Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is an artist, filmmaker, author, curator and theorist of visual culture. For over ten years, her work has focused on developing and demonstrating potential history, a radical concept that contends with imperial violence and erasure. Potential history “is a form of being with others, both living and dead, across time, against the separation of the past from the present, colonized peoples from their worlds and possessions, and history from politics.” The world like a jewel in the hand is the second film in her series, Unlearning imperial plunder, which goes beyond the movement to repatriate looted museum objects, and questions the very foundation of imperialism. Azoulay’s film, within this widened landscape, focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world in North Africa. Her film insists on making it imaginable and inhabitable again.

The screening of The world like a jewel in the hand – Unlearning imperial plunder ii will be followed by a virtual discussion with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Hernease Davis, the Assistant Curator of Education and Public Programs.

Suggested: $10 [tickets]

[Download Program PDF]

The VSW Salon is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts and by the ArtWorks program of the National Endowment for the Arts.