Tuesday/Wed Night 11.09.04 -- Field Trip to Cooper Union + Pace University

Contents:
0. About Field Trips
1. About this Tuesday (Cooper Union -- Call to RSVP)
2. About this Wednesday (Pace University)

PLEASE NOTE: Neither of these events will take place at 16Beaver.

http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday

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0. About Field Trips

This week, we really found two good events going on in the city and felt that it would be nice to direct people to them as fruit for thought and discussion.

One of the events will take place at Cooper Union and the other at LMCC.
The first is a discussion about the photos which emerged from Abu Ghraib. The panel will include Seymore Hirsch, who was one of the first journalists to take on the story. The panel will also inlcude author Luc Sante and Brian Wallis as moderator.

On Wed will also be a great event at Pace University with Raqs Media Collective. If you are or are not familiar with their work, this should be an interesting evening.

Hope to see you at one of the events!

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1. About this Tuesday

What: Panel -- Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib
When: Tuesday November 09, 2004 7pm
Where: COOPER UNION
Who: w/ Seymour Hersh, Luc Sante, David Levi Strauss

PUBLIC PROGRAM

Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib

Tuesday November 9, 2004 7:00 pm The Great Hall – Cooper Union 7 East 7th
Street at 3rd Avenue

In Conversation: Seymour Hersh, Luc Sante, David Levi Strauss

Moderated by Brian Wallis

Seymour Hersh, Luc Sante, and David Levi Strauss will participate in a major symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib, which is on view at the International Center of Photography through November 28, 2004. 

The symposium, moderated by ICP Chief Curator Brian Wallis, will take place on Tuesday, November 9 at 7:00 pm, in The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street at 3rd Avenue in New York City.

This panel will bring together these outstanding writers and critics who will address the part that photography has played in the international debate on the events of the past year, and will speak to a range of ethical and political issues, the function of electronic media, and photography’s role in documenting truth.

Few photographs in recent years have had the explosive impact of the images of detainees being abused by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. First revealed on CBS’s “60 Minutes II” on April 28, 2004, the photographs quickly began to proliferate on a number of Internet sites, and were subsequently published in the May 5, 2004 issue of The New Yorker with Seymour Hersh’s article entitled “Torture at Abu Ghraib.”

From the covers of weekly news magazines to the front pages of national and
local newspapers, the images began to invade the American consciousness. The
emergence of the Abu Ghraib photographs fundamentally calls into question the
relationship between photography and war. Unlike traditional war
photojournalism, the images were not created as documentation of atrocities,
but were actually intended as instruments of maltreatment and sexual/cultural
humiliation. It was amateur digital photographs transmitted over the Internet
that made the public aware of shocking human rights abuses and jolted our
perception of the Iraqi conflict, something that signaled a sea change in the
representation of war via image-making technology.

Admission to the symposium is free. Seating is limited: for further
information and to reserve a space, please contact the ICP Education
Department at (212) 857-0001.

Organized by the International Center of Photography in conjunction with The
Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School and Cooper Union. 
This evening panel has been made possible with the generous support of the
Open Society Institute.

Seymour Hersh, Writer; author, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
Ghraib, The Dark Side of Camelot, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear
Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, and The Price of Power: Kissinger in
the Nixon White House, among others; regular contributor for The New Yorker
since 1993; recipient of numerous awards including the National Magazine
Award for Public Interest for his pieces on intelligence and the Iraq war,
the Pulitzer Prize, and four George Polk Awards.                     

David Levi Strauss, Writer and critic; essays and reviews have appeared
regularly in Artforumand Aperture; author, Between the Eyes, Essays on
Photography and Politics, Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art & Politics, and
Broken Wings: The Legacy of Landmines; his essays have also appeared in
monographs on numerous artists including Carolee Schneemann, Leon Golub,
Miguel Rio Branco, Alfredo Jaar, Francesca Woodman, and Daniel J. Martinez.

Luc Sante, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography, Bard College;
author, Walker Evans (2001), The Factory of Facts (1998), Evidence (1992),
and Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991). Co-editor, O.K. You
Mugs (1999). Introductions to Maggie and the Bowery Tales by Stephen Crane
(Modern Library, 2001) and Classic Crimes by William Roughead (2000), among
others. Essays in New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, many
others. Awards: Whiting Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Award in Literature
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Grammy Award (for album
notes).

Brian Wallis, ICP Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator. Organizer of
numerous exhibitionsincluding "Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison
Photographs from Abu Ghraib," currently at ICP, and a forthcoming
retrospective of the work of Larry Clark. Publications include Only Skin
Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003); Art Matters: How the
Culture Wars Changed America (1999); Constructing Masculinity (1995); and
Democracy: A Project by Group Material (1990).

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2. About this Wednesday

Please join us for a panel discussion with India’s Raqs Media Collective, moderated by Singapore art theorist Gunalan Nadarajan

Wednesday November 10th, 7:00pm
Multipurpose Room in the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts
Pace University, 3 Spruce Street, between Park Row and Gold Street (entrance closer to Gold).

The Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) is a group of media practitioners that works in new media & digital art practice, documentary filmmaking, photography, media theory & research, writing, criticism and curation. The collective has been working together since 1991. Their work explores the power of the unregulated communications of city life: the experience of movie theater audiences in Delhi, the illegal posters on the sides of constructions sites, the traffic on websites and chatrooms, or the illegal bootlegging of the latest Hollywood DVD's. Based in New Delhi, India, Raqs is one of the initiators of Sarai: The New Media Initiative, (www.sarai.net) a program of interdisciplinary research and practice on media, city space and urban culture at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

The artists will discuss their past work, including their multi-media installations exhibited at Documenta 11, the Walker Art Center, and their current installation at Bose Pacia gallery in Chelsea. Gunalan Nadarajan, an art theorist, curator and writer from Singapore who has written and lectured extensively on contemporary art, architecture and cyberculture, will moderate the discussion. Mr. Nadarajan is the author of Ambulations, based on the notion of walking, and has recently contributed a chapter on 'Ornamental Biotechnology' for Biotechnology, Art and Culture (MIT Press, 2003).

The Raqs Media Collective Artists Dialogue is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Imposter in the Waiting Room on view from November 9 – December 30, 2004 at the Bose Pacia gallery (http://www.bosepacia.com) in Chelsea.  The talk is also part of Downtown Digital Futures, LMCC's multi-year platform for artists, cultural planners, urban developers, and technologists to creatively explore the role of art and technology in the transformation of Lower Manhattan and other urban centers. Downtown Digital Futures includes public art installations, artists' talks, large scale commissions, and a research and policy think tank. For more information, please visit http://www.lmcc.net/ddf

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