In the early ’90s, curators at the New Museum organized three related exhibitions that critically examined the rhetoric of colonial expansion and conquest. Developed under the working title “Occupied Territory,” these exhibitions— “In Transit,” “The Final Frontier,”and “Trade Routes” —invited artists to respond to questions surrounding globalization’s social, economic, cultural, and intellectual exchanges. To address these issues in a renewed context, Laura Kurgan and Naeem Mohaiemen will engage the original overarching conceptual framework for the three exhibitions through presentations that draw upon their current research and individual practices. They will both respond as if the “Occupied Territory” outline—sourced from an internal working document in the New Museum archives—were a structural prompt they had received for an exhibition series today.

Within the exhibition trilogy that “Occupied Territory” gave rise to, “In Transit” (January 15–April 3, 1993) focused on global movements via immigration, but also looked closer to home, addressing the (often involuntary) movement of people through urban spaces, with works that focused on reclamation, trespassing, or homelessness. “The Final Frontier” (May 7–August 15, 1993), originally slated to focus on space exploration and scientific studies of the cosmos, shifted during the planning stages to more polemically consider the impacts of technology on physical and spatial boundaries with particular attention placed on “the body as a contested site.” The last exhibition, “Trade Routes” (September 10–November 7, 1993), considered the consequences of the globalization of trade and finance, with particular emphasis on the role of art within this network.

Against this exhibition history, presentations by Kurgan and Mohaiemen will open up a conversation that will draw out and reassess ideas about the changing borders and boundaries of culture in relation to issues as wide-reaching as neoliberal capitalism and as particular as the situations facing individual cities. Kurgan, who contributed to “Trade Routes,” will additionally offer reflections on the original exhibition context.

LAURA KURGAN
Laura Kurgan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Visual Studies curriculum, the Spatial Information Design Lab and is Codirector of the Advanced Data Visualization Project. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013). Kurgan’s work explores things ranging from digital mapping technologies to the ethics and politics of mapping, building intelligence, and the art, science, and visualization of big and small data. Her work has appeared at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Altria, MACBA Barcelona, ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Museum of Modern Art. She was the winner of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship in 2009.

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Naeem Mohaiemen is a writer and visual artist working in Dhaka and New York. Since 2006, he has worked on “The Young Man Was,” a fragmentary history of the 1970s ultra-left in Bangladesh. One chapter, the film United Red Army (on the 1977 hijack of Japan Airlines), and the in-progress script for another film, Afsan’s Long Day (on the 1974 anticommunist manhunts), previewed at the New Museum. The project has been described as “engagements with a revolutionary past meaningful in the sudden eruption of a revolutionary present” (Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Bidoun). Mohaiemen’s essays have been published in Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of US Global Power (NYU),Lines of Control: Partition as Productive Space (Cornell/Johnson Museum), Visual Culture Reader, 3rd ed. (Routledge), Sound Unbound (MIT Press), Granta (Pakistan Issue),Rethinking Marxism, etc. He is a PhD student in Anthropology at Columbia University.

External Link »