In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Elena Shtromberg (University of Utah / Clark Fellow) examines how contemporary video works have confronted the persistence of colonial illustrations circulated in European travel narratives. Shtromberg expands on media scholar Vilém Flusser’s idea of posthistorical memory, wherein video functions as a new kind of memory. Works by artists José Alejandro Restrepo, Harun Farocki, and Tiago Sant’Ana employ video to reframe colonial conventions of laboring bodies naturalized for European audiences, reactivating the body as a site of resistance.

Elena Shtromberg is associate professor of art history at the University of Utah, where she specializes in global contemporary art with a special focus on Latin America. She is the author of Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (University of Texas Press, 2016) and co-editor of Encounters in Video Art in Latin America (Getty Publications, 2023). She has also curated a number of exhibitions, the latest among them a 2017 co-curated survey entitled Video Art in Latin America at LAXART in Los Angeles. At the Clark, Shtromberg will be working on a manuscript titled The Politics of Memory in Video Art.

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: José Alejandro Restrepo, Paso de Quindio II (detail), 1999, video installation