Absence and Access: Silent Presence as a Form of Action
Saturday, April, 19th, 2014 10:00am
Campus in Camps, Al Feneiq Center, (Dheisheh Refugee Camp)

The rise of various “thing theories” in the last twenty years can be understood as a reaction against the extravagant privileging of discourse in scholarly discourse in the late twentieth century. In this seminar discussion and workshop, participants will reflect on this development, and consider the status of “the absent” in current theories of material culture. What are the implications for thinking about art and cultural heritage? Those who are interested will be invited to experiment with a practice of sustained attention oriented to missing things.
People Without Things

Biographical note

D. Graham Burnett is based in New York City, where he is an editor at Cabinet magazine and a 2013-2014 Guggenheim Fellow. Trained in the history and philosophy of science, Burnett is the author of several books on nature, the environment, and law, including The Sounding of the Whale (Chicago, 2012), and he is on the faculty at Princeton University. “The Work of Art under Conditions of Intermittent Accessibility”—an installation and performance piece—just closed at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.