Plotting Movements: Laura Kurgan and Naeem Mohaiemen on the Politics of Space

• Art/Photo

In the early ’90s, curators at the New Museum organized three related exhibitions that critically examined the rhetoric of colonial expansion and conquest. Developed under the working title “Occupied Territory,” these exhibitions— “In Transit,” “The Final Frontier,”and “Trade Routes” —invited artists to respond to questions surrounding globalization’s social, economic, cultural, and intellectual exchanges. To address these issues in a renewed context, Laura Kurgan and Naeem Mohaiemen will engage the original overarching conceptual framework for the three exhibitions through presentations that draw upon their current research and individual practices. They will both respond as if the “Occupied Territory” outline—sourced from an internal working document in the New Museum archives—were a structural prompt they had received for an exhibition series today.