On a flight to Dubai in February, when I looked at the flight path on my seat screen, I had a sickening feeling that something terrible would happen before my return flight. Sadly, my hunch was correct. Moreover, the war was worse than what I had expected, and that was only the beginning. It was even more eerily to notice that the shortest direct line between Toronto and Dubai would
It is an understatement to say that darkness is falling upon us these days. For those who dare to see and experience it, there are simply too many places to begin, and there is no time to waste. However, it is unclear what these obscure shades of darkness really mean when they constitute both the foreground and the background. Incidentally but not so incidentally, my recent publications that came out
Have you been to the zone yet? As a fan of Andrei Tarkovsky, especially his occult 1979 Stalker, my answer is a definite YES. In fact, in the past decade, I have visited the zone metaphorically, conceptually, and even physically. For Tarkovsky and his fans, of course, the zone is allegorical. However, in a more concrete sense, some of my recent published essays are also about the idea of the zone as a heterotopic
My ongoing global Cold War series called Bifucated and Parallel Histories was invited to participate in China’s biannual Lishui Photography Festival in November 2019. Although the first exhibition of this series took place in Berlin in 2014, most images in this show came from my rather recent works. Located at the Lishui Art Museum–the main festival site–my show constituted part of the festival’s two core exhibitions. Overall, the festival hosted
My exibition Moving Images, Moving People is now on view @ 401 Richmond as part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. This is also the first exhibition of this body of work after more than 4 years of research and collaboration funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC), as well as 15 months of planning, curatorial design, and production. The exhibition is made up of illuminated
Posters for my upcoming exhibition in this year’s Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and the related talk + roundtable event.
Is it possible to develop an aesthetics of resistance in a world that is dominated by spectacles sanctioned by the state and capital?
Le Monde, the Paris-based daily, reports on the censorship problems in this year’s Lianzhou Foto Festival. They estimate that at least 10% of the approximately 2,000 photographs, including several of my photographs, were censored in the exhibition. I spoke briefly with an editor from the paper: Festival de photographie : en Chine, l’art mystérieux de la censure