Notes on Dissent

_EN

My talk will point to a shared cultural and epistemological domain between contemporary activist and artistic practices. In particular, the move from a “critique of representation” towards a performative creation of shared yet contested public realms of appearance. By performative, I mean, the active formation of interventionist strategies of political dissent through, among others, the (re)mobilization and configuration of communicative modes and mediums of public address and exchange. These operations, with their focus on acts of transmission and circulation, become indispensable for political processes of subjectivization. I will mainly focus on the work of the photography collective Activestills, and on the artistic work and performances of Sharon Hayes.

Vered Maimon is an Associate Professor in the Art History Department at Tel Aviv University. Her essays on the history and theory of photography and contemporary art appeared in October, Oxford Art Journal, History of Photography, Art History, Parallax, TDR: The Drama Review, and Third Text. She is the author of Singular Images, Failed Copies: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Early Photograph (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and the co-editor of Activestills: Photography as Protest in Palestine/Israel (Pluto Press, 2016), and Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Duke University Press, 2009). Her book Contemporary Art, Photography and the Politics of Citizenship is forthcoming from Routledge in 2020.