Ursula Biemann in Conversation: A screening of Black Sea Files (2005) & Work in Progress

The Strategic Working Group on Cultural Forms / Local Stakes / Global Circuits presents

Ursula Biemann in Conversation: A screening of Black Sea Files (2005) & Work in Progress

Discussion moderated by Deniz Göktürk (German & Film Studies)

Thursday, April 30, 2009, 4 pm

142 Dwinelle Hall

Zurich-based artist, theorist, and curator Ursula Biemann interrogates in her video-essays how migration and technologies of mobility are reshaping our world. In videos such as Performing the Border (1999), Remote Sensing (2001), and Europlex (2003), she exposes the gendered dimension of migrant labor and the precarious position of global sex workers. Her award-winning work has been shown worldwide in solo exhibitions, art biennials, film festivals, and activist conferences. Biemann’s 2005 project Black Sea Files explores the sociopolitical and cultural effects of oil extraction in the Caspian Sea, focusing on the daily practices of oil workers, farmers, refugees, and prostitutes living along the building site of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The video-essay combines an experimental aesthetic practice with the investigatory fieldwork of anthropologists and journalists to expose how visual intelligence is detected, withheld, and circulated./ Black Sea Files/ is part of a larger visual research project with Angela Melitopoulos and Lisa Parks called B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond.

For more information visit the Geobodies website.

Co-sponsored by the German Department, the Working Group on Contemporary European Performance, the Multicultural Germany / Transnational Europe Project, Film Studies, the Institute for European Studies