Conversation

VLC Forum 2024: Relative Histories

Oct 26, 2024

1:15–2:30pm ET

The New School, Starr Foundation Hall
Lower Level, 63 Fifth Avenue
New York City

Thinking through and beyond historical relatedness, relations, and relativism of past and ongoing colonial erasure, imperial violence, and genocide, Palestinian architectural scholar and urbanist Mahdi Sabbagh and writer and genocide scholar Zoé Samudzi take on the coloniality of the museum, the ethnographic archive, and architecture. Their conversation oscillates between their work as scholars and researchers in institutional settings as well as their personal and bodily experiences within them. They each grapple with the challenges and opportunities for intervening, altering, and amending archives, museums, and other history-bearing institutions, with the awareness that they are already revisionist accounts of the past. Speaking to individual and communal practices and legacies, they discuss the role of objects and rituals in reckoning with history, narrating counter histories and the potential for solidarity and liberation across past and ongoing struggles.

The Vera List Center Forum 2024 is presented as part of the center’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction*. It is curated by Eriola Pira with Carin Kuoni, with research support by Ariana Kallinga and is convened with the support of Tabor Banquer, Re’al Christian, and Adrienne Umeh.

This event is supported by the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy and the Helen Shapiro Lectureship fund.

The Fall 2024 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, individual donors as well as the following institutional funders:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Boris Lurie Art Foundation/The Schaina and Josephina Lurje Memorial Foundation
Dayton Foundation
Mellon Foundation
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature
Terra Foundation for American Art
and The New School