Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

ICA Miami welcomes literary and theory scholar Edwige Tamalet Talbayev to the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center for a lecture titled “Exposure. Bodies and Water.” This virtual lecture is free and open to the public with advance RSVP and is presented in conjunction with the ICA Miami’s Fall 2021 semester.

From Talbayev:

This lecture stems from a consideration of the Mediterranean Sea as a corrupting agent endowed with the power to corrode biotic and non-biotic matter submerged in its volume. Probing the tension between the Mediterranean’s fabled history of cross-cultural contact and the multifarious practices of biopolitical suppression that its water performs in the context of the so-called trans-Mediterranean “migrant crisis,” we will examine artistic engagements with the sea that highlight its liminal position between human agon (irruptive migrants, seeking agency and security through their maritime passage) and Europe’s strictly enforced border regime. Placing clandestine migration in historical perspective, we will probe its continuity and frictions with earlier paradigms of mobility across the Mediterranean. Through a consideration of works by Zineb Sedira, Christoph Büchel, and Jason deCaires Taylor (Museo Atlántico in the Canary Islands), we will engage the modes of disposability generated by Europe’s extractive regimes to which human lives and environments continue to be sacrificed. We will explore how Europe’s extractive regimes impact human lives and environments, rendering them disposable.