LIVE EVENT - Artists’ Talk! Geographies of the Future: Traveling the Arab Majority World in Virtual Reality (14 April)

LIVE EVENT - Artists’ Talk! Geographies of the Future: Traveling the Arab Majority World in Virtual Reality (14 April)

LIVE EVENT - Artists’ Talk! Geographies of the Future: Traveling the Arab Majority World in Virtual Reality (14 April)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Middle East and Islamic Studies (GMU) Presents
 

Artists' Talk!
Geographies of the Future:

Traveling the Arab Majority World in Virtual Reality

 

Thursday, 14 April 2022
12:00 PM EDT | 5:00 PM London | 7:00 PM Beirut


Cosponsored by: Middle East and Islamic Studies Program (GMU), Arab Studies Institute, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (Georgetown University), Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the Phillips Gallery at Franklin & Marshall College

Moderated by: Co-curators Jessica Holland and Bridget Guarasci

Artists participating in the Geographies of the Future exhibit contemplate futurity and the stakes of virtual collaboration in a live discussion. Featuring Ala Younis, Majd al-Shihabi and Ahmad Barclay of Palestine Open Maps, Ali Yass and Ahmed Isamaldin, Areej Huniti and Eliza Goldox, and Barış Doğrusöz. Moderated by Jessica Holland and Bridget Guarasci. The exhibit Geographies of the Future: Traveling the Arab Majority World in Virtual Reality experiments with virtual media to render possible impossible worlds. Participating artists reimagine geographies of the Arab-majority world in order to analyze political violence or to chart anew known landscapes.

Speakers


Ala Younis
is an artist, with curatorial, film and publishing projects. Younis investigates the ambiguity of the archive and its persistent manipulation of the imagination, seeking to examine instances where historical and political events collapse into personal ones. She is co-founder of the publishing initiative Kayfa ta, co-Head of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, member of  the Academy of Arts of the World (Cologne), and co-Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2022.

Majd al-Shihabi is a PhD Student in Geography at the University of Toronto focusing on the role of technology in urban systems and policy design.

Ahmad Barclay is an architect, visual communicator, and product designer and partner with Visualizing Impact who is actively engaged in projects involving data visualization, visual sotrytelling, and learning through play. 

Barış Doğrusöz recuperates the geographical substrate of a more or less distant past to create works that interrogate the notion of territory, border and scale, whether physical or symbolic, and examine how fragmented elements such as found footage, military material, archeological artifacts and codes operate as a prequel or premonition for a near future fiction. Doğrusöz is based in Beirut and holds a BA in Visual Arts and an MFA from HEAR (Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin – Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts Le Quai), France. 

Areej Huniti is an artist and researcher based in Amman, Jordan. Her current work explores the magic and seduction of reality. Huniti received an MA in Global Digital Cultures from SOAS University of London. 

Eliza Goldox is an artist and project initiator working on solo and collaborative projects involving a variety of media with a focus on film, installation and new media. Goldox received an MA in Art and Design, from Chelsea College, University of the Arts London in 2011.

HUNITI GOLDOX In their joint practice HUNITI GOLDOX use new media technologies such as VR, video art and writing to develop spaces and tools for collective imagining.

Ali Yass is a painter and filmmaker based in Berlin. His works are concerned with the theme of resistance. Ali completed his BA in Fine Arts at the University of Jordan in 2015. He is currently studying at the University of Arts (UdK) Berlin. 

Ahmed Isamaldin is a visual artist-designer and blogger from Khartoum based in Berlin. Isamaldin studied physics at the University of Khartoum and graphic design and photography in Cairo. His artistic practice focuses on immigration and psychology, as well as the processes of revolutions, de-colonial design, and technology. 

Moderators


Jessica Holland
 is the Manager of Knowledge Production and Pedagogy at the Forum on Arab and Muslim Affairs, part of the Arab Studies Institute. Jessica is also co-curator of the upcoming exhibition “Geographies of the Future: Traveling the Arab World in Virtual Reality (2024). Jessica was formerly the project co-lead for a digitization and online education project, the ACOR Digital Archive in Amman, Jordan. Jessica gained an MA with distinction in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic from SOAS, University of London, in 2018. She presented her dissertation on decolonial ‘affordances’ within the digital archive to peers at Photo Archives VII conference, organized by NYU Dhabi Institut in Florence (2019). Jessica received her BA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge in 2013.

Bridget Guarasci is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College and a 2021-2022 Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Scholar. She is an environmental anthropologist whose work examines how war and conflict create ecological life in the Arab majority world. At first blush, nature and war might appear to be oxymoronic. People commonly think of nature as teeming with life. Wetlands are seen as transitional spaces between land and sea where migrating birds alight unifying biodiversity hotspots across the globe during seasonal migrations. Nature in this sense conveys an image of peace and tranquility. War is conceptualized as almost its exact opposite. Rife with bombs, artillery, pain, and suffering, war tears through the social fabric to destroy life and livelihood. Guarasci’s work demonstrates that contrary to popular thinking nature and war are not paradoxical, but entangled processes of making and harnessing the biosphere. Her scholarship analyzes how the material effects of emplacing water ecologies is a form of political violence.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412