Public Program

Panel Discussion: Images of War: What is Forgotten, How Do We Remember?

Saturday, February 28, 2015 | 2 pm – 4 pm

Valiant Corporation Suite, 3rd floor Also known as Northeast corner (third floor)
Third Floor

Images of War: What is Forgotten, How Do We Remember?
Join us for a panel discussion including John Greyson, Elle Flanders, José Seoane and Mahwish Chishty; moderated by Dr. Lee Rodney.
Pay-what-you-can admission

Mahwish Chishty, initially trained as a miniature painter from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, has aggressively combined new media and conceptual work with her traditional practice. Her visit to Pakistan in 2011 inspired her recent body of work. Starting from a silhouette of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (aka 'drone'), Ms. Chishty paints folk ‘truck art’ imagery on these war machines to give them a second skin, in effect juxtaposing terror with a cultural representation of beauty.

Ms. Chishty has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at venues like Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MOCADA), Brooklyn, NY; University of Technology (UTS Gallery), Sydney, Australia; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; The Jones Center at The Contemporary Austin, TX and Canvas Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan among others. Her work has been reviewed in Mother Jones, The Guardian (Australia), Nouveau Projet (Canada) and The Washington Post just to name the few. Ms. Chishty also has pieces in the public and private collections including the Foreign office Islamabad, Pakistan and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka Shi, Japan.

Elle Flanders is a filmmaker and artist based in Toronto. She was raised in Montreal and Jerusalem and holds a PhD in Visual Arts and both an MA in Critical Theory and an MFA from Rutgers University. She is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program where she mentored with Mary Kelly and Martha Rosler. Flanders’ work has been screened and exhibited internationally including: the Museum of Modern Art; Berlin International Film Festival; The Toronto International Film Festival, the MoCCA and the Incheon Biennial. She is a founding member of Public Studio with architect and artist Tamira Sawatzky. Her most recent work includes: The Dialogues, a series of films displayed in public spaces — subways and advertising LED billboards — addressing revolution through the extraction of dialogue from the history of cinema  Drone Wedding, an eight-channel film installation examining surveillance in the everyday, What Isn’t There, a 15-year ongoing photo installation project that documents Palestinian villages that no longer exist; Road Movie, a six screen installation on the segregated roads of Palestine that premiered at TIFF (2011) and the Berlinale (2012); and Kino Pravda 3G, a series of video installations addressing current public dissent and protests across the globe. Flanders also made the award-winning documentary feature Zero Degrees of Separation about Israel, Palestine and queer love under occupation. She and her partner Tamira Sawatzky, are working on a new feature film: HarMageddon and several large-scale public art installations addressing public space and deterritorialization. 

John Greyson is a video/film artist whose recent titles include Gazonto, Murder in Passing, Fig Trees, 14.3 Seconds, Covered, Rex vs. Singh, and Proteus. He teaches film at York University, and is on the boards of Vtape, Cinema Politica and the Toronto Palestine Film Festival. 

Lee Rodney is Associate Professor of Media Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Windsor, Canada.  She has written on contemporary art, cultural theory and visual culture in a range of books and publications including: Space and Culture, Parallax, Prefix Photo and PAJ: Performance Art Journal. From 2010 - 2013 she ran the Border Bookmobile project, an urban research platform and traveling exhibition of books, artist projects, photographs and ephemera about the urban history of the Windsor-Detroit region and other border cities around the world. Her forthcoming book, Looking Beyond Border Lines: North America and its Frontier Imagination will be published by Routledge in December 2015.

José Seoane is a Cuban – Canadian painter and installation artist, investigating ideas around transculturation and identity within the postmodern condition. His work extends from the gallery into site-specific spaces that include interactive, collaborative interventions and large-scale murals. Currently he teaches at the School of Visual Arts, University of Windsor, Canada. As a migrant between Western and non-Western worlds, José Seoane has been inspired, by his double separate identities and by historical circumstances, to cross borders and to move over, under, and along cultural boundaries. In this sequence of heavy tongues, objects in visual- symbolic mutations, he looks at language and the possibilities of communication within cultural differences (even by denial of cultural design, camouflages, acculturations, etc).