Dr. Emilia Yang: Southern Exposure Panel Discussion

March 18, 2023

Seen from behind, a group of women wearing headscarves march down a paved street, clasping their raised hands, toward a plume of smoke.

Stamps Assistant Professor Dr. Emilia Yang, with Narges Bajoghli and Gala Berger, will take part in Against Forgetting: Grassroots Opposition to State Oppression in Latin America and Iran, an online panel discussion exploring transnational entangled histories of violence, dictatorships, and resistance in the Global South. Gelare Khoshgozaran will moderate the conversation, presented by Southern Exposure and the Taneen Working Group, on the role of artists in direct action and organizing, as well as memorializing histories of tyranny and violence.

Against Forgetting: Grassroots Opposition to State Oppression in Latin America and Iran
Saturday, April 1, 2023 from 12:00 – 2:00 PM
ZOOM: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87095081205

Gelare Khoshgozaran is an undisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer whose work engages with the legacies of imperial violence. She uses film and video to explore narratives of belonging outside of the geographies and temporalities that have both unsettled our sense of home, and make our places of affinity uninhabitable. Gelare’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the New Museum, Queens Museum, Hammer Museum, LAXART, Artspeak, Plug In ICA, and Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual; with forthcoming exhibitions at Delfina Foundation, MASS MoCA and Images Festival. Gelare was the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2015), a Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant (2016) Art Matters Award (2017), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019) and a Graham Foundation Award (2020).

Narges Bajoghli is Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She is an award-winning anthropologist, scholar, and writer. Trained as a political anthropologist, media anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker, Narges’ academic research is at the intersections of media and power in Iran and the United States. Her first project focused on régime cultural producers in Iran, and was based on ethnographic research with Basij, Ansar‑e Hezbollah, and Revolutionary Guard media producers. The resulting book, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford University Press 2019) was awarded the 2020 Margaret Mead Award (American Anthropological Association & Society for Applied Anthropology); 2020 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title (American Library Association); and the 2021 Silver Medal in Independent Publisher Book Awards for Current Events (Political/Economic, Foreign Affairs). Narges has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and Jacobin. She has also appeared as a guest commentator on Iranian politics on CNN, DemocracyNow!, NPR, BBC WorldService, BBC NewsHour, and PBS NewsHour as well as in Spanish on radio across Latin America.

Gala Berger (b. Villa Gesell, Argentina, 1983) is a visual artist and independent curator living and thinking between San José, Costa Rica and Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is co-founder of La Ene (New Energy Museum of Contemporary Art), an experimental museum based in Buenos Aires, and the Paraguay Printed Art Fair, a fair born with the aim of creating alternative platforms of exchange and circulation of independent publications without the traditional restrictions and regulations faced by the mainstream press. Between 2012 and 2014, she also co-founded and directed two exhibition spaces in Buenos Aires: Inmigrante [Immigrant] and Urgente [Urgent]. Both of them acted as meeting points for experimental projects that didn’t have any local attention or support. In 2009 she was the curator for Munguau Project, an exchange platform between South Korea and Argentina as part of the Korean Cultural Center for Latin America. In 2017, she taught the course “Aesthetics of self-criticism” at the National University of Art, as part of the trans-departmental area of Art Criticism program, in Buenos Aires. She has been in residence at SAAP, Anyang Public Art Project, South Korea (2009); KUTSU in Tampere, Finland (2010); Collection Moraes-Barbosa, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2012). In November 2018 she was a resident in La Tallera – Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, in Mexico. She is one of the recipients of the 2018 Grants and Commissions CIFO (Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation) with the project Resistance Alliances, a board game to explore the social history of feminisms in Latin America.

Emilia Yang is an artist, organizer, and scholar. Her art practice utilizes expanded forms of digital media for the creation of community-based feminist, anti-racist and transformative justice projects. Her project, “AMA y No Olvida, Memory Museum Against Impunity” is a transmedia and community memory museum that explores participatory forms of mediation and design for remembering victims of state violence in her home country Nicaragua. Yang earned her PhD in Interdisciplinary Media Arts + Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art and Design. Her artworks have been shown at international venues such as Resistance Biennale in Guatemala, the Legislative Assembly of Costa Rica, the Museum of Jade and Pre-Columbian Culture in Costa Rica, Casa America and La Neomudejar Vanguard Art Center and Museum in Spain, Le Commun Contemporary Art Building in Geneva, Unity for Humanity, IndieCade Independent Games Festival, Games for Change, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and the Games and the New Media Summit at Tribeca Film Festival.