interest in the topology of the  local shop, and how many properties in Lewes she noticed that retain traces of having been shops. She suggests that ‘mosts artists need a shop front to have a practice as an artist, to be in conversation with others, to show something to others.’
  The exchange offered by the Sweetshop windows is not immediately tangible, but inserts itself as a pause. The passerby is under no obligation, and may not notice the work, or may look at the windows while thinking of something else. The possibilities are quite wide in scope and cannot be clearly evaluated. As a practice for Salaman, and the many collaborating artists, this is simply a way to work,  at site that is artist run and to a certain extent autonomous..  
  However the practices developed on this site are acute and focussed. Salaman’s background in Image /Text work and critical theory contribute to her incorporation of the shop sign as an element of the visual work which can change. A fortuitous meeting with an aspiring sign writer, Luska Mengam in 2023, enabled a significant development of the shop front when the signage changed from Lansdown Sweetshop to Brighton Polytechnic, and now Mary Wollstonecraft. The new Sur Text is considered an umbrella term for the exhibitions that take place in the windows below, but may not coincide, or confirm a message in a direct way.  The text above the shop is considered as part of the poetics of the site, related to text work by Ed Rusha, Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer. The design of the text is a result of intense conversations. 
  The turn around of work can be fast, but the pace of thinking in the process can be slowed down.  The work costs little to make or hang and decisions can be immediate and without the weight of curatorial and institutional processes of selection and funding.
   
• Visual Maps and Spatial Analysis
  For her PhD thesis "Looking back at the life room; revisiting Pevsner's Academies of Art" (2008), Salaman developed an innovative presentation format that included "the written thesis containing illustrated chapters and six large, fold-out visual maps". These visual maps serve a specific purpose that written text alone cannot achieve: they "contribute visual connections and visual groups and overlaps that would be hard to describe in words". This demonstrates how Salaman uses visual essays to articulate relationships and patterns that resist verbal description.
  Salaman’s visual maps function as a form of spatial analysis, particularly evident in her identification of a "curved space of observation" in her collection of life rooms and dissection theatres. This "morphology is presented as a black and white print series; new research offering visual associations as a way to analyse the architecture as visual apparatus".  Salaman is interested in how architectural spaces function as theoretical apparatuses that shape ways of seeing and knowing.
• Exhibition as Visual Essay
  Salaman extends the concept of the visual essay to exhibition curation.  "Looking Back at the Life Room," an exhibition she curated with Nina Pearlman at the Strang Room, UCL (2010). She describes the exhibition itself as a visual essay,   an approach that allows her to unpack her research in ways that would be impossible in other formats. As she explains: "I was able to compile the work and the archive in a way I cannot imagine doing anywhere else, not even in a publication format…. I was able to push the photographs to work on their own as a series of pedagogical spaces, while the cases and boxes let me tinker away with all the details and the accumulation of visual material, and to organise seven accounts of, or visual essays on the spaces of the traditional art curriculum". This approach allows her to explore "the process, practice and pedagogy of looking at, drawing from and reading images in relation to iconology, critical theory and the technologies of image reproduction". Rather than simply documenting these spaces, her visual essays address the underlying structures and ideologies that have shaped art education.  
• Visual Essay as Methodological Framework
  Salaman’s research considers and deploys the visual essays as a deliberate strategy to document, analyse, and critique institutional spaces, particularly those related to art education. This format enables Salaman to create what she describes as "discursive, multi-voiced texts that blur the boundaries between visual and written analysis." This methodology is influenced by art historians who worked with photographic reproductions rather than original objects, such as Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. By citing these influences, Salaman positions her practice within a critical tradition that uses visual juxtaposition as a form of analysis.
• Documenting Institutional Spaces
  Salaman's visual essay work focuses on institutional spaces that are disappearing or transforming. She has spent years photographing European art school studios where drawing is taught, "charting the remnants of a pedagogical system now suspended". Her interest lies not in documenting these spaces before they vanish, but in addressing their function as a powerful and disciplined apparatus of vision during the centuries leading up to modernity. 
  In an interview, Salaman explains that her work is about "setting the record straight! Documenting things that are about to be forgotten - not because, as in the traditional documentary mode - I think it is a terrible shame that they are disappearing, - but rather because I think they are the remains of a dominating ideological vision or way of seeing.". This approach distinguishes her way of working with the archive, as interventions that expose the underlying structures of cultural production and transmission. Salaman’s works with archives include; ’Nothing is Secret’ (1999), ‘Parenthesis’ (1999), ‘Changed Pressmarks of the Private Case’ (2001), ‘Parapraxis ‘ (2001), ‘Looking back at the life room,’ (2008) (2010) ‘The non art project 1971; notes on the emergence off Fine Art Critical Practice at Brighton Polytechnic’ (2024).
   

• • Integration of Theory and Practice
Salaman's visual practice represent a sophisticated integration of theory and practice. She describes her approach as involving "a range of voices, from the travelogue, to the analytical, to an open process of thought transcribed and at times fragmented, closer to the associative power of images, than the semantics of prose.”
This integration is evident in projects like "Parenthesis," (1998), which combined large drawings of lecture theatres with a handmade book containing memories of influential seminars and tutorials. This work explored "the space of that interaction of teaching and being taught; or public speaking and individual reception; and of the transmission of ideas from one generation to another". Through the visual essay approach, Salaman investigates the complex dynamics of knowledge transmission across generations.