Guest Lecture during a seminar session of “Narrating Migration” instructed by Prof. Radha S. Hegde at New York University, Berlin.

9 January 2024
6:30-8:00 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, Raum 2070A

This talk examines visual documentation and the documentary form in their intimate connection with racialized state surveillance and border control in the United States. It discusses the ways that visual documents such as the photograph have been wielded on behalf of U.S. immigration policy to contain border crossings since the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and highlights the underexamined linkage between official documentation and historical processes of Asian racialization. Against this backdrop, I turn to the ongoing work of Miko Revereza, a Philippine-born artist and self-ascribed “undocumented-documentary filmmaker.” I explore how Revereza advances an aesthetic of the undocument, or fugitive, errant, and ephemeral visual forms that both attune us to documentation’s violent history and mobilize self-documentary practices beyond the demand to capture and report.

Feng-Mei Heberer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, and the author of Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Her research interests lie at the junctures of gendered racialization, labor, and transnational migration with a focus on queer-feminist Asian diasporic media cultures. In addition, she researches and works in film curation and cultural organizing.

8 January, 4 pm, DOR 24, r. 1.501

Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive is a collaborative research art project by Kiri Dalena, Lizza May David, and Jaclyn Reyes that inquires into the tangents of the Philippines’ colonial past, archiving, and its impacts on being Filipina. The project builds upon the imagery and knowledge of Dean Worcester, an ornithologist and Secretary of Interior of the Philippine Islands during the American colonial period, whose photos are part of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum’s archive in Cologne, Germany. Worcester’s views shaped US public opinion, foreign policy, and inevitably what we know to be Filipino history and identity. Snare for Birds: Rereading the Colonial Archive recipocrates Worcester’s endeavor: to engage with archival images like specimens and to claim truths a camera was “made to tell.” It encourages viewers to question the colonial gaze, the accessibility of these historical records, and the ways in which our responses to these images shape how we engage with our predecessors.

Lizza May David lives and works in Berlin and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg, the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon and at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Currently, she is a lecturer at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. She is interested in gaps and silences in personal and collective archives and experiments with forms of activation or disturbance through abstract painting. She navigates through affects and moments that elude representability, leading to experimental approaches for the very same reason. She does not assume the existing binary simplifications of the world, but rather thinks relationally in crossroads, turning points, overlapping and branching out, finding further expression in collaborations, architectural interventions or installations.