What does it mean to bring an anticolonial practice to the colonial archive that has been systematically organized under the sign of counter-insurgency?

It is this colonial archive that has produced our concepts of ‘art’ and ‘history’, of what can be admitted into their domain and on what terms, and it is this same archive that anticipates and discredits resistance to colonial power. In other words, art and aesthetics have made colonial violence tenable and sustainable. Can an anticolonial practice reorganize the signs under which the past flows into the future?

Historian Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar will address these questions in her lecture and explore them further in conversation with curator and researcher Abhishek Nilamber before opening the discussion to the audience.

This event is co-organized by Céline Barry (Technische Universität Berlin), Agata Lisiak (Bard College Berlin), and Pablo Valdivia Orozco (Europa-Universität Viadrina) as part of the “Postcolonial Critiques” lecture series, and it is funded by the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network.

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is Associate Professor of History at Brown University and works on decolonization, displacement, war, nonviolence, and the visual archive. This talk draws on her forthcoming digital humanities book that intervenes in images of art history and war from the Indo-Afghan borderlands of British India.

Abhishek Nilamber (1987, India) works with projects and products which catalyse democratisation of knowledge. He is a researcher and curator with SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin and creative consultant at Backyard Civilization, Kochi, India. Nilamber has been working in Berlin since May 2016. His specific interest lies in contemporary community circulation practices in the Global South with audio-visual culture as specificity. One of the forms in which this interest manifests is the research, exhibition and networking project titled United Screens, which inquires into the challenges and opportunities in South-to-South circulation of cinema and video art, decoupled from its dependance on both state and capital-based markets.