Upcoming XE Events – Talk with Zach Blas + Year Zero Symposium
ZACH BLAS: BEATILLI, QUIEST IMAGO-FREE, WEDNESDAY, FEB 6TH, 6-8 PM, 244 GREENE ST.
Event link here.
In this artist talk, Zach Blas will discuss his recent work on Silicon Valley and time travel, airport security, mysticism, BDSM, and more. Blas reimagines the airport security setting through the genre of body horror cinema, with body scans and biometric meshes as key protagonists. These digital bodies—extracted from embodied selves—are inspected, prodded, and probed for the sake of risk preemption, but how do such acts come to provoke or terrify, when—no matter how violently handled— the digital renderings of securitized people appear to be free of the horrors of bodily violation?
Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans technical investigation, theoretical research, conceptualism, performance, and science fiction. He is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Blas has exhibited, lectured, and held screenings internationally, recently at the 2018 Gwangju Biennale; the 68th Berlin International Film Festival; Abierto X Obras, Matadero Madrid; 2018 Creative Time Summit, Miami; MAXXI, Rome; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Art in General, New York; Gasworks, London; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore; e-flux, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. His recent project Contra-Internet is supported by a 2016 Creative Capital award in Emerging Fields and the Arts Council England. His writings can be found in Documentary Across Disciplines, Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art, and e-flux journal. His work has been written about and featured in Artforum, Frieze, ArtReview, Mousse Magazine, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Blas is a 2018-20 Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellow.
Co-sponsored by NYU MCC.
YEAR ZERO: MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDING AFTER 1945, FRIDAY, FEB 22ND, 10 AM – 6 PM, 19 WASHINGTON SQUARE N.
Event link here.
1945 marks the end of a world war, the rise of decolonized states, the beginning of an unruly geological epoch. Please join us for this symposium with six extraordinary scholars who cross disciplines to examine intersecting materialities and unprecedented logics of this postwar rupture, a Year Zero in which humans, nonhumans, and machines were violently remade.
We ask: how did new imaginaries and practices emerge from the industrialized bodies of plants, animals, and chemicals of this historical moment? How did the structural transformations of the second World War reorient the dynamics of ecologies, markets, and machines? What kinds of interdisciplinary methods, genres, and collaborative practices may be crafted to articulate these complex co-emergences, or what feminist scholars call worlding?
Thinking of security and affect through nuclear ruins (Masco), ecological consequences of growth paradigms (Livingston), queer postcolonial bodies through chemical fertilizers (Agard-Jones), remaking of a global South through oranges (Saraiva), smartness and resilience through infrastructure (Halpern), and the emergence of metadata after the war (Gitelman), this symposium gathers together a striking array of critical-creative practices for tracing more-than-human worlding and inhabiting their relentless, differential trajectories.
Speakers:
Vanessa Agard-Jones, Columbia University
Lisa Gitelman, New York University
Orit Halpern, Concordia University
Julie Livingston, New York University
Joseph Masco, University of Chicago
Tiago Saraiva, Drexel University
Co-organized by Elaine Gan and Una Chaudhuri, NYU XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement. With special thanks to NYU Abu Dhabi Institute, Department of Anthropology, Department of Environmental Studies, and Environmental Humanities Lecture Series.
