Brianne Cohen Talks about Eco Aesthetics

Tue 12 Jun 2018, 6.30 pm
DOCLAB

From DOCLAB:

It’s our great pleasure to invite you to the first event at Hanoi DocLab’s new space:

“Just in Time or Too Late? Climate Justice and Forensic Aesthetics”

Brianne Cohen
University of Colorado, Boulder

How can artists help in the fight for climate justice? By this I mean resistance against the large-scale violence of global warming, which involves a complex and unjustly distributed web of responsibility. Some are clearly more accountable for, as well as subject to, environmental violence than others in different parts of the world. This talk examines the idea and method of forensic aesthetics in relation to such crimes against the Earth.

Forensic aesthetics is an artistic concept that has recently gained popular traction in contemporary art circles, for instance, receiving much critical acclaim at last summer’s Documenta 14. It arises from a group of artist-activists in London – known as Forensic Architecture – who work to document mass atrocities and bring them to light in diverse forums such as art exhibitions, the mass media, and courtrooms. Such work even aims to adjudicate crimes and bring perpetrators to justice legally, and several of its members importantly focus on mass ecological violence. This talk asks whether such an approach and its attention on culpability arrive just in time, when we now have the 21st-century digital and mapping tools necessary to document such far-reaching crimes, or too late, as prevention against global warming suddenly seems more urgent than “pointing blame” after the fact.

In this talk, I aim to demonstrate both the merits and limits of a forensic aesthetic approach for artists. Climate justice requires not only bringing crimes to justice in the aftermath of violence committed, but also imagining the less clear and slower care necessary to prevent such violence in the first place.

About Brianne Cohen:

Brianne Cohen is an assistant professor of contemporary art history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research and teaching focuses on contemporary art in the public sphere. From participatory art to lens-based activism, she examines artistic practices particularly concerned with global migration, postcolonial histories, political violence, and ecology and environmentalism. Her book project, “Preventive Publics: Contemporary Art and the Idea of Europe,” analyzes contemporary art that grapples with cross-cultural affiliation in 21st-century Europe. Centered around the art of Harun Farocki, Thomas Hirschhorn, and the artist collective Henry VIII’s Wives, it charts a shifting generational outlook on transnational European identification, from post-Holocaust unification and decolonization, to more recently contested issues of secularism, globalization, and refugee movement. She has published articles related to this research in Third Text, the Journal of European Studies, and Image [&] Narrative, as well as the edited anthology, New Silent Cinema (Routledge/AFI, 2015).

She is also in the early stages of another book project related to visual-material questions of ecological devastation in Southeast Asia. Tentatively titled “Public Matters: Environmental Violence and Lens-Based Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia,” this study investigates creative documentary artwork that catalyzes translocal protest and raises global publicity against environmental destruction in the region.

Before joining CU Boulder, she taught as a visiting assistant professor at Brown University and Amherst College. After receiving her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2012, she also held a joint postdoctoral fellowship at the Université catholique de Louvain and Lieven Gevaert Centre in Belgium. During this appointment, she co-edited a book, The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Leuven University Press and Cornell University Press, 2016).

Language: English, with Vietnamese interpretation (by Quyen Nguyen)

Free entrance. Limited space, please come early to make sure you have a seat!

(Sorry we don’t have space for parking, please come early and park at the temple just across the street from Lane 378, then take a walk into Lane 376 till you reach number 12 on the right, the House 11 will be the one in a corner)

Image Caption: Unknown Fields Division, Rare Earthenware (2014-15)

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