The MA Program at the Center for Human Rights & the Arts is pleased to announce Material As Witness, the thesis exhibition of the MA in Human Rights & the Arts, Class of 2024.
Material As Witness is taking place April 19–28 at Massena Campus, with one installation performance at Blithewood Lawn. The exhibition features installations, live performances, and written works by the graduating cohort. The artistic, academic, and hybrid theses are all based on original research by students. They make interventions at both the analytic and methodological levels of analysis.
Accessing Massena Campus
Massena Campus is located at 30 Seminary Dr, Barrytown, NY 12507, and has available parking. In addition, shuttle service from and back to South Kline Shuttle Stop will depart Annandale at 3 pm, 4 pm, 5 pm, and 6 pm (with the last return from Massena at 7:15 pm).
Installations & Reading Room Schedule
Massena Campus & Blithewood Lawn, Bard College, April 19-28, 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Performance Schedule
Friday April 19, Saturday April 20, Saturday April 27, and Sunday April 28.
The Sanguinary Cradle: Cutha
By Ciko Sidzumo
5 pm – 7 pm (durational, no need for reservations.)
Thesis Project Abstracts
Camera as Kalashnikov: The Ideology and Visual Aesthetics of Palestinian Armed Resistance (1968–1982)
Mayss Al Alami
Camera as Kalashnikov is a written thesis that explores the films of the Palestinian revolution between 1968 and 1982, with a particular focus on films by the Palestine Film Unit (PFU). The thesis investigates what the visual aesthetics of armed resistance in the films tell us about the political ideology of the revolution. It approaches the films within two primary contexts: the regional and global efforts to displace, disarm, and pacify the Palestinian resistance after the 1967 Naksa, and its exilic condition in Jordan and Lebanon. Through close readings of selected scenes, Camera as Kalashnikov is inspired by the films’ visual materiality to explore the recurrent figure of the Kalashnikov as a complex device that links the filmic struggle for self-representation with the militant struggle for liberation in exile.
Designed by Our Hands
Anas Al-Khatib
Designed by Our Hands is an architectural design manual and research article investigating the space-making agency in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, Palestine. Through tracing the spatial transformations of four generations of toilets, the booklet documents the histories of construction practices, tools, and technologies in the camp. This work also offers a design toolkit by refugees for other refugees.
The “Banality” of Photographs: Critical Analysis of Photographic Practices in Russian Turkestan
Guzal Alimova
This written thesis explores the images of women from the Turkestan Album (1871–1872) and Hugues Krafft’s A Travers le Turkestan Russe (1902). In doing so, it challenges the hegemonic knowledge production on the presentation of images produced in unequal power relations. By looking at photographs of Turkestani women produced during the reign of the Russian Empire, it addresses the question of agency, marginal resistance, exploitation of body and mind, and the exotification of culture and religion. The research responds to the lack of adequate attention in existing Central Asian postcolonial studies to engage with the nuances and complexities embedded within photographs, calling for a more critical and subject-oriented analysis of visual representations in the region’s historical and contemporary contexts.
Where Do We Meet The Sun?
Raneem Ayyad
Where Do We Meet The Sun? is an interactive installation and research article investigating the interconnectedness of vitamin D deficiency and urban planning in the city of Al-Zarqa in Jordan where the artist grew up. The audience is invited to explore the everyday life of three women living in residential apartments by following the voice in mundane domestic objects. The project is based on one-to-one collaborations with three housewives through a participant observation method called “follow the mop,” in which the artist joins everyday cleaning chores while recording brief encounters with sunlight. Where Do We Meet The Sun examines natural light as a medium of regulation, gender discrimination, and illness enforced by the neoliberal mass-produced housing.
ვითომ-ვითომ [Vitom-Vitom]
Luka Gotsiridze
ვითომ-ვითომ [Vitom-Vitom] is an interactive performance exploring personal accounts of resistance to the normative gender roles that are ingrained in and performed as part of the Georgian national identity. The audience is invited to a traditional Supra table, disrupted by imaginative childhood play. Through paper-cut characters, food, and polyphonic singing, the artist reclaims his childhood position at the table while examining the notions of cultural belonging and queer spacemaking.
In Search of Adonis_XXX
Immanuel J.
In Search of Adonis_XXX is a multichannel video installation depicting imagery from Immanuel J.’s inquiry of Black gay male sexuality in the digital age. J. took on a hypermasculine queer digital persona on the social media platform X. The installation reconstructs visual and sonic motifs of their time spent in erotic chat rooms and on social media to ponder the relationship between Black Gay men’s sexual fantasies and power. During an epidemic of increasing isolation and loneliness, these queer erotic spaces and subversive sexual bonding rituals provide reprieve to the throes of racial capitalism and the toll it takes on the Black body. By leaning into the cannibalistic consumption of Black flesh, these men dawn personas informed by the pain of state-sanctioned violence. Adonis_XXX tells the story of the pleasure found within Black (dis)empowerment.
No One Has Stayed And No One Has Left
K.
This multimedia installation delves into domestic and international reverberations from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. It follows the war-induced migration from Russia and explores an insurgent border between Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Tbilisi, Georgia. Through engaging with text, images, and film, the audience is invited to reflect on the dialectical relationship between mobility and immobility, voice and silence, complicity and dissent in the context of war, imperialism, and state violence.
Cultural Politics and National Imaginaries in Soviet and Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan
Mariia Pankova
This written thesis examines how the formation of Kyrgyz national identity has been shaped by the intersection of cultural institutions, visual culture, and grassroots artistic initiatives. The research focuses on transformations of national discourse since Kyrgyzstan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It explores Soviet legacies in mediating the national imaginary through structures of knowledge and cultural production. By examining visual symbols appropriated in the project of national storytelling, the research draws connections between the creation of national myths and their physical manifestation in material culture. This project documents recent artistic and activist interventions in public institutions that aim to question the dominant discourses shaping national identity.
Who Needs AI, We Need Potatoes
Aya Rebai
Who Needs AI, We Need Potatoes is an interactive performance installation set in a mobile farmstand with homegrown sentient plants. This multi-sensory experience is based on research on biohacking, object-oriented ontology and speculative design. The audience is invited to encounter different smart beings and to reflect on the role of new technology in disrupting the Anthropocene. This live art project comments on human exceptionalism and its overlook on the more-than-human world.
Behind the Tanks: The Politics and Aesthetics of Water Tanks in Palestine
Jina Rishmawi
This written thesis investigates the cultural and political meanings behind water tanks in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It explores the centrality of a discourse around water—”making the desert bloom”—to the Zionist project, and the importance of struggles over access to water supplies in the period after 1948. The water tanks that are a ubiquitous feature of the built environment in Palestine emerge as both a symbol of occupation and as a physical key to deciphering its logic and tactics. Water tanks have become slow, violent tools that generate and expose deep problems in the urban landscape of the occupied territories. At the same time, they symbolize the possibilities of resistance in the most basic elements of everyday life in Palestine.
The Narratives of The Moths
Laila Sharif
The Narratives of The Moths is an interactive installation inspired by the ongoing struggle of the Grandmothers of Plaza De Mayo activist group from Argentina, who are searching for their “lost” grandchildren and the truth about the fate of their forcibly “disappeared” children. The work uses the centuries-old mindful practice of folding origami paper sculptures, to create space for collective memory and grief for victims of state-terror. The artist invites the audience to join her at a work table, folding origami from archival documents from Argentina and daily news of violence from around the globe. The archive is based on research linked to the use of DNA as a tool to identify the victims of forced disappearance.
The Sanguinary Cradle: Cutha
Ciko Sidzumo
The Sanguinary Cradle: Cutha is an audio installation and movement-based performance exploring menstrual pain and intergenerational somatic relief techniques. The piece is informed by activism on period poverty in the Global South as well as findings from clinical trials and dance research on the mitigation of menstrual pain. During the performance, the audience is invited to engage in exercises of collective somatic care based on the artist’s own exploration of her body in pain through the use of breath-work, vocal dexterity, Trauma Release Exercise, and undulation. Beyond the performance, the installation space is open to the public as a space for reflection, grounding, and introspective movement.
Shroud[ed]: MH17
Nestor Rotsen
Shroud[ed]: MH17 is a multimedia project centered on the terrorist attack on Malaysian Airlines MH17, shot down by Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Beginning with 30 photographs taken during field research in Southeast Asia, the work unfolds into an investigative installation, to be concluded with a fashion performance showcasing 30 garments based on the victims’ stories. The project explores the repercussions of the Russian regime’s imperialist desires, the profound impact of the loss of 298 victims from 10 different countries, and the important recognition that the Russian war crimes in Ukraine started way before the 2022 invasion.
The MA Program at the Center for Human Rights & the Arts is pleased to announce Material As Witness, the thesis exhibition of the MA in Human Rights & the Arts, Class of 2024.
Material As Witness is taking place April 19–28 at Massena Campus, with one installation performance at Blithewood Lawn. The exhibition features installations, live performances, and written works by the graduating cohort. The artistic, academic, and hybrid theses are all based on original research by students. They make interventions at both the analytic and methodological levels of analysis.
Accessing Massena Campus
Massena Campus is located at 30 Seminary Dr, Barrytown, NY 12507, and has available parking. In addition, shuttle service from and back to South Kline Shuttle Stop will depart Annandale at 3 pm, 4 pm, 5 pm, and 6 pm (with the last return from Massena at 7:15 pm).
Installations & Reading Room Schedule
Massena Campus & Blithewood Lawn, Bard College, April 19-28, 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Performance Schedule
Friday April 19, Saturday April 20, Saturday April 27, and Sunday April 28.
The Sanguinary Cradle: Cutha
By Ciko Sidzumo
5 pm – 7 pm (durational, no need for reservations.)
Thesis Project Abstracts
Camera as Kalashnikov: The Ideology and Visual Aesthetics of Palestinian Armed Resistance (1968–1982)
Mayss Al Alami
Camera as Kalashnikov is a written thesis that explores the films of the Palestinian revolution between 1968 and 1982, with a particular focus on films by the Palestine Film Unit (PFU). The thesis investigates what the visual aesthetics of armed resistance in the films tell us about the political ideology of the revolution. It approaches the films within two primary contexts: the regional and global efforts to displace, disarm, and pacify the Palestinian resistance after the 1967 Naksa, and its exilic condition in Jordan and Lebanon. Through close readings of selected scenes, Camera as Kalashnikov is inspired by the films’ visual materiality to explore the recurrent figure of the Kalashnikov as a complex device that links the filmic struggle for self-representation with the militant struggle for liberation in exile.
Designed by Our Hands
Anas Al-Khatib
Designed by Our Hands is an architectural design manual and research article investigating the space-making agency in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, Palestine. Through tracing the spatial transformations of four generations of toilets, the booklet documents the histories of construction practices, tools, and technologies in the camp. This work also offers a design toolkit by refugees for other refugees.
The “Banality” of Photographs: Critical Analysis of Photographic Practices in Russian Turkestan
Guzal Alimova
This written thesis explores the images of women from the Turkestan Album (1871–1872) and Hugues Krafft’s A Travers le Turkestan Russe (1902). In doing so, it challenges the hegemonic knowledge production on the presentation of images produced in unequal power relations. By looking at photographs of Turkestani women produced during the reign of the Russian Empire, it addresses the question of agency, marginal resistance, exploitation of body and mind, and the exotification of culture and religion. The research responds to the lack of adequate attention in existing Central Asian postcolonial studies to engage with the nuances and complexities embedded within photographs, calling for a more critical and subject-oriented analysis of visual representations in the region’s historical and contemporary contexts.
Where Do We Meet The Sun?
Raneem Ayyad
Where Do We Meet The Sun? is an interactive installation and research article investigating the interconnectedness of vitamin D deficiency and urban planning in the city of Al-Zarqa in Jordan where the artist grew up. The audience is invited to explore the everyday life of three women living in residential apartments by following the voice in mundane domestic objects. The project is based on one-to-one collaborations with three housewives through a participant observation method called “follow the mop,” in which the artist joins everyday cleaning chores while recording brief encounters with sunlight. Where Do We Meet The Sun examines natural light as a medium of regulation, gender discrimination, and illness enforced by the neoliberal mass-produced housing.
ვითომ-ვითომ [Vitom-Vitom]
Luka Gotsiridze
ვითომ-ვითომ [Vitom-Vitom] is an interactive performance exploring personal accounts of resistance to the normative gender roles that are ingrained in and performed as part of the Georgian national identity. The audience is invited to a traditional Supra table, disrupted by imaginative childhood play. Through paper-cut characters, food, and polyphonic singing, the artist reclaims his childhood position at the table while examining the notions of cultural belonging and queer spacemaking.
In Search of Adonis_XXX
Immanuel J.
In Search of Adonis_XXX is a multichannel video installation depicting imagery from Immanuel J.’s inquiry of Black gay male sexuality in the digital age. J. took on a hypermasculine queer digital persona on the social media platform X. The installation reconstructs visual and sonic motifs of their time spent in erotic chat rooms and on social media to ponder the relationship between Black Gay men’s sexual fantasies and power. During an epidemic of increasing isolation and loneliness, these queer erotic spaces and subversive sexual bonding rituals provide reprieve to the throes of racial capitalism and the toll it takes on the Black body. By leaning into the cannibalistic consumption of Black flesh, these men dawn personas informed by the pain of state-sanctioned violence. Adonis_XXX tells the story of the pleasure found within Black (dis)empowerment.
No One Has Stayed And No One Has Left
K.
This multimedia installation delves into domestic and international reverberations from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. It follows the war-induced migration from Russia and explores an insurgent border between Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Tbilisi, Georgia. Through engaging with text, images, and film, the audience is invited to reflect on the dialectical relationship between mobility and immobility, voice and silence, complicity and dissent in the context of war, imperialism, and state violence.
Cultural Politics and National Imaginaries in Soviet and Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan
Mariia Pankova
This written thesis examines how the formation of Kyrgyz national identity has been shaped by the intersection of cultural institutions, visual culture, and grassroots artistic initiatives. The research focuses on transformations of national discourse since Kyrgyzstan’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. It explores Soviet legacies in mediating the national imaginary through structures of knowledge and cultural production. By examining visual symbols appropriated in the project of national storytelling, the research draws connections between the creation of national myths and their physical manifestation in material culture. This project documents recent artistic and activist interventions in public institutions that aim to question the dominant discourses shaping national identity.
Who Needs AI, We Need Potatoes
Aya Rebai
Who Needs AI, We Need Potatoes is an interactive performance installation set in a mobile farmstand with homegrown sentient plants. This multi-sensory experience is based on research on biohacking, object-oriented ontology and speculative design. The audience is invited to encounter different smart beings and to reflect on the role of new technology in disrupting the Anthropocene. This live art project comments on human exceptionalism and its overlook on the more-than-human world.
Behind the Tanks: The Politics and Aesthetics of Water Tanks in Palestine
Jina Rishmawi
This written thesis investigates the cultural and political meanings behind water tanks in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It explores the centrality of a discourse around water—”making the desert bloom”—to the Zionist project, and the importance of struggles over access to water supplies in the period after 1948. The water tanks that are a ubiquitous feature of the built environment in Palestine emerge as both a symbol of occupation and as a physical key to deciphering its logic and tactics. Water tanks have become slow, violent tools that generate and expose deep problems in the urban landscape of the occupied territories. At the same time, they symbolize the possibilities of resistance in the most basic elements of everyday life in Palestine.
The Narratives of The Moths
Laila Sharif
The Narratives of The Moths is an interactive installation inspired by the ongoing struggle of the Grandmothers of Plaza De Mayo activist group from Argentina, who are searching for their “lost” grandchildren and the truth about the fate of their forcibly “disappeared” children. The work uses the centuries-old mindful practice of folding origami paper sculptures, to create space for collective memory and grief for victims of state-terror. The artist invites the audience to join her at a work table, folding origami from archival documents from Argentina and daily news of violence from around the globe. The archive is based on research linked to the use of DNA as a tool to identify the victims of forced disappearance.
The Sanguinary Cradle: Cutha
Ciko Sidzumo
The Sanguinary Cradle: Cutha is an audio installation and movement-based performance exploring menstrual pain and intergenerational somatic relief techniques. The piece is informed by activism on period poverty in the Global South as well as findings from clinical trials and dance research on the mitigation of menstrual pain. During the performance, the audience is invited to engage in exercises of collective somatic care based on the artist’s own exploration of her body in pain through the use of breath-work, vocal dexterity, Trauma Release Exercise, and undulation. Beyond the performance, the installation space is open to the public as a space for reflection, grounding, and introspective movement.
Shroud[ed]: MH17
Nestor Rotsen
Shroud[ed]: MH17 is a multimedia project centered on the terrorist attack on Malaysian Airlines MH17, shot down by Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Beginning with 30 photographs taken during field research in Southeast Asia, the work unfolds into an investigative installation, to be concluded with a fashion performance showcasing 30 garments based on the victims’ stories. The project explores the repercussions of the Russian regime’s imperialist desires, the profound impact of the loss of 298 victims from 10 different countries, and the important recognition that the Russian war crimes in Ukraine started way before the 2022 invasion.