Loading Events
  • This event has passed.

Jun 4, 2012 at 7:30 pm

Capturing Palestine: Witnessing and Storytelling with Michael Kennedy

With photographer Michael Kennedy.

Since late 2009, the West Bank village of Iraq Burin has been subject to land theft and increasing violence from the Israeli military and neighboring settlement of Bracha. In March 2010, the Israeli military entered the village and shot two teenage boys in the street. Counter to Israeli claims that no live ammunition was used, a U.N. report was issued on the incident containing three post-mortem photographs of entry and exit wounds on the boys’ bodies. Excluded from this report and other journalistic accounts is another image: dried blood in the street where the boys fell that spelled “Mohammed.”

Can the photographer, researcher, artist, journalist, human rights worker or activist meet the demands of objectivity and proof required in the documentation of rights abuses and still take the miraculous seriously?

On Iraq Burin consists of 22 large format photographs accompanied by entries from Kennedy’s notebooks recounting demonstrations, settler violence, detention and stories told in the village of the boys’ murder. The form of the notebook is explored here as a genre of writing, driven by the unfinished thoughts and observations purged from (scholarly, legal, journalistic) writings that find their efficacy in objectivity. Photographs of landscape, home interiors, objects referenced in the reports, and the notebooks themselves are sutured to the text to make a sort of half document, quasi record, semi proof of things – not? – encountered.

This program is part of ArteEast’s 2012 series Making the Real: Practices of Documentation.

Michael Kennedy is a photographer and doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. His work considers the politics of representation by moving between artistic practice and the conventions of ethnography. He holds a M.A. in anthropology from the American University in Cairo, and has taught photography in the Department of Journalism at An Najah University. His writings and photography have appeared in publications and exhibits in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States.

 

Barrak Alzaid (b. 1985 Kuwait, MA Performance Studies, NYU) is a writer, curator, and artist, and is the Artistic Director of ArteEast. Recent installation and performance work include Seera Kartooniya [Bushwick closed Studios, 2010] and Diwaniya with Fatima Al Qadiri and Aziz Alqatami [Gwangju Design Biennial 2011]. Curatorial work includes antinormanybody [Kleio Projects, 2011]. His article, “Fatwas and Fags: Violence and the Discursive Production of Abject Bodies” is available in The Columbia Journal of Gender and Law.

 

PRESENTED WITH:

ArteEast presents the works of contemporary artists from the Middle East, North Africa and their diasporas t a wide audience in order to foster a more complex understanding of the regions’ arts and cultures and to encourage artistic excellence. Through public events, exhibitions, film screenings, a dynamic virtual gallery and a resource-rich website, ArteEast supports artists and filmmakers by providing the platforms necessary for them to showcase groundbreaking and significant work. We also give the public the opportunity to learn more about and develop an appreciation for the talent of these established and emerging artists.

Details

Date
Jun 4, 2012
Time
7:30 pm – 10:00 pm
Program:

Support UnionDocs’ next phase and new building by becoming a member

Peek in the window of our bustling building in NYC and tune into the ideas and energy bubbling up from the UNDO Center.

Tune into cutting-edge, powerful and poetic documentary programs and connect to conversations with the artists and thinkers passing through.

Now available at the Apple Store and on Roku.

MONTHLY

 

Unlimited access to all of our monthly offerings for the price of two espressos.

ANNUALLY

 

Keep it simple and save. Unlimited access to our sweet offerings for a reduced, annual fee and receive some added benefits.

LOCAL, ARTIST, STUDENT OR SENIOR

 

In the neighborhood, a working artist, student or senior? This membership is for you. Fill out a quick form for a discount code to an annual membership.

ANNUAL EDITIONS MEMBERSHIP

 

Get all of the benefits of the Annual UNDO Membership plus an annual subscription to UnionDocs Editions, a set of publications, merchandise or special objects.

UnionDocs is grateful for support from:

We have two new limited editions out now that have grown out of our UNDO FELLOWSHIP

FORMS OF ERRANTRY delves into the mesmerizing and haunting films of Miryam Charles and is edited by Lakshmi Padmanabhan. GEOLOGIC LISTENING centers the monumental and expansive work of filmmaker Deborah Stratman and is edited by Sukhdev Sandhu.

Summer Documentary Labs

Join a select group of emerging filmmakers to think through every aspect of your work-in-progress in this tightly structured program.