Category: Film Screening

In the 1990s, Uzbekistan’s first president Islam Karimov arrested tens of thousands of practising Muslims, imams, and citizens engaged in Islamic study groups, forcing them to sign pre-written confessions that led to decades in prison on terrorism and treason charges.

Following Karimov’s death in 2016, his successor, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, acknowledged for the first time the existence of a blacklist against former prisoners, their social contacts and extended family. Oqlanmagan — The Unexonerated, a documentary sponsored by the Oxus Society, is one of the first attempts to tell the story of more than 18,000 people formerly designated as “extremists” by the Karimov government.

This event will feature a screening of the film followed by a discussion with Noah Tucker, Oxus Society senior researcher and the film’s producer, and Emina Umarov, a researcher whose family lived through the Karimov repression and the prison system before receiving asylum in the United States.

Dr Anna Elena Torres will read from her latest book Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature, in a conversation with Dr Jeffrey Stevenson Murer, Director of the Centre for Art and Politics with conversational and musical contributions from Michael Alpert.

Dr Anna Elena Torres is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago in the departments of Comparative Literature and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. Torres is the author of Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature (Yale University Press) and co-editor of With Freedom in Our Ears: Histories of Jewish Anarchism (University of Illinois Press).

Michael Alpert has been a pioneering figure in the renaissance of East European Jewish music and Yiddish culture since the 1970s, and is the recipient of a 2015 National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts — the USA’s highest honor for traditional and heritage artists. He is internationally known for his award-winning performances and recordings with Brave Old World, David Krakauer, Itzhak Perlman, Theodore Bikel, Andy Statman, Daniel Kahn, Frank London and others.

Maré from the Inside: Race, Gender and Utopia in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas

Maré from the Inside: Race, Gender and Utopia in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas
Maré from the Inside is an interactive multi-media exhibit developed by artists, activists, and academics from Complexo da Maré, a group of 16 contiguous favelas (informal and marginalised neighbourhoods) in Rio de Janeiro. The exhibit’s photographs, films, and texts present Maré and its residents in all their vibrancy, diversity, and contradictions. In so doing, the collaborative project leverages art’s pedagogical potential to contribute to a more nuanced public understanding of favelas. The favela, after all, is both a product of the structural forces of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, as well as a geography of resistance in which Black, Indigenous, and other marginalised Brazilian communities have refused to be overdetermined by these interlocking systems of oppression. From this perspective, favelas are also an ongoing project, a desire for utopia, and a dream.

When and Where
Maré from the Inside will be located on the ground and first floors of the Theatre Arts Building from March 15th until May 25th.
Guided tours (starting in Arts Lecture Foyer):
Friday, March 15th: 3:30pm — 5pm (followed by a catered reception)
Monday, March 18th: 3:30pm — 5pm

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/40aag_VCKtzY8PHYOH5IeTi2cJqyF8Z8UGBGm4NWIphiAg3sSsASGjRBOBG9cIKn.rMkkmiIj861dzmkF

Thursday 21 September 20234:00pm to 5:30pmSchool II, St Salvator’s Quad, School II

‘Leilah Babiyre made and exhibited the installation ‘I care about you’ (2016) during the ARTWORK AT KAMPALA Exhibition hosted at Makerere University in 2016. She used this work to publicly declare that she was gay (something that costed her admission for graduate training in 2018). She is currently exiled in the USA. In the presentation, I shall raise issues of art, politics and law to speak about Babirye’s work, mine and that of two others Sheila Nakitende and Mzili Mujunga. These are the few visual artists who have dared to speak about gay rights in Uganda.’

Dr Angelo Kakande (Associate Professor, Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, Makerere University, Uganda) is visiting the School of Art History in September 2023 as part of his 2023-2024 Global Fellowship at the University of St Andrews. Dr Kakande is an artist, art historian and lawyer, and an expert in histories of modern and contemporary art in East Africa. His artworks and publications have particularly engaged with the ways in which art functions in defense of individual and collective rights. He joins us at St Andrews in connection with Dr Kate Cowcher’s ongoing research project, Dar to Dunoon, investigating the African modern artworks in the Argyll Collection.