Visual Materialities

Migrant Dreams Build Nations: Shirin Neshat’s Reverent Gaze in Land of Dreams

Migrant dreams are potent political vehicles for envisioning the nation of the future. Shirin Neshat has captured the abject migrants dreamy gaze with reverence and in so doing endowed them with dignity and human rights. Her collection Land of Dreams distills the exilic imaginary in the desolate landscape of the present moment. A murky analogy to the American Dream, her work explores the unconscious dream life of migrants in these dark times of walls and ICE. She represents the exilic subjects with dignity. The proximity of the migrant’s face awakens a sense of responsibility. The aporetic gaze is a salutary reminder that the West is complicit in the plight of the migrant and thus response-able.

Mehraneh Ebrahimi, PhD Assistant Professor, York University

The canvas as technique: Paul Klee and Walter Benjamin

One of Klee’s well-known arguments about painting is his conception of the canvas as a body, as a skeleton, which he renders by the expression “anatomy of the canvas” (an argument which can now be found in the book titled On Modern Art, which contains many of the lectures he presented while teaching at the Bauhaus). This conference will discuss how this conception of the canvas is related to Benjamin’s articulation of technique in his famous The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility. For both thinkers, the “apparatus,” i.e., the technique, informs the work of art in a profound way, for it is also a dispositive of thought. This conference will also discuss the influence of the Baroque on both thinkers, since it is part of such a conception of the work of art, the Baroque paving the way for a perspectivism that is intimately linked to the technique as a dispositive of thought.

Laurence Sylvain Candidate au doctorat, Littérature comparée Option Théorie et épistémologie Université de Montréal

more informations : https://ccla.digitaltextualities.ca/post/session-04/

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