Colloquium: Photography and Human Rights April 4, 2016 | 19 Washington Square North, NYU Abu Dhabi, New York Abstracts and Participant Bios Strategies for Engagement Shahidul Alam, Drik Abstract: While images remain a powerful tool for mobilizing social change, the massive increase in the use of images, the shorter attention spans of intended audiences and the increasingly repressive environments that journalists and activists face require a rethinking of not only the vocabulary that one uses, but also the modes of engagement. Shahidul Alam has been challenging successive authoritarian governments in Bangladesh through his work as an artist and a journalist for over thirty years. He will be discussing the strategies for interventions that he has been using, both as an individual and through the organizations and networks he has created. This will include both his photography and writing, but also the legal and public actions through which he and his colleagues continue to try and expand the space for freedom of expression and dissent. Bio: Recipient of the Shilpakala Award, the highest national award given to Bangladeshi artists, photographer, writer, curator and activist Shahidul Alam obtained a PhD in chemistry before switching to photography. Returning to Dhaka in 1984, he produced his seminal work, documenting the democratic struggle to remove General Ershad. A former president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, Alam’s work has been exhibited in MOMA, Centre Georges Pompidou and Tate Modern. A speaker at Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, Oxford and Cambridge universities, Alam is a visiting professor of Sunderland University and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in the UK. He is the only person of color to have chaired the international jury of World Press Photo. His book My Journey as a Witness has been described as “the most important book ever written by a photographer” by John Morris, the former picture editor of Life Magazine. 1 Guardians of the Spoon Manca Juvan, Independent Photographer Abstract: The project speaks about preserving memory of internment and relates to a historic period of the World War II, when Kingdom of Italy occupied part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s territory, and when Fascist camps served as an instrument of political and racial persecution. Its importance lies in the general present day historic amnesia in Italy and beyond, where shock is experienced by learning that Mussolini’s Italy was not only the aggressor at the time, but it created a grid of 400 different camp types on Italian territory and beyond. There’s been a poor recognition of Italian war crimes in the international context (as opposed to the Nazi crimes). Check encyclopedias and you won’t find a single mention of Italian concentration camps, which served as an instrument of political and racial persecution. It’s time to raise awareness. And that is something this collaborative project between photographer Manca Juvan, writer Saša Petejan and historian Dr. Ušrka Strle aims to do. Bio: Manca Juvan is a freelance photographer, who along with a BA in Photography has more than a decade of working experience throughout the field and around the world. Juvan’s long-term project Unordinary Lives documents the consequences of the Afghanistan War through the stories of ordinary Afghans. She was selected Photographer of the Year in Slovenia for her reportage work in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Her book Afghanistan: Unordinary Lives was published in 2010 and an English edition followed in 2012. Her work was exhibited in Slovene Museum of Modern Art as well as on festivals and different exhibition venues in Luxembourg, New York, Washington, Brussels, Paris and elsewhere. Her photographs have among others appeared in The Times, National Geographic, and The Guardian. She was a member of the international photography collective Sputnik Photos and was a MF Human Rights Fellow in 2011. 2 Human Rights Through My Experience & Photographs in Palestine Rula Halawani, Independent Photographer Abstract: My presentation will take the audience on a journey through my career demonstrating how life under occupation in Palestine has influenced my path in life from mathematician, to photojournalist and finally to artist. Living under occupation and in the midst of a volatile political situation in which houses are demolished, children are being shot at and land is systematically confiscated, has had a tremendous role in articulating my career. As a photojournalist I felt the need to vocalize and promote a humanistic perspective on the embodied suffering that I have captured throughout the years. I endeavored to give the subjects that I photographed a story in an attempt to enable the world to see their plight. Eventually the perpetual suffering became too hard for me to cope with on a day-to-day basis and I made the decision to utilize my lens to produce artwork. My artistic practice still centers around the suffering of people living under the occupation but by taking a thematic approach, I attempt to formulate a wider narrative around the story of my country. Bio: Born in 1964, Rula Halawani holds a BA in Advanced Photography from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada (1989) and an MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster, London (2001). Growing up under the occupation in East Jerusalem and working as a photographer in an intensely political environment, Halawani’s work demonstrates a strong relationship between art and politics. Her photographs depict aspects of Palestinian life and have been widely exhibited in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the United States. Halawani’s photographs are housed in the international collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nadour Collection, Germany; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The British Museum, London, The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Halawani’s solo exhibitions include Ayyam Gallery, Dubai (2016); Selma Feriani Gallery, London (2013, 2010); Al Hoash Gallery, Jerusalem (2009); and Botanique Museum, Brussels. Halawani has featured in recent collective exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg (2015); MART Museum, Rovereto (2014); FotoFest Biennial, USA (2014); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); and BOZAR, Palace for Fine Arts, Brussels (2011). 3 Subject and Citizen Yasser Alwan, Independent Photographer Abstract: In the late 90s, I made a series of portraits in Cairo that were motivated by Bread… Freedom… Social justice…- the slogan of the January 25 “Revolution”. I make no claim to foresight - just the opposite. It was a theme that had to be photographed. But Scream, my "human rights" project proved the obvious: that photographs, in and of themselves, change nothing. That “discovery” opened the door to another approach, an engagement with individuals as they are, and not as emblematic of the larger “human rights” situation in Egypt. Bio: Yasser Alwan is an independent photographer who has lived in Egypt nearly 25 years. His photos have been exhibited widely. He has written Imagining Egypt (2007) on the Lehnert & Landrock Collection and, in Arabic, Mirrors or Windows: How To Decipher a Photograph (2015). Two catalogues of his photography have been published: Scream and The Liberty of Appearing. 4 Travel Guide for Mama Sumeja Tulic, Independent Photographer Abstract: As the name suggests, the guide is dedicated to my mother, who started wearing the hijab some twenty-five years ago. Whenever I am away from home, somewhere West where the skyline doesn't include the towers of a mosque, I think of my mother and how she would feel here. The guide is based on Wikitravel’s guide for New York and it includes the experiences of a dozen of women I interviewed in New York. Some of these women were New Yorkers, some were tourists, but all of them wore the hijab. The photographs included in the project are self-portraits in which I wore the hijab in different tourist locations throughout New York City. Bio: Sumeja Tulic is a Bosnian and Libyan human right advocate and photographer. In the last seven years, Tulic worked as researcher for Amnesty International in London and as project officer for Civil Rights Defenders in Bosnia and in Serbia. She uses photography as a tool for human rights outreach. In 2014, she became the first Bosnian to receive the Human Rights and Photography fellowship of the Magnum Foundation and the New York University. Tulic holds BA in Law education from the University in Sarajevo and MA in Human Rights and Democracy in South-Eastern Europe from the University of Sarajevo and the University of Bologna. She is currently studying at CUNY Grad School of Journalism in New York. 5 Bending the Frame: Photographic Approaches to Social Justice Fred Ritchin, International Center of Photography Abstract: Given the transformation of media in the digital era, what are the emerging strategies that are useful in affecting social change? While there is a strong tradition of the photography of war, can there also be a photography of peace? How does the rise of social media provide new possibilities for impacting societal dialogue, and also for frustrating it? What is the relevance of photographic traditions to contemporary practice? Bio: Fred Ritchin is Dean of the School at the International Center of Photography. Previously he was professor of Photography & Imaging at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where he began the Photography and Human Rights Program with Susan Meiselas. Ritchin is author of three books on the future of imaging: In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (1990); After Photography (2008); and Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (2013). He is also former picture editor of the New York Times Magazine. 6 .