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Solo show
CentreSpace Gallery, Bristol. UK.
28th Oct / 8th Nov 2023.
About
This Project brings art into conversation with academics & advocacy groups to raise awareness and instigate public debate. Addressing themes of enforced disappearance, feminicide, slavery, genocide and indigenous persecution, it responds to the most pressing concerns facing our shared humanity.
OUR PARTNERS
This initial impetus project was conceived back in 2017 as a result of responding to the violence of enforced disappearance, which had become an everyday reality in Chantal's home country of Mexico. As she began her own witnessing to this through art, our subsequent discussions raised a number of crucial questions for us. Not least: - How can we do justice to a shattering absence? How could we bring our own grammatical tools to bare on a problem that took us beyond the threshold of intelligibility? What could political philosophy say when confronting the limits of language and what could art say when all presence is being denied?
Confronting these questions we understood demanded a collaborative response between the arts & philosophy. It also demanded a wider conversation with a community of intellectuals, who could allow us to reimagine the truly unimaginable. Recognising this, we began this journey noting that while disappearance is undoubtedly terrifying for its victims and families, there was a need to reimagine the term disappearance itself within a more considered and intimate frame. It was necessary to account for the terror which lives on in the minds of everybody it touches, not only to focus attention on the absence of bodies, but to also consider broader issues on the roles between perpetrators, victims and witnesses, onto the ways it forces a fundamental rupture in the logics of space and time. Indeed, we felt that it was only by addressing it on these terms that we might be able to ask serious questions about what role art and critical thinking have when confronting this devastating problem, which by its very definition, exceeds the limits of aesthetic and philosophical engagement on account of its very absence and denials.
SOLO EXHIBITION
28th October - 8th November 2023
The Inaugural State of Disappearance Art exhibition was held at CentreSpace Art Gallery in Bristol from October 27th to November 8th, 2023. Showcasing for the first time together, 75 dedicated works were presented dealing with the brutality of disappearance, and how it leaves its mark upon those who must live with the consequences.
Complimenting the exhibition, two weeks of events included a series of public lectures from internationally recognised speakers and leading authorities on different related issues from natural disasters, the holocaust, enforced disappearances on to slavery, dedicated panels exploring issues concerning memory & justice and student workshops exploring human disappearance.
THE BOOK
State of Disappearance brings together the power of artistic testimony and witnessing with critical voices to ask deeper questions about extreme violence, the normalisation of human vanishing, state and ideological complicity, and memorialisation, along with wider concerns about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.
ART HOUSE MOVIE
"Disappearance is marked by a devastating absence. It constitutes a form of violence that rips open a wound in time. It offers no viable recovery and no meaningful justice. It provisions alibis to perpetrators, while denying the victims their very humanity. And for those who are left to live with its presence, the terror is unending".
PUBLIC TALKS
In this section you will find a digital library of filmed resources related to the State of Disappearance project.
The archive includes keynote lectures, invited talks, public interviews, plenary discussions and recorded webinars.
WEBINARS
Hosted in partnership with The Philosopher (Britain's longest running philosophy journal) a series of public "State of Disappearance" webinars have been scheduled from Oct 2023.
Each of the conversations will be published here following their recording.
The links to join the conversation will be post here 1 week before the upcoming webinar.
The Philosopher - State of Disappearance
The Philosopher - State of Disappearance
"Vanishing Racialised Bodies": David Theo Goldberg in conversation with Brad Evans and Chantal Meza
"Technologies of Disappearance": Julian Reid in conversation with Brad Evans
"Art and the Disappearing Body": Bret W. Davis with Brad Evans and Chantal Meza
PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY
