DATE
6:00PM
18 March 2024
LOCATION
612 Schermerhorn Hall
Join us for “Holding My Brother: Resistance as Affective Practice in Contemporary Palestinian Art,” a talk by Alessandra Amin (UPenn) on 18 March 2024 at 6pm. Lila Abu-Lughod (Columbia) will chair the event.
The spate of Israeli assaults on Gaza between 2008 and the present have saturated our screens with images of Palestinian suffering. Concurrently, rising public interest in Palestinian visual art has focused on the iconography of resistance, examining the history of nationalist symbols such as the watermelon and the poppy. Lost in discussion of both photojournalism and resistance art is the question of their relationship. How have Palestinian artists navigated an era of unprecedented visual access to real-time violence? How does their work intervene in discourses crystallized by the proliferation of traumatic imagery? This talk revisits To My Brother, a 2012 series of white-on-white etchings by Gazan artist Taysir Batniji, to consider how its engagement with visibility subjugates an iconography of resistance to its affective practice. Rejecting a paradigm of Palestinian representation that demands documentary over emotional truth, To My Brother performs a multi-sensory reclamation of mourning from a scopic regime that deliberately trivializes Palestinian death. In doing so, this extraordinary work invites speculation on the radical potential of masculine intimacy as an agent of visual decolonization.
This event is co-presented by the Center for Palestine Studies, the Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Middle East Institute.
ALESSANDRA MIN is a historian of modern art in the Arab world, specializing in Palestinian painting and graphic arts during the second half of the twentieth century. Her work explores the aesthetic and philosophical currents mediating artists’ relationships to Palestine across chasms of space, time, and catastrophe, paying particular attention to the gendered dimensions of Palestinian futurities. Her research has been supported by the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, the Social Science Research Council, the Palestinian American Research Center, Darat al-Funun, and the U.S. Department of Education. Her writing has appeared in Trans Asia Photography, MAVCOR Journal, and Art Journal, and is forthcoming in ARTMargins. At Penn, she is working on her first book project, Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State.
LILA ABU-LUGHOD is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University and teaches in the Department of Anthropology and at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her courses focus on gender politics in the Muslim world, the cultures of nationalism, and the politics of liberalism and women's and human rights. A leading voice in debates about gender, Islam, and global power, her publications have been translated into more than 13 languages. A founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies, she has co-edited with Ahmad Sa’di Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (2007) and has published on Palestinian archives, comparative settler colonialism, and museum politics, and served on the board of The Palestinian Museum in Birzeit.