About

Edmund Clark and ICP Director of Exhibitions and Collections Erin Barnett discuss Edmund Clark: The Day the Music Died, an exhibition that explores new ways to visualize the structures of power and control in the global War on Terror.

MacArthur fellow, artist, journalist, author, and photographer Trevor Paglen discusses surveillance, covert operations, classified landscapes, and other themes that radiate through both his work and the ICP Museum’s exhibitions Edmund Clark: The Day the Music Died and Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. This is a free event, but please register in advance. ICP Members have access to the best seats at our public programs in our reserved members’ section. Bio Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans imagemaking, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures. Paglen’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Berkeley Art Museum; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Nevada Museum of Art. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award–winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Economist, and Art Forum. He is a 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Award. Paglen holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley.

How does artistic production shape our understanding of America’s carceral state and render its crisis visible? Join us for a conversation with Ruby Tapia, Nicole Fleetwood, and Moliere Dimanche on issues of aesthetics, visibility, and photography vis-a-vis American prisons. More information at: https://www.icp.org/events/carceral-aesthetics-vision-and-imprisonment

Pulitzer Prize– and Bancroft Prize–winning historian Heather Ann Thompson discusses civil liberties in our heavily surveilled and incarcerated society. Bio Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan, and is the Pulitzer Prize– and Bancroft Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). Thompson is a public intellectual who writes extensively on the history of policing, mass incarceration, and the current criminal justice system for the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, NBC, New Labor Forum, the Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post, among others. Thompson served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the US as well on the boards of several policy organizations including the Prison Policy Initiative; the Eastern State Penitentiary, a historic site; and on the advisory boards of Life of the Law and the Alliance of Families for Justice. She has spent considerable time presenting her work on prisons and justice policy to universities and policy groups nationally and internationally as well as to state legislators in various states. This is a free event, but please register in advance. ICP Members have access to the best seats at our public programs in our reserved members’ section.

Digital artist and programmer Josh Begley discusses his artistic practice, which maps systems of surveillance and incarceration vis-a-vis data visualizations, digital archives, and real-time applications. His projects include a data compilation of every reported United States drone strike (Dronestream), a visual glossary of the Drone Papers, an initiative mapping the visual geography of American incarceration (Prison Map), and a quantification of military footprints (Empire.Is). Register for tickets at icp.org/events

Professor Anna Pegler-Gordon discusses the role of photography in shaping immigration policy ahead of a panel discussion with Carl Takei, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality; Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at NYU School of Law; and Bitta Mostofi, an immigrant rights advocate and human rights organizer. Register for tickets at icp.org/events.

Edmund Clark is joined by performance artist and scholar Elise Morrison, assistant professor of theater studies at Yale; Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project and associate professor of comparative literature at Bard College; and Dror Ladin, staff attorney at the ACLU National Security Project, for a discussion on the intersections of conflict, policy-making, and new forms of visualization in our globalized, surveilled culture of spectacle. This exchange draws on themes from the current ICP Museum exhibition Edmund Clark: The Day the Music Died, enriching the conversation around Clark’s work about the impact of the War on Terror during the final week of the show. This is a free event, but please register in advance. ICP Members have access to the best seats at our public programs in the reserved members’ section. The ICP Museum–public program combination ticket grants $10 entry starting at 4:30 PM to those attending the program. Tickets are only available online when you register for the program. Register here: https://www.icp.org/events/conflict-terror-spectacle-a-closing-conversation-with-edmund-clark Bios: Edmund Clark is an award-winning British photographer whose work links history, politics, and representation. He has received worldwide recognition for his work, including the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for outstanding photography for public service, the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award, a 2017 W. Eugene Smith Fellowship, and, along with Crofton Black, a 2017 ICP Infinity Award and the 2016 Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award. His work was the subject of major solo exhibitions, Edmund Clark: War of Terror, at the Imperial War Museum, London, and Terror Incognitus, at Zephyr Raum für Fotogra e, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Manheim, Germany. He teaches at the London College of Communication, part of the University of the Arts London. Elise Morrison is an Assistant Professor of Theater Studies at Yale. Her book, Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance was published by University of Michigan Press in 2016. In 2015 Morrison edited a special issue on “Surveillance Technologies in Performance” for the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (Routledge, 11.2) and has published on this topic in IJPADM, Theater Magazine, and TDR. In recent years she has performed her surveillance cabaret show, “Through the Looking Glass,” in Boston and Providence, and, in collaboration with Jamie Jewett, Luke Dubois, and Thalia Field, created Zoologic, an original surveillance-dance-theater piece for FirstWorks in Providence, RI in 2015.Her current research focuses on theatrical performances that stage technologies of contemporary warfare, from military drones to virtual reality interfaces used to train and rehabilitate soldiers, in order to investigate how live performance might intervene in the ethics and aesthetics of war fought “at a distance.” Thomas Kennan teaches human rights, media, and literature at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson NY. His most recent book, co-written with Eyal Weizman, is Mengele's Skull (2012), on the emergence of human rights forensics. With Carles Guerra, he curated the exhibition "Antiphotojournalism" at FOAM Amsterdam and La Virreina in Barcelona, and he is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Human Rights and Humanity. Dror Ladin is a Staff Attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project. He has litigated numerous cases involving national security, detention, and torture. His experience includes representing torture survivors and victims in Salim v. Mitchell, the first successful lawsuit arising out of the CIA torture program, and securing the release of previously-secret documents in cases brought under the Freedom of Information Act.