Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, "Genocides, Photography & Museums"

The Institute for Critical Social Inquiry will open part of its programming to the public—a series of lectures taught by this Summer's faculty cohort of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University) , Glen Coulthard (University of British Columbia), Jack Halberstam (Columbia University) and Robin Kelley (UCLA).

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's lecture is entitled "Genocide, Photography, & Museums." Establishing the connection between genocidal violence and objects displayed in museums, requiring us to dwell at museums' thresholds. This talk will ask questions about the imminence of genocides to Western political regimes, and its inscription in the plundered objects therein.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay teaches at Brown political theory from an anti-colonial perspective, using photography and material culture. Her latest books: The Jewelers of the ummah – Potential History of The Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024), La resistance des bijoux (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2023) and Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019) and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011); She recently published her first children book Golden Threads (Ayin Press, 2024). Her latest films include the trilogy Unlearning Imperial Plunder: One Thousand and One Jewels (2025), The world like a jewel in the hand (2023), Un-documented (2019); her latest exhibitions: Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).