Role
Dr. Helene Kazan in a Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory on the Bachelors and Masters in Fine Art.
Publications
Journal articles
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Amin HY, Downey A, Kazan H, Mohaiemen N, Schuppli S, 'Witness statements and the technologies of memory: A conversation between Heba Y. Amin, Anthony Downey, Helene Kazan, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Susan Schuppli'
Memory, Mind & Media 1 (2022)
eISSN: 2635-0238AbstractPublished hereBringing together artistic and scientific modes of inquiry, Witness statements and the technologies of memory examines the impact that digital technologies have on the substance of truth and historical facts. Hosted as part of Heba Y. Amin and Anthony Downey's online symposium, which was held in conjunction with Amin's exhibition When I see the future, I close my eyes, Chapter I (curated by Downey for the Mosaic Rooms in 2020), the panel discussed the legacies of colonial power and command, regimes of memory, and the ex post facto constitution of evidence from online archives. Drawing upon the diverse backgrounds and experiences of the panellists, which included Helene Kazan (Oxford Brookes University), Naeem Mohaiemen (Columbia University), and Susan Schuppli (Goldsmiths, University of London), Heba Y. Amin (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart), and Anthony Downey (Birmingham City University), Witness statements and the technologies of memory sought to more fully understand the impact of digital archives on historical records and evidence-gathering. Against the backdrop of indiscriminate expurgations of online material, we observe how the evidentiary potential of digital archives is compromised by the commercial imperatives of social media networks, censorship, and state surveillance. Among the many questions that arise here, the extent to which personal recollections are often presented as virtual artefacts of memory – a technology of recall or a mnemo-technics in its own right – remains central to the debate about the future of memory in our post-digital age.
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Kazan HE, 'An unbound critical lived-built environment'
Journal of Visual Culture 20 (3) (2022) pp.575 -595
ISSN: 1470-4129 eISSN: 1741-2994AbstractPublished hereThrough engaged analysis of entangled research-based practice, this article argues that thresholds of distinction between environmental or conflict-based violence are unbound across Lebanon’s critical lived–built environment. Drawing on the fields of architecture, law, art and cultural production, this investigative scope is engaged through de-colonial, feminist and critical legal theory and method. The analysis in this article is an attempt at dismantling the inherent asymmetric power structures – legal, political and architectural – operating through violent risk, which continue to evade certain frames of accountability. This is done to reveal the complexity of this violent limit condition and its materializations, in the proposal of a progressive methodological imagining and investigation: an unbound critical lived–built environment.
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Kazan HE, 'Against Resilience'
Journal of Visual Culture 2 (2020)
ISSN: 1470-4129 eISSN: 1741-2994Published here -
Kazan H, 'Decolonizing Archives and Law's Frame of Accountability'
World Records Journal 4 (2020)
Published here Open Access on RADAR -
Kazan H, 'The Architecture of Slow, Structural, and Spectacular Violence and the Poetic Testimony of War'
Australian Feminist Law Journal 44 (1) (2018) pp.119-136
ISSN: 1320-0968AbstractPublished hereThis research observes the architecture of the lived built environment in Lebanon as a material sensor of risk, produced through an evolving integrated limit condition of conflict and capitalism. Forcing its impact through slow, structural, and spectacular modes of enacting violence, this article traces an historic inscription of these technologies of governance, read through an intersectional observation of international law, architecture, and the human bodily experience of affect. Framing the often chaotic or hysteric nature of voicing evidence as poetic testimony, this article questions dominant methods of producing evidence that often exclude or render the human body invisible.
Book chapters
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Kazan H, 'Poetic Testimony' in Riccardo Badano, Tomas Percival, Susan Schuppli (ed.), Militant Media, Spector Books, Leipzig (2024)
ISBN: 9783959056878Published here Open Access on RADAR -
Kazan HE, '(De)constructing Risk' in Braidotti R, Jones E, Klumbyte G (ed.), More Postman Glossary, Bloomsbury Publishing (2022)
ISBN: 9781350231429AbstractPublished hereThe notion of the posthuman continues to both intrigue and confuse, not least because of the huge number of ideas, theories and figures associated with this term. More Posthuman Glossary provides a way in to the dizzying array of posthuman concepts, providing vivid accounts of emerging terms. It is much more than a series of definitions, however, in that it seeks to imagine and predict what new terms might come into being as this exciting field continues to expand.
A follow-up volume to the brilliant interventions of Posthuman Glossary (2018), this book extends and elaborates on that work, particularly focusing on concepts of race, indigeneity and new ideas in radical ecology. It also includes new and emerging voices within the new humanities and multiple modes of communicating ideas.
This is an indispensible glossary for those who are exploring what the non-human, inhuman and posthuman might mean in the 21st century. -
Kazan H, 'What the War Will Look Like' in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Sternberg Press (2014)
ISBN: 9783956790119
Reviews
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Kazan HE, review of Interwoven solidarities: Review of Bhandar and Ziadah, eds, Revolutionary Feminisms
Radical Philosophy 211 (Winter) (2021) pp.63-66
ISSN: 0300-211X eISSN: 0300-211XPublished here
Other publications
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Kazan HE, Safa M, Garcia-Kurland A, Chakaroun Z, Hassan Y, Charafeddine L, Youssef J, Aboul-Hosn Z, Atoui J, Sibai L, Mira, Slayman K, Moussawi S, Hewitt S
, 'Frame of Accountability', (2024)
AbstractPublished hereThrough film, installation, writing and public engagement, Frame of Accountability investigates ‘risk’ as a lived condition, produced through the co-evolution of capitalist systems and violent conflict. The project focuses on the effects across Lebanon and Syria, with a view to understanding the wider regional and global consequences. Using revolutionary feminist, decolonial, critical-legal, and artistic theories and methods, the work explores ways of dismantling violence perpetrated through colonial mechanisms of governance, towards wider frameworks of accountability and justice.
The feature length film is produced in a multi-part, non-linear formation:
Beyond the Sky’s Limits narrates law as a consciousness coming to terms with its own failings: the speculative voice of a feminist, queered, decolonial International Law. Unravelling this complex non-human subjectivity, it narrates the drafting of the Rules of Air Warfare in 1923. As a study of the legal archival document reveals how these international laws of war become corrupted by the self-interests of the strong states and colonial powers involved in their making: their ambitions fail quickly and critically.
(Un)Touching Ground begins through the discovery of the personal archive of General Spears, the first British Minister of Lebanon and Syria who was closely involved in the Allied invasion of the Vichy French controlled territory in 1941. The film traces the multiple routes of the military campaign and its human and non-human effects as—under the legal construct of ‘military necessity’—two colonial forces fight for control of and access to natural resources across the territory.
In Her View engages evidence revealing the sexual exploitation of an anonymous woman by occupying Australian soldiers fighting for the Allied forces in Lebanon in 1941. The film moves through the archival evidence to sense, trace and position her encounter as a formation of poetic testimony. This part of the film points to the lack of legal accountability for violence enacted at the scale of the body through state perpetrated violence.
Frame of Accountability, has been developed, in part, during a 2018-2020 Vera List Center Fellowship at The New School. It has been supported by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and its Advisory Board. The project has also been developed with thanks and support from the 2022 Graham Foundation Grant Award, Beirut Art Centre and Centre Of Research in the Arts (CORA) Oxford Brookes University.
https://youtu.be/dSP2YHGxeHs?si=rQz1z4_dVfZkfCgi
https://www.foa-working-archive.com -
Kazan HE, 'Engineering Shelter', (2024)
AbstractPublished hereMining information from ‘before and after’ images of an experiment carried out by the British Ministry of Home Security in 1941, where a 350 pound concrete block was dropped on a shelter known as the Morrison shelter to prove the structures engineered capacity to shelter civilians during aerial bombardment. Engineering Shelter re-enacts the outlined experiment to test the claims of safety being made by the British government in recommending the use of the shelter. Originally a live re-enactment of the experiment took place, the documentation of which formed part of a multi-media installation including the remnant outcome of the conducted experiment at the Fort Brockhurst, for the exhibition ‘Space Interrupted’ curated by Clare Sheppeard. The project was then translated as a short film and online project commissioned by Amal Khalaf for Ibraaz, a leading critical forum on visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East.
This April 2024 the work was developed as a multimedia installation, which was exhibited at Karst, Plymouth and for online platform Rolodex Propoganda.
https://www.polygonpalm.com/
https://thewrong.org/RodolexPropaganda