Lecture, Performance

2018-2020 Vera List Center Fellow, artist and researcher, Helene Kazan gives a lecture-performance introducing ‘poetic testimony’ as a speculative legal future, and as a feminist method for breaking asymmetric power structures in international law.

In this lecture-performance of audio/visual material from different temporal and spatial contexts encountered throughout her work, Kazan draws on contemporary feminist and queer critical legal theory, on culturally ingrained and gendered modes of voicing evidence that often exclude or render the human body invisible. Engaging the proposed speculative legal futures that question necessary modes of reform in international law, Kazan posits poetic testimony amongst such methods for empowering the subject affected by internationally perpetrated violence, experienced through armed conflict and climate disaster. Further, Kazan questions the modes of solidarity that can be engaged through poetic testimony, in connecting communities and contexts dealing with the effects of violence that fall outside of international law’s conceptual frame of accountability.

Following the lecture-performance, Kazan engages in conversation with Toby Lee, artist, anthropologist, and Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Josh Guilford, Assistant Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College.

Participants

Josh Guilford, Assistant Professor of English in Film and Media Studies at Amherst College
Helene Kazan, artist and 2018-20 Vera List Center Fellow
Toby Lee, artist, Anthropologist, and Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts

“Speculative Legal Futures and the Poetic Testimony of Violence” is presented at UnionDocs as part of Kazan’s ongoing investigation as 2018-2020 Vera List Center Fellow at The New School, New York. Building on Kazan’s presentation in fall 2018 at the start of the fellowship, the project will culminate in an assembly event organized with the Vera List Center in the spring of 2020. The UnionDocs event is organized by Toby Lee and Josh Guilford in conjunction with World Records, a journal of documentary media published by UnionDocs. Additional support for this event is provided by Amherst College.