Photo courtesy of Ila Sheren, 2010
Wednesday, March 4, 2015, 5:30 PM | Center for Creative Photography 108
Lecture: Site, Non-site, Re-site: Border art and Boundaries since 1984
The politics of immigration and trade policy on the U.S.-Mexico border are as complex as they are compelling. Artists have been drawn to the physical site of the frontera, the human rights concerns it presents, and the overarching question of the ethics of globalization. Beginning in 1986, performance artists used the border region to interrogate well-established ideas of site-specificity and, in conjunction with the developments of the early 1990s, altered the definition of “site” to parallel the fluidity of international borders. This talk will discuss the shifts from site-specificity to what I term “portability,” a movement both away from and towards the border region.
Bio: Ila Nicole Sheren is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching interests are in the field of contemporary political art, and her current project focuses on environmental activist art and digital media. Dr. Sheren received her doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute from 2011-2012. Her first book, Portable Borders: Performance Art and Politics on the U.S. Frontera since 1984, is being published by the University of Texas Press in the spring of 2015.
