Event

Mediating the Archive: A Conference on Moving Images and Social Histories

Fri, Apr 15, 2016

9:00 AM–7:30 PM

Room C203 / Room 4202

Film and media objects have complex afterlives, circulating via shifting paths of exchange. Their apparent ephemerality can serve to mask their temporal and geographical situatedness, particularly in the current processes of globalization and digitization. This conference will explore different modes of archival intervention, with an eye toward excavating histories that have been obscured, forgotten, or suppressed.

How can the past be mobilized in new ways through critical artistic interventions? Which histories are preserved, and which are lost? How might questions of performance, “liveness,” and active spectatorship complicate our understanding of archival practices? What political possibilities do media archives offer in changing the conditions of the present? Our panelists explore such questions in the contexts of cinema, photography, broadcast media, social media, museum practices, heritage tourism, and surveillance footage.

This event is presented as part of Mediating the Archive, an interdisciplinary research group that focuses on how archival studies dovetail with the scholarly and artistic legacy of queer activism through visual art, film, digital media, and dance. The group is supported by the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. For more information or to join, email [email protected].

View the full conference schedule here.

Cosponsored by the Cinema Studies Group, the Film Studies Certificate Program, and the “Mediating the Archive” Mellon Seminar for Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, and supported in part by Artis Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Participants

Ariella Azoulay

Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, and an independent curator and filmmaker. She is the author of the groundbreaking book The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), which provides a compelling rethinking of the political and ethical status of photography. Azoulay was formerly professor of visual culture and contemporary philosophy at the Program for Culture and Interpretation, Bar Ilan University. She is also the author of Once Upon A Time: Photography Following Walter Benjaminand Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, winner of the 2002 Infinity Award for Writing presented by the International Center for Photography for excellence in the field of photography (MIT Press, 2001). In recent years, Azoulay has produced several documentary films that address different aspects of the history of Israel and Palestine.