Event overview
02079197712
Tues 28th Jan 2014, 5-7pm
After the Last Sky was conceived as an effort to redress the fact that, as Said put it, 'to most people Palestinians have been visible as fighters, terrorists and lawless pariahs'. Negatively 'over-represented', yet in crucial respects invisible, the Palestinian experience of dispossession is here restored to its lived complexity, not allowing the violence of occupation to saturate the field of vision and blot out everyday life. In this presentation, we want to reflect on how, more than a quarter century after its publication, Said and Mohr's collaboration can serve as a potent resource in addressing the politics and aesthetics of representing dispossession. In particular, we will consider how Said's recognition of the centrality of land to the dynamics of dispossession informs the composition of After the Last Sky, and how the book can provide a critical vantage point on a rich critical legal literature on settler-colonial dispossession which often risks abstracting away from lifeworlds of ownership and resistance which remain unregistered in legal frameworks. Drawing on some of Said's writings on the visible, as well as on Allan Sekula's critical writings on the history of photography, will also try to contrast Said and Mohr's ways of seeing with different strategies for representing Palestinian dispossession and resistance, focusing in particular on three registers: reflexive or formalistic attempts to depict (armed) Palestinian struggle, from Wakamatsu and Adachi's PFLP-Japanese Red Army – Declaration of World War and Godard and Melville's Ici et Ailleurs to Ahlam Shibli's Phantom Home; documentary records of dispossession (Ariella Azoulay's From Palestine to Israel); contemporary filmic and photographic work which foregrounds the landscape or the technologies of dispossession whole leaving Palestinian experience outside the frame (Sophie Ristelheuber's West Bank).
Exhibition: SPACE & GAZE: Conversations with Jean Mohr & Edward Said in Palestine (Nov 2013 – June 2014) Kingsway Corridor, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, Lewisham Way, London SE14 6NW
Presented by the METHODS LAB
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Jan 2014 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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