Announcement: Image Wars: Conflict, Media, Globalization

Image Wars: Conflict, Media, Globalization

A Symposium in relation to the Exhibition Zones of Conflict at Pratt
Manhattan Gallery
2pm, Friday, January 30, 2009
2-6pm (coffee break: 4-4:30)
Lecture hall 213, next to Pratt Manhattan Gallery
144 W. 14th Street, 2nd Floor

ZONES OF CONFLICT have proliferated globally, designating an historically
unprecedented condition of war without geographical and temporal limit,
one confronting a 'terrorism' similarly without spatio-temporal
boundaries. Artistic responses have included the documentation of
military action, the memorialization of loss, activism against war, and
conceptual analyses and contestations of military and media
representations. But conflict has also divided artistic representation,
pressing the need for the reinvention of documentary strategies and the
acknowledgment that conventional forms of realism and reportage are no
longer adequate. Following seven years of the so-called 'war on terror,'
we are now in a position to consider in what ways contemporary art and
visual culture have reflected and confronted social and political
upheaval and "infinite war."

Speakers:

Faisal Devji
Faisal Devji is Assistant Professor of History at the New School
University. Devji researches the political thought of modern Islam as
well as in the transformation of liberal categories and democratic
practice in South Asia. His broader concerns are with ethics and violence
in a globalized world. He is the author of Landscapes of the Jihad:
Militancy, Morality, Modernity (2005).

T.J. Demos
The curator of Zones of Conflict, T.J. Demos is a critic and a
lecturer
in the Art Hisotry Department, University College London. The author of
The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (2007), his essays on modern and
contemporary art have appeared in journals such as Artforum, Art Journal,
Grey Room, October, and Texte zur Kunst. Demos is currently working on a
new book, Migrations: Contemporary Art and Globalization.

Maymanah Farhat
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 and CounterPunch, and Z Magazine.

Allan Frame
Allen Frame is a practicing photographer and teaches photography at the
Pratt Institute, as well as at the International Center of Photography
and the School of Visual Arts. Frame has had solo exhibitions at Leslie
Tonkonow Gallery in New York in 1997 and Schedler Galerie in Zurich in
2001.

Andrea Geyer
A participating artist in Zones of Conflict, Andrea Geyer's work
over
recent years has investigated the construction and perception of national
identity. She works with photography and writing mostly in form of
installations. Geyer has exhibited widely, with solo shows at Secession,
Vienna; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; Platform, Berlin (with
Sharon Hayes); and Document 12.

Tom Keenan
Thomas Keenan teaches human rights, media, and literature at Bard
College. He is the author of Fables of Responsibility (1997), and
co-editor of New Media, Old Media (2005), and will soon be finishing a
book on media and conflict.

Vyjayanthi Rao
Vyjayanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the New School.
Her research focuses on globalization, and in particular issues of
technology, infrastructure, memory and modernity in South Asia. She is
currently at work on two book projects: Ruins and Recollections: the
Heritage of Modernization in a South Asian Context and Infra-City:
Catastrophic Urbanisms in Post-Industrial Mumbai.

The "Zones of Conflict" exhibition catalog with essay by T.J. Demos is
now available. Please check our website, www.pratt.edu/exhibitions for
more information.

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