Promotionsvorhaben: Vanessa Gravenor
Working Title: Secrecy, Hypervisibility, Invisibility, Blindspots
Supervisors: Prof Dr. Hanne Loreck and Jeanne Faust
My artistic-theoretical Phd project considers and reveals the aftermaths and afterwardness of secret operations from the cold war to the war on terror. Moreover, it traces the visual and linguistic means in which war and violence is rendered invisible through speech acts, photography, and data. How do secret operations hide in plain view, and what are the ongoing means that war crimes are made invisible while evidence abounds? As such, it draws heavily on the artistic practices of Forensic Architecture, and similar media labs and the broader evidentiary turn, that artist and scholar Susan Schuppli writes, began with Nuremberg trials’ reliance on documentary evidence rather than witness testimony. Thus, the project considers material documents in the context of the legal record as a status and medium to investigate the psychological state of dissociation and the production of what Ann Laura Stoler has called aphasia that updates amnesia as a metaphor for national memory blocks. My project strives to unpack how war hides in plain sight through a materialist reading of digital aesthetics, and seeks to open the ambiguities and apparent paradoxes within the notion of hiding in plain sight and invisibilities of war.
In 2022, the reality of war is perhaps closer than ever from where I stand, yet the history and legacy of “foreign wars” and the evolution of modern military powers such as the United States and Germany have pushed this reality away through the evolution of military technology (drone warfare). This technology purports to make war humane while degrading the image of violence—literally and materially—and extending war’s continuum through distance. Technology, thus, makes it possible for war to be clandestine, another form of secrecy other than the secret operation from the cold war. In addition to a deep engagement with political histories and a reading of these from a feminist/decolonial gaze, the project draws on media theory and writings on photography to unfold the question of visibility, data, and imaging technology in respect to the real of violence. How has photography historically been used as a medium to produce images of resistance, evidence of crimes, and how has war evolved through highly mediatized catastrophes such as the Syrian War and past Gulf Wars? Can images today resist and in what ways can resistance be marshalled? Vice versa, how do images marshal war at the expense of what Judith Butler terms precarious life?
The artistic component will be conducted through the medium of film, video art, renderings, and photographic collages that meditate on the intersection of violence and images, national dissociation, linguistic lines of fire, and virtualities.
Vita
Vanessa Gravenor (1992 Canada) is an artist, writer, and researcher. From 2010 to 2014 she completed her Bachelors in Photography at Washington University in St. Louis, USA and from 2016 to 2018 she was a master’s student of Prof. Dr. phil Hito Steyerl at the University of the Arts, Berlin. She has held research grants from the DAAD as a graduate student in visual arts and the Canada Council for the Arts. From 2021 to 2024, she is an Artistic Research Assistant in the department of Theory and History at HFBK-Hamburg under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hanne Loreck. Gravenor works in the mediums of film, video, and the performance-lecture. Her artistic works and critical texts question how present-day materializations of violence are embedded within histories and demonstrate how retellings can be a place for power reversals, complicating what is recognized as official truth. Her ongoing research examines methods of unlearning, repressed histories, procedures of forgetting, and the effects of secret operations i.e. in the context of war.
Contact and Website
Vanessa.gravenor@hfbk-hamburg.de
www.vanessagravenor.com