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.
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
My solo exhibtion The Theater of War will open on December 1 as part of the 2018 Lianzhou Foto Festival. The exhibition draws on my ongoing investigation of the relation between aesthetics and military violence, nuclear fallout, and Cold War ruins. In his treatise On War published nearly two centuries ago, the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz deploys the idea of the “Theater of War” to analyze warfare. By
In the latest issue of Radical History Review that focuses on Photography and Work, my extended photo-essay, “Portable and Precarious: Life and Spectacle in China’s Construction Camps,” explores the relations betwen mobile cinema and the portable life of migrant workers inside China’s construction compounds. “[W]hereas shipping containers are transported between seaports and other logistic centers that are mostly devoid of humans, dormitory containers are packed with migrant bodies to be
We like to imagine Japan as a clean and technologically savvy society. Yet, little known to the outside world is a burgeoning subculture of visiting abandoned factories, mines, theme parks, and resorts that have been left behind by Japan’s bubble economy or the so-called “Lost Decade” of the 1990s. How do we make sense of this “haikyo mania” (ruin mania) practiced by Japanese ruins aficionados? My book chapter, “Japan Lost and
In a photo-essay that seeks to bring “future-oriented fictions and urban-centred theories of China and India” together, historian Kavita Philip writes about my photos, along with those by Dipti Desai. “How might we think dialogically about the material geographies of China and India, while not overplaying the familiar comparative analytics of borders and populations, communism and democracy, economic and cultural difference? How might we think in the longue durée about