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.
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Earlier Event: February 29
The Adab Colloquium: The Divine Comedy and the Formation of Modern Adab
Later Event: March 26
Film Screening: Infiltrators by Khaled Jarrar