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CÉDA, Room 123
2515 Rue Delisle
Montréal, QC H3J 1K8
This workshop introduces participants to the creative political strategy of opacity. Derived from anti-colonial theory, we will explore the ways opacity shows up in our everyday lives materially, socially, and strategically as a method against the state. We will consider what opacity does as a method and tool of the state through privacy and secrecy (e.g. practices of redaction in the state documents) and how the people’s subversion of such methods shows it was always our own to begin with. Specifically, we will consider counter-surveillant measures of opacity and opaque matter as urgent and necessary measures that are part of our everyday choices to conceal and cover; in addition to considering how organizers, artists, and direct action practitioners have historically moved fugitively as a means of defining and reimagining the horizons for forms of community defense. The workshop will provide a material grounding of opacity to help frame current strategies against rampant fascism.
Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice
Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Concordia University
Balbir K. Singh is Canada Research Chair in Art and Racial Justice, as well as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She is the Director of Dark Opacities Lab, a hub for BIPOC political and aesthetic study and strategy. Using anti-colonial methods of reading and sensing, Singh builds on theories of opacity in her in-progress manuscript “Militant Bodies: Racial/Religious Opacity and Minoritarian Self-Defense,” which takes a materialist feminist approach to explore questions that center post-9/11 racial and religious hyper-policing of Muslim and Sikh bodies. Currently, she serves as Reviews Editor for Art Journal and is part of the Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Colelctive. Singh has been published in journals including Sikh Formations, Critical Ethnic Studies, QED, Surveillance and Society, Rhizomes, the Journal of Asian American Studies, Spectra, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas.
