The third lecture in the Image Complex lecture series, delivered on 5 March 2021.
Image: Sharon Hayes, I March in the Parade of Liberty But As Long As I Love You I’m Not Free, 2007-08. Sound installation with framed digital print and PA speaker, Dimensions variable. Photo by Andrea Geyer.
How have feminist artists used live performance, video and media arts to explore a form of fearless speech by emphasizing the voice as a radical medium? Contemporary artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Sharon Hayes, deploy speech and language to address systemic inequities and silences. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s revival of Greek parrhesia and Banu Bargu’s concept of the ‘silent exception’, theories of embodied enunciation support the project’s contribution to a feminist political epistemology that redefines practices of democratic participation.
The lecture series “Image Complex: Art, Visuality and Power in the United States” investigates the visual infrastructures that have shaped the United States, and the practices that have, and continue to, resist them.
The Image Complex lecture series is co-presented by the Power Institute and Discipline journal.
People
Jennifer González
Jennifer González is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at University of California, Santa Cruz. She writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on critical race discourse, activist art, and technologies of embodiment. She is the author of Subject to Display: Reframing Race In Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) and Pepón Osorio (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and served as chief editor for the volume Chicana and Chicano Art: A Critical Anthology, with Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega and Tere Romo, Duke University Press (2019). González has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published articles in numerous scholarly and art publications such as Journal of Visual Culture, Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Archives of American Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Open Space and Art Journal. She has lectured extensively at universities and art museums nationally and internationally and teaches regularly at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York.
