Something you should know

At the next session of the seminar Something you should know, meet Bani Khoshnoudi, author of the film "The Silent Majority Speaks", presented on May 2 at Forum des Images and on June 17 at Centre Pompidou. 

The speaker

Bani Khoshnoudi was born in Tehran and immigrated to the United States at the age of two during the Iranian revolution of 1979. She studied architecture, photography and film at the University of Texas at Austin and then continued her studies ten years later, in 2008, in the prestigious contemporary art program, the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work is inhabited by displacement and uprootedness and explores themes of exile, modernity and its violence, memory and the archive. While her films (both documentary and fiction) delve into layers of stories and experiences related to global migrations, nomadism and historical struggles for freedom, her photographs and installations also work with the textures and traces of these histories, architecture and ruins, and human footprints on the land.  Since 2009, she divides her time between Paris and Mexico City.

The seminar Something you should know

Created in 2006, Something you should know aims to welcome contemporary art in an institution of higher education and research by placing itself resolutely on the side of the practice of today's artists and producers.

While globalization disrupts the flows and polarities of the art world, giving rise to new forms of activism and new collective ambitions, questioning the space and forms of political representation or the constitution of new national references resulting from the communist world and decolonization, reinscribing utopia at the heart of collective projects, questioning the majority legitimacies and blind spots of democracy : so many motives for today's art that the seminar proposes to explore by giving the floor to artists, curators, critics, institutional leaders, and activists who, working outside of France, come to EHESS/FMSH to share their experience with us.

Organisers

• Patricia Falguières, Georg Simmel Center | EHESS-CNRS
• Elisabeth Lebovici
• Natasa Petresin-Bachelez |Cité Internationale des Arts