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Dr Molly Castelloe award winning film Vamik's Room

Ian Alan Paul

The Guantanamo Bay Museum
Conversation and Q&A with Ian Alan Paul and Dr Jeffrey Murer

Wednesday 3rd November 2021

What if the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp had been closed, and replaced by a museum that critically reflects on the social and political significance of the prison? This is the premise that animates The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History, an art project initiated by Ian Alan Paul and involving more than a dozen activists, theorists and artists.

Ian Alan Paul (b. 1984, US) is an artist-theorist whose work examines enactments of power and practices of resistance in global contexts. Their transdisciplinary practice is formally diverse, and is situated at the intersections of critical theory, contemporary art, and digital media studies. Ian has developed projects and lived for extended periods in the United States, Mexico, Spain, Egypt, and Palestine, and has exhibited their work and given lectures internationally.

Their research-creation practice approaches issues that are geographically diffuse yet thematically connected, including the digitized surveillance of the Mexico-US Border, the contested past and future of the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities, and the politics of memory in Post-Revolution Cairo. They received their PhD in Film and Digital Media Studies from UC Santa Cruz in 2016, their MFA and MA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011, and is presently based in Barcelona.

Watch the conversation here

 

Visit the museum here – Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History