Ariella Azoulay

A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share, from one of our most compelling political theorists In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions—an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums—to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as “past” and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

Unlearning Imperialism

Potential History

An argument that anyone can pursue political agency and resistance through photography, even those with flawed or nonexistent citizenship.

The Civil Contract of Photography

Showcasing a vast array of color photographs, a teacher of contemporary philosophy and visual culture at Bar Ilan University presents a provocative argument for photography as a civic practice, capable of reclaiming power for the purposes of critique, freedom and resistance.

A Political Ontology of Photography

Civil Imagination

An interdisciplinary exploration of the visual presence of death in contemporary culture.

The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy

Death's Showcase

Susanne Pfeffer

Felix Ensslin

Dor Guez explores an intricate, multifaceted reality and challenges the boundaries and prevalent binary expositions between East and West, Jews and Arabs, religion and secularism, Israeli and Palestine identity.

Al-Lydd

دور غيز اللد

Armin Linke

For over 20 years Berlin-based photographer and filmmaker Armin Linke (b. 1966) has been photographing the effects of globalization, the transformation of infrastructures and the networking of post-industrial society via digital information and communication technologies. Following his recent exhibition in Milan, this substantial publication features images selected by a variety of theorists and scientists chosen by Linke. The images selected by Israeli theorist, curator and filmmaker Ariella Azoulay, French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, Austrian artist/curator/media theorist Peter Weibel, American architectural theorist Mark Wigley, and British geologist Jan Zalasiewicz open up Linkes work to a variety of new readings. Linkes photographs depict the modern world as a massive profusion of data, where the material infrastructures, consisting of computer centers, data highways and server rooms, are largely invisible. A research affiliate at the MIT Visual Arts Program, Linke has exhibited extensively worldwide including the Storefront, NY, and KW Berlin.

The Appearance of That Which Cannot Be Seen

Eva Barois de Caevel

CATPC is the first publication to focus on the activities of the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, an cooperative based in Lusanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Included in this compact but hefty and fully illustrated monograph are writings and projects rethinking postcolonial power relations within the global art world. Contributors include curators Ariella Azoulay, Eva Barois De Caevel, Ruba Katrib, Alexander Koch, artists Eleonore Hellio and Renzo Martens, art historian Els Roelandt, political theorist Francois Verges, documentary filmmaker Leonard Pongo, art critic Charles Tumba Kekwo and writers J.A. Coster and Charles Siketele Gize, among others. CATPC, initiated in 2014 by Amsterdam-based artist, Renzo Martens, whose radical and controversial hybrid practice feeds into many current debates and Ren Ngongo, a Kinshasa-based biologist and environmental activist, this cooperative continues to develop independently and redefine the relations between art, agriculture, industry and value creation. CATPC has exhibited at The Sculpture Center, NY (2017) and MIT List Visual Art Center (2014).

Cercle D'art Des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise

Kristen Lubben

Marianne Hirsch

Susan Meiselas

Corey Keller

Eduardo Cadava

Işın Önol

This exhaustive monograph of Susan Meiselas will be released in occasion of the retrospective that will take place at Tàpies Foundation in Barcelone, Jeu de Paume in Paris and SFMOMA in San Francisco. Mediations is published by Damiani/Jeu de Paume/Fondation Tàpies. This exhibition and monograph propose a selection of works from the 1970s to today which reveal the particular approach of Susan Meiselas toward to the underlying reasons for making photographs, how the image concerns it's subject as much as the photographer and the role that these images can have at different levels in society and particularly in photojournalism. She questions the relationship between the image and the subject in such a way as to include the people portrayed in the image in the process of the making. There is nothing systematic in her approach: each work expresses in a very strong manner that context is vital to the understanding of photography. Therefore her work is specific to the persons portrayed, to the notion of community to which they belong and to the locality of the geographic and political territories that the artist addresses. The way of the showing the work is equally a part of the thought process. How does the spectator behold the artwork? It is often comprised of many parts, made in different media: each "layer" is used to document a level of meaning. For Meiselas one should be able to grasp why the image was taken. Both the subject of the image and the context in which the images are shown are taken into account in the elaboration of each project.

Mediations

Miki Kratsman

Miki Kratsman (born 1959) has worked as a photojournalist in the Palestinian Occupied Territories for over three decades. Originally created in the context of daily news, his photographs look at both "wanted men"--individuals sought by the Israeli state--and the everyman and everywoman on the street who, by virtue of being Palestinian in a particular time and place, can be seen as a "suspect." Kratsman has also provoked long-term interaction around the images on social media, creating a Facebook page on which viewers are invited to identify the individuals portrayed and comment on their "fate." This complex project is chronicled in this book in more than 300 images that powerfully implicate the viewer. A text by Ariella Azoulay explores the ways in which the shadow of death is an actual threat that hovers over Kratsman's subjects.

The Resolution of the Suspect

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.

Adi Ophir

Since the start of the occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Israel's domination of the Palestinians has deprived an entire population of any political status or protection. But even decades on, most people speak of this rule—both in everyday political discussion and in legal and academic debates—as temporary, as a state of affairs incidental and external to the Israeli regime. In The One-State Condition, Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir directly challenge this belief. Looking closely at the history and contemporary formation of the ruling apparatus—the technologies and operations of the Israeli army, the General Security Services, and the legal system imposed in the Occupied Territories—Azoulay and Ophir outline the one-state condition of Israel/Palestine: the grounding principle of Israeli governance is the perpetuation of differential rule over populations of differing status. Israeli citizenship is shaped through the active denial of Palestinian citizenship and civil rights. Though many Israelis, on both political right and left, agree that the occupation constitutes a problem for Israeli democracy, few ultimately admit that Israel is no democracy or question the very structure of the Israeli regime itself. Too frequently ignored are the lasting effects of the deceptive denial of the events of 1948 and 1967, and the ways in which the resulting occupation has reinforced the sweeping militarization and recent racialization of Israeli society. Azoulay and Ophir show that acknowledgment of the one-state condition is not only a prerequisite for considering a one- or two-state solution; it is a prerequisite for advancing new ideas to move beyond the trap of this false dilemma.

Ariella Azoulay

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