Online Conference: Imaging and Imagining Intimacy (February 11-13, 2021)

When: February 11-13, 2021

Where: McGill University (online)

This interdisciplinary conference explores the role of images in the production of diverse forms of intimacy as a crucial locus for the possible reconfiguration of social and geo/political relations. Imaging and Imagining Intimacy proposes to think through the critical possibilities afforded by imaging processes and practices, their affective dispositions, and their potential in imagining and creating an otherwise.

The keynote lecture is open to all. An *EventBrite* page is coming soon. The conference is also open to all, but registration is *required*. If you would like to register please send an email to imaging.intimacy2021@gmail.com

Organized by Farah Atoui and Viviane Saglier

With the support of the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Conference Description:

The parameters of what counts as intimate have been dramatically altered in the past year, not only by disciplinary and/or sanitary measures in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, but also by global anti-racist protests calling for a new set of social relations no longer determined by the afterlives of slavery and colonial structures of oppression and exploitation. Intimacy, as Lisa Lowe (2015) suggests, functions as an analytic to rethink the historical construction of geopolitical orderings and unacknowledged co-dependencies that structure racial capitalism. Recent debates in critical theory across the fields of queer and sexuality studies, Black studies, Indigenous and settler colonial studies, anthropology, and history among others have mobilized the vocabulary of intimacy to address not only racial but also emotional capitalism, neoliberal and neocolonial governmentality, queer solidarities and kinships, and the viscerality of decolonization. Building on those important foundations, Imaging and Imagining Intimacy proposes to think through the critical possibilities afforded by imaging processes and practices, their affective dispositions, and their potential in imagining and creating an otherwise. The speakers investigate how contrasting understandings of intimacy inflect, discipline, and potentiate the production, circulation, reproduction, meaning, and effect of images in the world. Images play a specific role in the study of intimacy, because they (re)present, (re)produce, and maintain personal desires and social attachments, which are sometimes revealed to be cruel and deceptive (Berlant 2011). The speakers raise central questions about what images can and cannot do, the interpretative worlds they open beyond the realm of the visual, the relationships they make possible and those they foreclose, and the fleeting and structural temporalities they articulate.

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PROGRAM:

THURSDAY FEB. 11

Keynote lecture | 5:00-7:00 PM (EST)

Discussant: Joana Joachim

Black Grief in the Atmosphere of the Visual

Kimberley Juanita Brown

FRIDAY FEB. 12

Panel 1 | 1:00- 2:45 PM (EST)

Discussant: Sanaz Sohrabi

The "Inside-Out" photo series: undoing percepticide one pixel at a time

Florencia Marchetti

Artefacts of Movement: Intimacy and the Politics of Co-citizenship

Krista Geneviève Lynes

Ethical-Ontological Orientations of Indigenous Materiality

Suzanne Kite

Panel 2 | 3:15-5:00 PM (EST )

Discussant: Hadeel Assali

Lingering Attachments: Queer South Asian Diasporas & Settler Colonialism

Beenash Jafri

Suspended Intimacy in Safaa Khatib’s “The Braids Rebellion”

Nayrouz Abu Hatoum

Poetic Images and the Rubble

Cynthia Kreichati

SATURDAY FEB. 13

Panel 3 | 11:00 AM -12:15 PM (EST)

Discussant: Alanna Thain

“No Need for Statements”: Ren Hang and the Suicide of Meaning

Bobby Benedicto

Acoustic Visions: Sounding Sense in Ethnographic Film

Diana Allan

Concluding Note | 12:15 PM (EST )

Alanna Thain