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Conference + Workshop | Extraterritorial Images: Exploring the Borderlines Between Artistic and Academic, by Maayan Amir

On 27th and 28th September 2023, Auditorium at South Pavilion

PROGRAMME
Auditorium of South Pavilion

27.09.2023 | 03:00 pm | CONFERENCE 

28.09.2023 | 09:00 am | WORKSHOP

My research centers around investigating the intricate connections and disparities between images and the law within extraterritorial jurisdictions. I focus on addressing the gaps in our visual knowledge and understanding how they are generated in relation to visual material used as evidence. Additionally, I extend and broaden the exploration of the extraterritorial potential of art.

This workshop will engage with the concept of extraterritoriality, viewed as a result of the encounter between different legal systems, politics, and technologies of governance, which enable their co-existence and produce complex regimes of representation. Building on examples of how an extraterritorial logic of representation is useful in accounting for certain aspects of contemporary visual cultures, in this encounter we will traverse the borderlines between artistic and academic research to discuss possible methodologies and imagine other possible approaches. During the talk, I will discuss my research on the topic and show artworks created in the frame of Exterritory, a long-term art project led by artist Ruti Sela and myself.  Springing from the wish to offer an image that transcends arbitrary discriminating border regimes, the project was instigated in 2010 when we projected video artworks by Middle-Eastern artists onto the sails of boats navigating the extraterritorial waters of the Mediterranean, wishing to create an image of art exhibited in a neutral space beholden to no national constraints of any kind.

Coordinated by Domingos Loureiro
FBAUP / i2ADS

BIO 

I am an artist and a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Over the past decades, my art and research has focused on a multidisciplinary inquiry into legal-juridical, political, and visual fields. A significant part of these endeavors has been carried out in the frame of the collaborative art project Exterritory (2009–ongoing together with Ruti Sela), which has received widespread recognition (including a UNESCO award) and has involved partners, exhibitions, and commissions in the Far East, Africa, Europe, North America, and beyond. Conceived as a screening of a video compilation of works by Middle-Eastern artists onto the sails of boats with the aim of using extraterritorial waters as a meeting space that offers a suspension of the region’s border regimes, my work has pivoted on a cross-disciplinary practical and theoretical examination of extraterritorial phenomena in both local and global contexts in order to distill the logic of extraterritorial representation. Consisting of the creation of artworks, scientific collaborations and advanced technologies experimentation, techno-aesthetic interventions, public events and publications, the project led me not only to a adhere to committed search for the extraterritorial power of art, but also to embark on an in-depth study of the rifts between imagery and the law in the context of extraterritorial jurisdictions. Our works are featured internationally at various exhibitions and venues, including the Biennale of Sydney, Istanbul Biennial, Berlin Biennial, Manifesta, New Museum Triennial, Stedelijk Museum, Centre Pompidou; Art in General, Tate Modern, Jeu de Paume, among many others. Maayan Amir (Israel)

 

Credit: Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir, Therms and Conditions, 01:33 min,
Infrared Thermography, 2022