Bard Translation and Translatability Initiative, Human Rights Project, and Middle Eastern Studies Program Present

Solidarity, In Messy Practice

The anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended (editors: Szakacs, Mohaiemen, forthcoming) weaves together gestures and alignments, within the visual arts, around transnational solidarity during the Cold War era. We survey both grand initiatives and tragic misfires from an entangled, decolonizing world. Events, alliances, and actions are in dialogue and dialectic with, among others, the reformist tendencies of non-alignment and the insurrectionary energy of liberation movements. This anthology proposes that transnational solidarity is always worth celebrating, and extremely difficult to inhabit.

Eszter Szakács is a PhD candidate in the project IMAGINART—Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she worked at tranzit.hu Budapest, where she has been co-editor of the online international art magazine Mezosfera, co-editor of the book IMAGINATION/IDEA: The Beginning of Hungarian Conceptual Art – The László Beke Collection, 1971 (tranzit.hu, JRP|Ringier, 2014), and curator of the collaborative research project Curatorial Dictionary. She is a curatorial team member of the civil initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest. Her research revolves around prefigurative politics in art organizing, questions of internationalisms, relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South, as well as the exhibitionary form of research.

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, drawings, sculptures, and essays to research socialist utopia, incomplete decolonization, malleable borders, unreliable memory, and the decaying family unit. His projects often start from Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and then radiate outward to unlikely, and unstable, transnational alliances: Lebanese migration networks, Japanese hijackers, and a Dutch academic. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child  (Nokta, forthcoming) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); and co-editor (w/ Lorenzo Fusi) of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). He is currently a Mellon Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Lunder Institute of American Art, Maine.

This talk is organized in conjunction with MES301 Solidarity as Worldmaking.

Zoom Link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86461530312

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, e-mail dramadan@bard.edu,
or visit https://www.bard.edu.

Time: 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Online Event

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