Joan Jonas | Reanimation, An Ongoing Performance
December 9
Tarek Elhaik
Media anthropologist, film curator, and Assistant Professor of Media and Culture, San Francisco State University
Tarek Elhaik’s talk sheds doubt about the proliferation of medial acts deployed under the banner of the “Social.” It is in fact still unclear how social media and art practices have emerged as the dominant creative horizons for resisting neo-liberal forms of mediation. Building on his ethnography of curatorial laboratories in Mexico City, Elhaik proposes the concept of the “Incurable-Image” as a point of departure for thinking and working through the malaise of contemporary curatorial and moving-image culture, offering another use of Deleuze’s Notes on Societies of Control.
Tarek Elhaik is a media anthropologist, film curator, and Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at San Francisco State University. His work is informed by archival research on Mexican and Latin American avant-garde film and experimental media arts and the ethnography of curatorial laboratories in Mexico City. He has curated several experimental film programs from Latin America and the Arab world at the Pacific Film Archive, Ruhrtriennale, San Francisco Cinematheque, Tangiers Cinematheque, Rice University, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His writings have appeared in books and journals including Framework, Revista de Antropologia Social, and Critical Arts. He is currently completing a manuscript titled The Incurable-Image / Untimely Futures: Lessons from Mexico.
