1994 research outputs found
Sort by
Challenges of Southern Knowledge Production:Reflections on/through Iran
Full text linkFocusing on the specific case of knowledge production in and about Iran, in this chapter, we discuss the risk of reproducing a Northern perspective in the attempts to produce knowledge on and through the Global South(s). We argue that such reproduction leads to cognitive suppression, further peripheralization, or even recolonization of the South(s). We also stress the lasting effects of methodological nationalism among attempts at decolonization and its political consequences, such as in the adoption of nativist discourses historically connected to the ‘Islamic’ Revolution by scholars focusing on the Global South(s) and in area studies concerning Iran. To avoid these effects, we suggest considering the politics of scale in our recognition and problematization of the hierarchization of Northern and Southern sites of knowledge production and their particularities
Inner World and Milieu:Art, Madness, and Brazilian Psychiatry in the Work of Nise da Silveira
Full text linkThis short essay focuses on the work of Brazilian doctor Nise da Silveira, a pioneer in psychiatry who introduced artistic tools to work with psychiatric patients, especially those diagnosed as psychotic. She founded the Museum of Images from the Unconscious in 1952 inside an asylum in Rio de Janeiro to assemble and exhibit the works produced by her patients. As an iconoclast who did not systematize her theory, she engaged with several European psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and thinkers to produce a very innovative reflection and practical clinical work. Her work resonates in particular with French Institutional Psychotherapy, as well as with Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric work in Algeria, but, differently from the former, places art at the core of its clinical method and proposes a radical positioning against every form of medicalized approach
When Home is a Photograph:Kathleen Cleaver's Albums of Exile
Full text linkThis talk examines how former Black Panther Party Communications Secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver has used photography to make ‘home’ in the world. Through close examination of a family photography album made by Cleaver of her family’s time living in exile in Algeria and France, 1969–1972, and drawing on Raiford’s three years of working with Cleaver leading a team organizing and cataloguing her vast personal photography archive (since acquired by Emory University in Spring 2020), Raiford considers the everyday image making practices that a public figure committed to improving the conditions of Black lives globally has engaged to imagine, identify, create, fabulate, inhabit, leave, and, sometimes, destroy ‘home’. While Cleaver’s photography collection broadly, and the family album specifically, have great political and historical significance, enriching our knowledge about the Black Panther Party, the work of Black internationalism in the era of Black Power, and gender politics in the context of Black revolutionary struggles, it is perhaps best understood as a family archive. Thus, Raiford reads the Algiers album as a Black-woman authored text, a model that offers an affective and personal history of a movement that has been conveyed primarily as historical document. Its form as a family album forces us to reckon with the messiness of movement and cannot deny the failures and disappointments of family relations — whether a difficult marriage, a growing community of exiles, family as a metaphor for nationalism or as a map of intergenerational kinship ties — as well as the possibilities and limitations of photography itself. Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about race, gender, justice and visuality. At Berkeley, Raiford is also Co-Director with Tianna S. Paschel of the Black Studies Collaboratory, a three year initiative to amplify the world-building work of Black Studies funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle and, with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, forthcoming from Thames and Hudson. Raiford is the Spring 2024 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin
Citizens of the Cosmos
Full text linkCosmism was an interdisciplinary movement intertwining Marxist discourse, Orthodox Christianity, Enlightenment thought, and Eastern philosophical traditions, advancing speculative models of international socialism, the quest for immortality, and the potential for resurrection through technological means in an imagined not so distant future. These visionary models provided a groundwork for discussion on the materialization of these aspirations within the realms of art, society, and science. How does the historical movement of cosmism, which found an important echo in the Soviet socialist experiment, provide the ground for (re)thinking the temporal relations between cosmos and commons, between community and communism? What is the relation between ancient cosmologies and cosmist ideas about death and immortality? The discussion will be complemented by a screening of Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep (2022, 47′, directed by Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan). Inspired by Sumerian cosmology as well as the philosophy of cosmism, the film follows the journey of Gilgamesh—part God, part human ruler of Uruk, one of the first historical metropolises—in this remarkable staging of a female heroine on her quest for immortality. Accompanied by an original score by Alva Noto, the film features an all-woman cast of actors from the Amed Theater in Diyarbakır. It interweaves the cosmist discourse with the quest for youth and immortality in one of the oldest literary works discovered to date.
Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, media theorist, and an internationally renowned expert on Soviet-era art and literature, especially the Russian avant-garde. He is a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, and a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). His work engages radically different traditions, from French post-structuralism to modern Russian philosophy, yet is firmly situated at the juncture of aesthetics and politics. Anton Vidokle is an artist, editor of e-flux journal, and chief curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema. Vidokle’s work has been exhibited internationally at Documenta 13 and the 56th Venice Biennale. Vidokle’s films have been presented at Bergen Assembly, Shanghai Biennale, Berlinale International Film Festival, Forum Expanded, Gwangju Biennale, Center Pompidou, Tate Modern, Garage Museum, Istanbul Biennial, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Tensta Konsthall, Blaffer Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Lincoln Center, MMCA Seoul, the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, and others
