DSR Lecture Series: "Edenic Fallout: The Aesthetics of the Atomic Apocalypse"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
In this talk Marisa Karyl Franz considers contemporary art practices related to sites of nuclear contamination, particularly focused on Chornobyl, to explore the aesthetics of post-human rewilding. These become entangled in a politics of discovering a new world--here narrativized as the Exclusion Zone.
The aestheticization of this Zone is framed simultaneously in discussions of eco-utopian dreams of post-anthropocene revival and in the horror of a mutated natural order. Franz considers how practices of visual and material documentation in art draw on canonical practices of data collection including expedition photography, specimen collection, narrativization of dangerous new lands, and the construction of the monstrous.
About the speaker
Marisa Karyl Franz is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at NYU. Her work focuses on how ordinary things are reconstituted as extraordinary through the work of museums, artists, decay, and sacrality. Her first book, Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums (forthcoming with Cornell University Press) considers the work of local museums in documenting local life to local people—presenting them their familiar things in an unfamiliar museological and Euro-colonial epistemology.