White Gaze: Michelle Dizon & Việt Lê

Friday, November 22, 2019, 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm EST
Organizer: AI Now Institute
Venue: AI Now Institute
Address:
155 6th Avenue
New York, NY 10013 United States
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Add to Calendar 11/22/2019 05:00 PM 11/22/2019 08:00 PM America/New_York White Gaze: Michelle Dizon & Việt Lê More detail: https://apa.nyu.edu/event/white-gaze-michelle-dizon-viet-le/ AI Now Institute, New York, NY, 10013

Presented by the AI Now Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. 

AI Now Fridays, presented by the AI Now Institute at NYU, creates space for discussion, exploration, and insight. This edition of AI Now Fridays will feature a presentation by artists Michelle Dizon and Việt Lê, followed by a conversation moderated Jason Schneiderman.

 

Artist and filmmaker Michelle Dizon works with an archive of National Geographic magazines to explore the mechanics of the “white gaze.” Through a process of poetic subtraction, Dizon works with only the language on the original page to write a decolonial counterpoint to a way of imaging the world centered on the West. Her images lay the white gaze bare, unearth a genealogy of a racist visuality, and work in the gap between image and text to write against the grain of imperialist narratives. Artist and writer Việt Lê uses Dizon’s images from White Gaze as a starting point for his poetic exploration of the legacies of war and imperialism. Lê’s text performs a dual work, both contextualizing Dizon’s images in the history of empire and unleashing a rhythmic play with language, both visually and aurally, to cut to the core of how meaning is produced. His text speaks to absence as much as presence with a story of war and empire told in fragments, phrases, words hanging on the page—an index of both the trauma and resistance experienced by those subjected to the violence of empire.

 

 

This building is accessible from the street. There is flat access to elevators that reaches the venue, and an accessible private bathroom on the floor. For any additional questions or for assistance, please email Alejandro Calcaño at alejandro@ainowinstitute.org.

 

Michelle Dizon is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and associate professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her works seize upon a freedom in time to assert languages, materialities, and knowledges that unravel the political projects of Western modernity and that hold space for the intimate and complex exploration of life worlds that are silenced by power and written out of history. She has lectured and exhibited across the Americas, Europe, and Asia in significant cultural and educational institutions such as the Center for Feminist Studies, Croatia; School of Oriental and African Studies, London; SalaSab, Colombia; Caixaforum, Barcelona; Jeu de Paume, France; The Cooper Union, NYC; Vargas Museum, Philippines; Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong; the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden; and the Singapore Biennial. She has been honored with a 2017-18 Master Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles. She earned an MFA in Art with a specialization in Interdisciplinary Studio from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a PhD in Rhetoric with designated emphases in Film and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley.

Việt Lê is an artist, writer, and curator. Lê is an associate professor in Visual Studies at California College of the Arts. He has been published in positions: asia critique, Crab Orchard Review, American Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Art Journal, and the anthologies Writing from the Perfume River, Strange Cargo, The Spaces Between Us, Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, among others. Lê has presented his work at The Banff Centre, Alberta; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Smithsonian, Washington DC; DoBaeBacSa Gallery, Korea; Japan Foundation, Việt Nam; 1a Space, Hong Kong; Bangkok Art & Cultural Center, Thailand; Civitella Ranieri, Italy; Shanghai Biennale, China; Rio Gay Film Festival, Brazil; among other venues.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of the poetry collections Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020), Primary Source (Red Hen, 2016), Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010), and Sublimation Point (Four Way, 2004). He also edited the Freshman Composition reader Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is an associate professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.