Zones of Conflict
Free admission
http://www.pratt.edu/exhibitions
Image Wars: Conflict, Media, Globalization
Zones of conflict have proliferated globally, designating historically unprecedented conditions of war without geographical or temporal boundaries. With reference to the recent violence in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia, panelists will consider the ways that contemporary art, visual culture, and media relate to social, political, and military upheaval in an age of global conflict and infinite war.
Speakers include:
T.J. Demos, guest-curator of Zones of Conflict, writes widely on modern and contemporary art. The author of The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007), his essays have appeared in international magazines and journals. Based at University College London’s Art History Department, he is currently working on a new book-length study, Migrations: Contemporary Art and Globalization.
Faisal Devji teaches political history at the New School for Social Research. Devji researches the political thought of modern Islam as well as in the transformation of liberal categories and democratic practice in South Asia. Devji, whose broader concerns are with ethics and violence in a globalized world, is also author of Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Cornell University Press, 2005).
Maymanah Farhat is a specialist in modern and contemporary Arab art. She is the editor of ArteNews, an online newsletter that focuses on Middle Eastern art and culture (www.arteeast.org), and has written for journals such as Electronic Intifada, CounterPunch, and Z Magazine.
Allen Frame is a practicing photographer and teaches photography at Pratt Institute, International Center of Photography, and School of Visual Arts. Frame has had solo exhibitions at Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, New York and Schedler Galerie, Zurich.
Andrea Geyer’s photography stages social interactions and navigations through spaces as sites of the production of culture and sources of experience. She has exhibited widely, with solo shows at Secession, Vienna; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; and Platform, Berlin (with Sharon Hayes).
Thomas Keenan teaches human rights, media, and literature at Bard College. He is the author of Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford University Press, 1997), and co-editor of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005), and will soon finish a book on media and conflict.
Vyjayanthi Rao teaches anthropology at the New School. Her work focuses on globalization, and in particular issues of technology, infrastructure, memory, and modernity in South Asia. She is currently finishing a book entitled The Speculative City: Global Mumbai, Urban Futures, and Formations of the Public.
Zones of Conflict, running through February 7, 2009, features work by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (Iraq), Sam Durant (U.S.A.), Andrea Geyer (Germany), and Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Nation – U.S.A.), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (Lebanon), Thomas Hirschhorn (Switzerland), Emily Jacir (Palestine), Lamia Joreige (Lebanon), An-My Lê (U.S.A.), Walid Raad (Lebanon/U.S.A.), Ahlam Shibli (Palestine), Sean Snyder (U.S.A.), Hito Steyerl (Germany), and Guy Tillim (South Africa).
The catalog Zones of Conflict, including an essay by T.J. Demos, is now available for purchase. For more information on publications and exhibitions please visit http://www.pratt.edu/exhibitions
Image above:
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad (Iraq)
A member of a Sunni militia guarding his area in Adhamiya in Baghdad.
Baghdad, Iraq, March 6, 2008
Digital c-print
Courtesy of the artist
For more information go to: http://www.pratt.edu/exhibitions
