Monday, April 3, 2017
4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Joukowsky Forum
Screenings presented by the artist, Ursula Biemann. The presentation introduces Black Sea Files (2005), a territorial research on the Caspian oil geography and the gigantic new pipeline that pumps crude oil through the Caucasus. Oil workers, farmers, refugees and prostitutes who live along the pipeline come into profile and contribute to a wider human geography that displaces the singular and powerful signifying practices of oil corporations and oil politicians. Drawing on investigatory fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, journalists and agents of secret intelligence, Black Sea Files comments on artistic methods in the field and the ways in which information and visual intelligence is detected, circulated or withheld. With the consecutive screening of part 3 of the more recent Egyptian Chemistry (2012), examining the River Nile and its hydro-engineering, Biemann moves from human geography to ecology and metaphysics as a form of engaging and ordering the material world.
Screening of Black Sea Files (43’) and part 3 of Egyptian Chemistry (16’).
This is the first in a three-part series:
Tuesday, April 4
Displacement Film Screening | Ursula Biemann, 'Sahara Chronicle'
Wednesday, April 5
Displacement Film Screening | Ursula Biemann, 'The Cosmopolitical Forest'
Center for Middle East Studies
Co-sponsored by the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Department of Modern Culture and Media, and Middle East Studies. This series is funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.