ANDREW WITT
Pacific Riviera
Image : Patrick Cruz, Stranger than paradise, 2016, spray paint and acrylic. Courtesy of the artist.
project
Pacific Riviera is a project that aims to write a history of the present by examining the past decade of contemporary artistic production from Vancouver, focusing on the crossover between visual art, the city’s experimental music scene, and its diasporic communities. Witt’s research builds on his commitment to art writing as a means for documenting and historicizing emerging cultural phenomena. The methodology for Pacific Riviera is rooted in interdisciplinary and cross-media inquiry, combining oral history, archival research, close listening, and site-specific engagement. Interviews are at the center of the project
The book will employ ekphrasis — the vivid, attentive description of artworks, performances, and spaces — as a means of forging connections across disciplines and contexts. Envisaged as a curatorial gesture in print, the book becomes a space of historical elaboration, where the visual and sonic can resonate on the page, allowing formal qualities, atmospheres, and cultural forms to be brought together and thought through.
SUPPORT IN PRODUCTION OF DISCOURSE - 2025
The book will employ ekphrasis — the vivid, attentive description of artworks, performances, and spaces — as a means of forging connections across disciplines and contexts. Envisaged as a curatorial gesture in print, the book becomes a space of historical elaboration, where the visual and sonic can resonate on the page, allowing formal qualities, atmospheres, and cultural forms to be brought together and thought through.
SUPPORT IN PRODUCTION OF DISCOURSE - 2025
practice and biography
Andrew Witt is an art historian and critic who writes on contemporary art. His research interests include the history of photography and aesthetic theory, with a particular focus on the intersection of contemporary music and visual art. His book Lost Days, Endless Nights: Photography and Film from Los Angeles (MIT Press, 2025) explores how artists and activists reimagined the aesthetic and political capacities of documentary photography and film from the 1970s to the present, with chapters on Agnès Varda, Allan Sekula, Asco, John Divola, Guadalupe Rosales, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Anthony Hernandez, and the collaborative practice of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel.
He is also at work on Exile Modernism, which examines how the medium of photography was reimagined in the context of mass migration and displacement during the Second World War. From this research, he is developing a publication on the photographic work of Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid, Germaine Krull, and Rose Mandel. His writing has appeared in Camera Austria, History of Photography, Oxford Art Journal and Philosophy of Photography. Witt completed his PhD at University College London in 2017 and his MA at UCL in 2010. From 2018 to 2022 he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
He is also at work on Exile Modernism, which examines how the medium of photography was reimagined in the context of mass migration and displacement during the Second World War. From this research, he is developing a publication on the photographic work of Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid, Germaine Krull, and Rose Mandel. His writing has appeared in Camera Austria, History of Photography, Oxford Art Journal and Philosophy of Photography. Witt completed his PhD at University College London in 2017 and his MA at UCL in 2010. From 2018 to 2022 he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin