Saturday, November 4, 2017
9:15am – 4:30pm
Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute
Registration is required
Organized by Hanan Toukan, Adrienne Minassian Visiting Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Architecture and Middle East Studies, and Kareem Estefan, PhD student in Modern Culture and Media.
For funding partners, view list below.
The act of bearing witness, associated with the visual documentation of state violence and cultural practices of “speaking truth to power,” is central to international human rights discourse after World War II. But it has come under increasing scrutiny from artists, writers, and scholars working on and amid the political conflicts of the Levant region, who have questioned the impact that images of suffering have on global publics and critiqued the exceptionalization of the figure of the "witness" as a neutral, truth-telling individual. This symposium will examine the uneven, retrospective, and intergenerational temporalities of witnessing, the archival constructions and mediations involved in representing what are often traumatic moments of violence and rupture, and the ways in which artists filter these personal and collective histories through processes of fabulation and speculation. It does so in the context of urgent political events in Syria, Palestine-Israel, and the broader region, which demand witnesses, but perhaps even more so, new methods of representation, mediation, distribution, and translation that can extend and deepen the meaning and impact of bearing witness.
The symposium will be preceded by a program of contemporary film/video works from the Levant to be screened at ListArt120 on November 3, 5:00 p.m., the evening before the main event.