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The Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College enters its fifth year with a new international cohort of MA students, a multidisciplinary public program, two book launches, and ongoing collaborations with activists, artists, and scholars from around the world.
MA PROGRAM
Our MA in Human Rights and the Arts continues to grow as we welcome our fourth cohort (Class of 2026) to Annandale. This group of students includes alumni from Al-Quds Bard College and Bard College Berlin and broadens the program’s geographical range to include students from Angola, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Turkey. First-year MA students will present a Live Art Microfestival, created as part of The Politics of Interactive Live Art course taught by Center Director Tania El Khoury.
This fall, we are also continuing with our second-year requirement Practicing Revolutions, involving historical and critical reflection on human rights issues with practical real-world activist projects. One group will team up with CUNY Law students to create videos in support of clemency applications for incarcerated persons in New York. The other half will team up with a network of immigration attorneys to in-take and communicate with asylum seekers.
We continue to draw on the breadth and depth of colleagues across Bard College to make possible a diverse range of electives for our students. This fall they are enrolled in Global Indigenism (Maria Sonevytsky); The Middle Sea: Mediterranean Encounters in Italy (Franco Baldasso); Theater and Democracy (Ashley Tata); Structuralism and Deconstruction (Robert Hardwick Weston); Exhibiting (Im)mobility (Dina Ramadan); and Global Artists’ Networks & Associations (Serubiri Moses).
Tuesday, October 1, 7:00-9:00pm in Preston Theater; Film Screening
Un-Documented and the world like a jewel in the hand by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.
Tuesday, October 8, 6:00pm in RKC 103; Talk
Unlearning at the Threshold of the Museum by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.
Thursday, October 31, 10:30am; Online Panel
One Year On: War, Genocide, and the Transformation of Palestinian, Israeli, and Regional Politics by Tareq Baconi, Aslı Ü. Bâli, and Shay Hazkani.
Friday, November 8, 12:30pm; Webinar Talk
The Racial Politics of Pre-Emption: Property, Power and Deputization by Brenna Bhandar.
Tuesday, November 19, 6:00pm in Barringer Global Classroom; Book Launch
A Behind the Scene Look into 10 Years of AP by Alarm Phone.
Tuesday, December 3, 7:15pm in Olin 102; Film Screening and Q&A
It Will Be Chaosby Filippo Piscopo and Lorena Luciano with Franco Baldasso.
December 10-11 at Various Locations Across Bard College Annandale Campus
Live Art Microfestival by First-Year MA Students.
THE LAWLESSNESS OF RIGHTS: TALKS ON HUMAN RIGHTS & THE ARTS 2
Our second volume in Talks on Human Rights & the Arts, The Lawlessness of Rights, is available digitally on our website and in print via Printed Matter, Inc. It contains essays based on talks by scholars Kendall Thomas and Sayak Valencia; artists Bhenji Ra and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, as well as writers Githa Hariharan, Layli Long Soldier, and Mohammed El-Kurd. The book was edited by Tania El Khoury with an afterword by Bassem Saad. It is designed by Will Brady with illustrations by Haitham Haddad.
Our first volume, Through the Ruins, is available in digital format on our website, and you can buy physical copies at Barnes & Noble and other sellers.
WORKSHOP: PERPETRATOR-MADE IMAGES
Thomas Keenan (Co-Founder of CHRA and Director of Bard’s Human Rights Project) hosted a workshop in conjunction with Bard College and University of Copenhagen on perpetrator-made images. As camera technologies have advanced and proliferated, new forms of these images have emerged, including live-streamed terror attacks, bodycam and dashcam footage of police encounters with civilians, and surveillance images of various sorts. These images document violence, yet often the images are part of that very violence. Workshop participants discussed the ethics around perpetrator-made images and how they are used and viewed within various fields (journalism, law, art, etc.) in an era of fast-paced production, dissemination, and altering of images.
ACTIVISM IN PROCESS
CHRA resumes its collaboration with its Activism in Process partners, Alarm Phone and Commoning. Generating from this collaboration, Alarm Phone will launch a scrapbook marking ten years of their life-saving work, highlighting personal experiences, reflections on the movement, and documentation through experimental forms of writing and image-making.
Commoning will launch an Arabic-language website that will house resources for projects invested in collective social organizing, as well as those involved in the politics of the commons.
FACULTY & STUDENT NEWS
Last spring, our second cohort of fourteen students graduated after a successful thesis exhibition featuring projects that included a data-rich analysis of LGBTQ+ representation in Russian independent media, a study of the fragmented visual archive of the Palestine Film Unit, an architectural investigation of women’s access to public space in Jordan, and a performance-installation assessing the convergence between artificial intelligence and vegetative life, among others. The exhibition primarily took place on the premises of Bard College’s new Massena campus, which is the setting for CHRA’s new classroom and studio spaces. Read the Open Society University Network’s (OSUN) article about the exhibition here.
Several of our current MA students secured grants for travel to and research in Abu Dis, Palestine; Bogota, Colombia; Budapest, Hungary; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Vienna, Austria. These grants were part of different opportunities provided by OSUN. While some utilized these funds for preliminary research on their thesis projects, others used them to support new or existing engagements in localized struggles for human rights and knowledge production about them.
This past summer, Gideon Lester (Senior Curator for CHRA and Artistic Director of the Fisher Center) oversaw the annual Bard SummerScape festival at the Fisher Center, with new commissions in dance, theater, and opera, as well as the Bard Music Festival and Spiegeltent.
CHRA director Tania El Khoury’s artwork is the subject of a newly-published edited volume. Tania El Khoury’s Live Art: Collaborative Knowledge Production (Amherst College Press). It is co-edited by Laurel V. McLaughlin and Carrie Robbins and examines El Khoury’s live art practice.
ABOUT CHRA
The Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College is an artist-led center that researches and supports art and activist practices globally. It hosts an international MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts. The Center teaches, studies, and engages innovative art practices that investigate human rights violations and grassroots activism that uses creative tools of resistance.
Image Credits: Graphic Design by Haitham Haddad
Alarm Phone Scrapbook: A Behind the Scenes Look Into 10 Years of Alarm Phone
Photographs by Grace Crummett & Aya Rebai
Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College
30 Campus Rd, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504
www.chra.bard.edu