Thursday, November 29 | Oakes 109 | 4:00 PM
Allan Sekula is photographer, writer, and critic, and is on the Art Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions all over the world, including the Folkwang Museum (Essen), the Vancouver Art Gallery (vancouver), the University Art Museum (Berkeley), the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Munich Kunstverein (Munich), and the Palais des Beau Arts (Brussels). His many books include Geography Lesson: Canadanian Notes (MIT, 1997), Five Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (with Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Verso, 2000), and The Traffic in Photographs (MIT, forthcoming). Fish Story (Richter Verlag, 1995) is an extraordinary book that is representative of much of his work. In phtographs and texts, Sekula effects a politically engaged and conceptually original re-materialization of oceanic social space-harbors, ship interiors, port towns, factories-and its dwellers, whose existence and struggles are so often effaced by globalist boosterist abstraction. For this visit, Allan Sekula will screen and discuss his video Irrational Exuberance (Tsukiji)-one part of a projected three-part Irrational Exuberance series-which engages the Japanese fishing industry, U.S. militarism, and the history of the U.S.-Japanese encounter.