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.