Human Rights: Confronting Images and Testimonies

This conference begins a question: “What is evidence?” and considers how art offers a lens through which we come to recognize the politics of power and abuse.

Artists, activists, and scholars discuss their work in the context of human rights, addressing how that work transforms the raw material of individual and collective suffering into legible and convincing data, confrontational imagery, or testimony.

The conference opens with a keynote presentation by noted artist/activist Coco Fusco, Thursday at 4 PM in the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Theater. Friday’s sessions are two panel discussions and a keynote presentation by Ratna Kapur, director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi, India, at the Wexner Center. The conference concludes with the collaborative project Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064: A Public Reading at the Main Library. Click "more info" below for a complete schedule.

Coco Fusco is an internationally renowned interdisciplinary artist, writer, and activist, as well as director of Intermedia Initiatives at Parsons/The New School for Design in New York. She has performed, lectured, exhibited, and curated around the world since 1988. She is a recipient of a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in two Whitney Biennials (1993 and 2008), the Sydney Biennale, Johannesburg Biennial, Kwangju Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, InSite O5, Transmediale, the London International Theatre Festival, VideoBrasil, and Performa05. She is the author of English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She has worked in the Wexner Center’s Art & Tech facility and previously spoke at the Wexner Center in October 2002 in an appearance cosponsored by the Department of Art and the Department Theatre.

Fusco’s work combines electronic media and performance in a variety of formats, from staged multimedia performances incorporating large-scale projections and closed-circuit television to live performances streamed to the Internet that invite audiences to chart the course of action through chat interaction. Her most recent work deals with the role of female interrogators in the “war on terror.” Those works include Operation Atropos (a film about interrogation training) and A Room of One’s Own (a monologue about female interrogators). Fusco is currently developing a new performance for the 2010 World Congress of the International Drama/Theatre Education Association in Brazil; it explores the “Black Codes” that were established in the Americas after slavery. She is also researching a new project on the experience of incarceration in the United States.

Keep reading for a complete schedule and more about the other presenters.

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SCHEDULE

Thursday, March 4, 2010
Locations Listed With Events

1:30–3 PM: Student Forum: Witnessing Authorship
Location: 311 Denney Hall, 164 W. 17th Ave.
Students will examine theoretical, ethical, and methodological issues of witnessing as they relate to several contemporary human rights narratives. Presenters include Jen Herman, Annie Mendenhall, Kate Parker, Erika Strandjord, and Julia Voss.

4 PM: Opening Keynote
Location: Wexner Center Film/Video Theater
Coco Fusco, "Torture, the Feminine Touch: Exploring Military Interrogation as Interculture Performance"
Fusco is a performance artist, writer, and associate professor in the fine arts program at the Parsons School for Design.

Friday, March 5, 2010: Conference Symposium
Location: Wexner Center Film/Video Theater, except as noted for A Public Reading.

9 AM: Welcome
Valerie Lee, Interim Vice Provost of Minority Affairs

9:30-11:30 AM: Panel 1: Questions of Evidence
Andrew Herscher (Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, College of Architecture and Urban Planning) will discuss architecture in presentations of atrocity and the visualization of humanity in distress.
Sam Gregory (Project Director at WITNESS) will discuss video documentary and new media in the human rights campaigns of Witness.
Sharon Hayes (Multimedia Artist) with Andrea Geyer and Ashley Hunt, will discuss their project Combatant Status Review Tribunals held at the U.S. military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between July 2004 and March 2005.
Amy Horowitz (Jerusalem Project) will discuss music in disputed territory, focusing on an Israeli example.

11:30 AM-12:30 PM: Keynote Speaker
Ratna Kapur, "W(h)ither Human Rights: A Critical Reflection"
Kapur (Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi and lecturer at the Indian Society for International Law) will examine the "dark side" of the human rights project and how it has been based on assumptions about difference, the cultural "Other," produced partly in and through the colonial encounter.

12:30-1:30 PM: Lunch Break

1:30-3:30 PM: Panel 2: Narrating Atrocity
Brenda Brueggemann (Professor, English/Disability Studies, The Ohio State University) will discuss cinematic representations of disability from a human rights perspective
Caroll Bogert (Associate Director, Human Rights Watch) will discuss the role of testimony and personal narrative in the activist work of Human Rights Watch.
Amy Shuman (Professor, English/Folklore, The Ohio State University) will discuss cultures of silence and atrocity narratives in the political asylum process.

4-8 PM: Performance: A Public Reading
Location: West Reading Room, Thompson Library, The Ohio State University
Sharon Hayes with Andrea Geyer, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne
Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064: A Public Reading, is a four-hour public reading of unedited transcripts from 18 Combatant Status Review Tribunals held at the U.S. military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between July 2004 and March 2005. A part of the larger collaborative work, 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, which premiered at Documenta 12 in 2007, this performance stages a 118-page excerpt from a massive collection that documents 558 tribunals, all of which were released on the Internet in 2007 by the U.S. Department of Defense in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

8-9 PM Conference Wrap-Up
Buffet dinner provided.


Friday Presenters

Caroll Bogert, Associate Director, Human Rights Watch

Brenda Brueggemannt, Professor, Department of English, The Ohio State University

Sam Gregory, Project Director, WITNESS

Sharon Hayes, multimedia artist of Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064: A Public Reading with Andrea Geyer, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne

Andrew Herscher, Assistant Professor, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Departments of Art History and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan

Amy Horowitz, Scholar in Residence, Lecturer, Melton Center for Jewish Studies and International Studies

Ratna Kapur, Director, Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi, and Professor, Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations

Amy Shuman, Professor, Departments of English and Anthropology, The Ohio State University


Conference Organizers

Ann Hamilton, Professor, Department of Art, The Ohio State University

Wendy Hesford, Associate Professor, Department of English, The Ohio State University

Amy Shuman, Professor, Departments of English and Anthropology, The Ohio State University