Archival Interventions

For its first event of the semester, the Yale Film Society presents Archival Inerventions: a screening and panel discussion focused on recent moving-image engagements with institutional archives.

The short works in this program, which have exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals, question the neutrality of the archive and indicate where preservation seeks to erase. More than critiques, they search out ways of manipulating representation to relate to violent images on their own terms. They re-embody virtual objects, re-work filmed events, and imagine where images drop off, calling on speculation and personal histories. Police files, military films, museum holdings, and colonial ethnographies become the subject of, and subject to, a host of practical inquiries: How can we recove the images the archive has lost? How can we recuperate the images it has stolen? How can we reveal histories declared dead to be living? how can we make and show images to address, not assist legacies of violence?

The screening will take place on September 12 at 7 PM in the Whitney Humanities Center and run one hour long. Afterwards, artists Onyeka Igwe, belit sağ, and Africanus Okokon will be joined by scholars Marius Kothor (Yale University, Department of History), Pooja Sen (Yale University, Departments of Film and Media Studies and the History of Art), and Sherena Razek (Brown University, Department of Modern Culture and Media) for a panel discussion and audience Q&A.

For full program details, see the event page on Facebook. Archival Interventions is curated by Josh van Biema ’20 and supported by Films at the Whitney, the Yale MacMillan Center Council on African Studies, and the Department of the History of Art.