The MA Program at the Center for Human Rights & the Arts is pleased to announce the thesis exhibition of the MA in Human Rights & the Arts, Class of 2025.
The exhibition is taking place April 25 through May 4, 3–7:30 pm, across the Massena Campus at Bard College. The exhibition features installations, films, 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.
Below is the program for the thesis exhibition, including a list of events and showcased works :
Excerpts of these works are on display in the exhibition
Sacred War as the Russian National Idea
Arina Pshenichnaya
“Late pyar lone lar?” In Search of A Clear Conscience in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution
Pyae Phyo Aung
A Baghdad Sin: Peregrinations in A Ruptured Geography
Nabil Salih
Open daily, 3–7:30 pm
Livestreamed Genocide: TikTok LIVE in Gaza
Sarah Al-Yahya
Calls from an Unseen Chorus
Amr Amer
Conducting Empire
Elinor Arden
The Land, Not a Film By Youssef Chahine
Leil Zahra Mortada
Prison Rule 113.11 and Fugitive Tools
Mauro Tosarelli
This installation features a docufiction video and explores the role of an unofficial taxi vehicle vital to mobility in occupied Palestine, using the cases of Abu Dis and Al-Eizariya, two towns located in Area C of the West Bank. Manufactured by Ford Motor Company, this US vehicle has unintentionally functioned as the connective tissue of a fragmented landscape, navigating an apartheid system reinforced by the Oslo Accords. Operating illegally for over thirty years, the Ford Transit has not only sustained movement but also emerged as a tool of cultural sovereignty, community-structured infrastructure, and self-governance. A time capsule of Oslo’s failures, this vehicle offers a lens into the lived realities of Palestinian daily resistance and the unyielding struggle for the right to move.
This hybrid project, comprised of an interactive, web-based installation and research article, examines how “history’s first livestreamed genocide” in Gaza has been presented on TikTok LIVE. The work explores these streams, characterized by their low viewership as well as scattered and disorienting nature, arguing that they reshape our understanding of “livestreamed genocide” as a historical media paradigm. The installation foregrounds the tensions between a gamified platform and the realities of war on the Gaza Strip. In doing so, it examines the uneasy rise of TikTok’s algorithmically-driven platform as a space where social media visibility and atrocity merge, clash, and are reshaped by the logic of public engagement.
Calls from an Unseen Chorus is a sound installation that resists the passive consumption of Palestine as an image of suffering, instead demanding engagement through the act of listening. Centering the auditory as a site of resistance, the work immerses audiences in the sonic realities of occupation and defiance—from the oppressive stasis of colonial checkpoints to the collective force of protest chants, resistance music, and the recorded wills of martyrs. These layered soundscapes challenge static representations of Palestinian struggle, asserting a mobilized, dissenting presence and an unceasing fight for liberation. By stripping away the visual, Calls from an Unseen Chorus transforms listening into an entry point for solidarity, where sound becomes both testimony and a call to resistance.
Conducting Empire is a research article and an installation-performance investigating the material history of the undersea cable network: the physical ‘backbone’ of the internet. The project explores what lies beneath Google’s marketing strategies for their new transatlantic cables, tracing the genealogy of this infrastructure to 19th-century Britain and the era of so-called abolition. A live activation of a sound sculpture exposes the metallic substance of the cable network and its transmission of historical records into the present. By linking claims of technological progress to imperial control, the work reframes the utopian ideal of global connectivity with evidence found in the British National Archives, from the Birmingham copper industry to a mass of colonial correspondences. Conducting Empire removes the network’s insulation to uncover how telecommunications were produced through a violent historical circuit.
This written thesis explores the question of morality and conscience in the anti-authoritarian revolution that took shape in response to the 2021 military coup in Myanmar. The term late pyar lone chin refers to the pride of performing a just action or the shame and guilt of not doing so, and the question, late pyar lone lar?, means roughly “do you have a clear conscience?” It is now widely used to testify to (or question) one’s stance and involvement in the revolution. Examining the digital artifacts and lived experiences of protestors, resistance fighters, and activist fundraisers, the thesis studies the role of calls to conscience in political mobilization and investigates how affect and morality have been activated through aesthetic means to shape the trajectory of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar.
The public policy known as Areas of Protection for Food Production was launched in July of 2024 in the south of La Guajira, Colombia. It aims to focus land use on agricultural production and prohibit any type of mining exploitation. This transition is based on concepts such as the human right to food and food security. This written thesis explores the origins of these concepts, their scope, and their limitations. This is particularly relevant at a time when the La Guajira Corporation is about to grant approval to the mining company Best Coal Company to exploit millions of tons of coal in the Cañaverales Community. This thesis responds to the crisis and the difficulties of the energy transition from an epistemological point of view, through an analysis of archives and geopoetics.
This hybrid project interrogates the role of Arab cultural production—particularly Egyptian songs and films about the Aswan High Dam—in shaping public history and contributing to Nubian dispossession. Building on an ongoing collaboration with Nubian activists, one component of this project is a research article that critiques nationalism and encourages a reflection on the power of cultural memory to perpetuate erasure or resist it. The second component of this project is an interactive installation titled The Land, Not a Film By Youssef Chahine, which examines state propaganda and confronts the failures of Arab liberation movements, while centering a Nubian narrative and presents a speculative grassroots response.
Despite the secular image often associated with modern nationalism, the Russian state’s sacralization of war reveals the enduring power of religious symbols, rituals, and narratives in shaping national identity. This written thesis examines how the concept of sacred war has become central to the Russian national idea through a fusion of Orthodox theology, state power, and militarized aesthetics. It focuses on two key phenomena: the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, which presents war as a timeless and divine foundation of Russian identity; and front-line baptismal rituals, which transform soldiers into metaphysical agents of a civilizational mission. I analyze these practices through the writings of Aleksandr Dugin, whose metaphysical theory of civilizational conflict (noomachy) frames war not as a geopolitical act but as an ontological necessity. Dugin’s thought provides the ideological architecture through which Russia is positioned as a sacred civilization resisting Western nihilism, where war is not simply justified, but ritually and cosmologically required. In doing so, the study challenges secular readings of nationalism and highlights how authoritarian regimes can mobilize religious metaphysics to render war not only legitimate, but liturgically necessary.
Aftermaths are deceptive. They obscure and conceal. This text, weaved along a photographic inquiry, troubles the notion of quietude. Together, they try to point to what lurks and haunts in the crevices of a wounded urbanscape. Twenty-one years after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, what litter and refuse remain in Baghdad today? In a time of rapid urban reconfiguration, what do the residual wartime rubble and the paraphernalia of security regimes tell us of the present, its politics, and relationship to the past? Put differently, what forces and apparatuses obstruct an Iraqi’s walk? Standing by the ruins is an old tradition dating to pre-Islamic poetry and the laments of ancient Mesopotamia. This essay follows suit but goes beyond. Its fragments narrate my auto-ethnographic and ethnographic walks and rides in Baghdad, where I investigate the constellations of rubble, the affects they discharge, and the memories they awaken in a given locale. Much ink and blood were spilled on the streets of Baghdad and world newspapers; this endeavor asks what Iraqis are left with today. The photographs aspire to a private archive for public loss, each being an obstinate interlocutor tested for what eludes vision and what is thought to be seen.
Prisons are not just spaces of deprivation and submission but environments where survival gives rise to new forms of expression and interaction. Despite spatial, social, and political constraints, prisoners cultivate communication networks through sound, imagery, and handmade tools. This installation reframes prison life by focusing on acquired culture and produced knowledge rather than narratives of marginalization. Prison Rule 113.11 highlights both clandestine tools of disobedience—tattoo guns, fishing lines, and makeshift speakers—and the coercion tools manufactured through prison labor. These objects are not merely functional but symbolic of defiance and connection. By amplifying sound rather than retreating into silence, prisoners reclaim their lives and assert their resistance to isolation. Positioning these tools as ‘fugitive objects’, this work reveals how incarcerated individuals are not merely passive subjects but a challenge to the very structures designed to contain them.
The MA Program at the Center for Human Rights & the Arts is pleased to announce the thesis exhibition of the MA in Human Rights & the Arts, Class of 2025.
The exhibition is taking place April 25 through May 4, 3–7:30 pm, across the Massena Campus at Bard College. The exhibition features installations, films, 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.
Below is the program for the thesis exhibition, including a list of events and showcased works :
Excerpts of these works are on display in the exhibition
Sacred War as the Russian National Idea
Arina Pshenichnaya
“Late pyar lone lar?” In Search of A Clear Conscience in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution
Pyae Phyo Aung
A Baghdad Sin: Peregrinations in A Ruptured Geography
Nabil Salih
Open daily, 3–7:30 pm
Livestreamed Genocide: TikTok LIVE in Gaza
Sarah Al-Yahya
Calls from an Unseen Chorus
Amr Amer
Conducting Empire
Elinor Arden
The Land, Not a Film By Youssef Chahine
Leil Zahra Mortada
Prison Rule 113.11 and Fugitive Tools
Mauro Tosarelli
This installation features a docufiction video and explores the role of an unofficial taxi vehicle vital to mobility in occupied Palestine, using the cases of Abu Dis and Al-Eizariya, two towns located in Area C of the West Bank. Manufactured by Ford Motor Company, this US vehicle has unintentionally functioned as the connective tissue of a fragmented landscape, navigating an apartheid system reinforced by the Oslo Accords. Operating illegally for over thirty years, the Ford Transit has not only sustained movement but also emerged as a tool of cultural sovereignty, community-structured infrastructure, and self-governance. A time capsule of Oslo’s failures, this vehicle offers a lens into the lived realities of Palestinian daily resistance and the unyielding struggle for the right to move.
This hybrid project, comprised of an interactive, web-based installation and research article, examines how “history’s first livestreamed genocide” in Gaza has been presented on TikTok LIVE. The work explores these streams, characterized by their low viewership as well as scattered and disorienting nature, arguing that they reshape our understanding of “livestreamed genocide” as a historical media paradigm. The installation foregrounds the tensions between a gamified platform and the realities of war on the Gaza Strip. In doing so, it examines the uneasy rise of TikTok’s algorithmically-driven platform as a space where social media visibility and atrocity merge, clash, and are reshaped by the logic of public engagement.
Calls from an Unseen Chorus is a sound installation that resists the passive consumption of Palestine as an image of suffering, instead demanding engagement through the act of listening. Centering the auditory as a site of resistance, the work immerses audiences in the sonic realities of occupation and defiance—from the oppressive stasis of colonial checkpoints to the collective force of protest chants, resistance music, and the recorded wills of martyrs. These layered soundscapes challenge static representations of Palestinian struggle, asserting a mobilized, dissenting presence and an unceasing fight for liberation. By stripping away the visual, Calls from an Unseen Chorus transforms listening into an entry point for solidarity, where sound becomes both testimony and a call to resistance.
Conducting Empire is a research article and an installation-performance investigating the material history of the undersea cable network: the physical ‘backbone’ of the internet. The project explores what lies beneath Google’s marketing strategies for their new transatlantic cables, tracing the genealogy of this infrastructure to 19th-century Britain and the era of so-called abolition. A live activation of a sound sculpture exposes the metallic substance of the cable network and its transmission of historical records into the present. By linking claims of technological progress to imperial control, the work reframes the utopian ideal of global connectivity with evidence found in the British National Archives, from the Birmingham copper industry to a mass of colonial correspondences. Conducting Empire removes the network’s insulation to uncover how telecommunications were produced through a violent historical circuit.
This written thesis explores the question of morality and conscience in the anti-authoritarian revolution that took shape in response to the 2021 military coup in Myanmar. The term late pyar lone chin refers to the pride of performing a just action or the shame and guilt of not doing so, and the question, late pyar lone lar?, means roughly “do you have a clear conscience?” It is now widely used to testify to (or question) one’s stance and involvement in the revolution. Examining the digital artifacts and lived experiences of protestors, resistance fighters, and activist fundraisers, the thesis studies the role of calls to conscience in political mobilization and investigates how affect and morality have been activated through aesthetic means to shape the trajectory of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar.
The public policy known as Areas of Protection for Food Production was launched in July of 2024 in the south of La Guajira, Colombia. It aims to focus land use on agricultural production and prohibit any type of mining exploitation. This transition is based on concepts such as the human right to food and food security. This written thesis explores the origins of these concepts, their scope, and their limitations. This is particularly relevant at a time when the La Guajira Corporation is about to grant approval to the mining company Best Coal Company to exploit millions of tons of coal in the Cañaverales Community. This thesis responds to the crisis and the difficulties of the energy transition from an epistemological point of view, through an analysis of archives and geopoetics.
This hybrid project interrogates the role of Arab cultural production—particularly Egyptian songs and films about the Aswan High Dam—in shaping public history and contributing to Nubian dispossession. Building on an ongoing collaboration with Nubian activists, one component of this project is a research article that critiques nationalism and encourages a reflection on the power of cultural memory to perpetuate erasure or resist it. The second component of this project is an interactive installation titled The Land, Not a Film By Youssef Chahine, which examines state propaganda and confronts the failures of Arab liberation movements, while centering a Nubian narrative and presents a speculative grassroots response.
Despite the secular image often associated with modern nationalism, the Russian state’s sacralization of war reveals the enduring power of religious symbols, rituals, and narratives in shaping national identity. This written thesis examines how the concept of sacred war has become central to the Russian national idea through a fusion of Orthodox theology, state power, and militarized aesthetics. It focuses on two key phenomena: the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, which presents war as a timeless and divine foundation of Russian identity; and front-line baptismal rituals, which transform soldiers into metaphysical agents of a civilizational mission. I analyze these practices through the writings of Aleksandr Dugin, whose metaphysical theory of civilizational conflict (noomachy) frames war not as a geopolitical act but as an ontological necessity. Dugin’s thought provides the ideological architecture through which Russia is positioned as a sacred civilization resisting Western nihilism, where war is not simply justified, but ritually and cosmologically required. In doing so, the study challenges secular readings of nationalism and highlights how authoritarian regimes can mobilize religious metaphysics to render war not only legitimate, but liturgically necessary.
Aftermaths are deceptive. They obscure and conceal. This text, weaved along a photographic inquiry, troubles the notion of quietude. Together, they try to point to what lurks and haunts in the crevices of a wounded urbanscape. Twenty-one years after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, what litter and refuse remain in Baghdad today? In a time of rapid urban reconfiguration, what do the residual wartime rubble and the paraphernalia of security regimes tell us of the present, its politics, and relationship to the past? Put differently, what forces and apparatuses obstruct an Iraqi’s walk? Standing by the ruins is an old tradition dating to pre-Islamic poetry and the laments of ancient Mesopotamia. This essay follows suit but goes beyond. Its fragments narrate my auto-ethnographic and ethnographic walks and rides in Baghdad, where I investigate the constellations of rubble, the affects they discharge, and the memories they awaken in a given locale. Much ink and blood were spilled on the streets of Baghdad and world newspapers; this endeavor asks what Iraqis are left with today. The photographs aspire to a private archive for public loss, each being an obstinate interlocutor tested for what eludes vision and what is thought to be seen.
Prisons are not just spaces of deprivation and submission but environments where survival gives rise to new forms of expression and interaction. Despite spatial, social, and political constraints, prisoners cultivate communication networks through sound, imagery, and handmade tools. This installation reframes prison life by focusing on acquired culture and produced knowledge rather than narratives of marginalization. Prison Rule 113.11 highlights both clandestine tools of disobedience—tattoo guns, fishing lines, and makeshift speakers—and the coercion tools manufactured through prison labor. These objects are not merely functional but symbolic of defiance and connection. By amplifying sound rather than retreating into silence, prisoners reclaim their lives and assert their resistance to isolation. Positioning these tools as ‘fugitive objects’, this work reveals how incarcerated individuals are not merely passive subjects but a challenge to the very structures designed to contain them.