Month: April 2024

Eight students presented work at this year’s CMP Critique on on April 12 with faculty, other CMP students, and guest critic Walid Raad. We exchanged lively feedback on work from Soumya Ghosh, Parker Hatley, Lilia Kilburn, Ana Laura Malmaceda, Noha Mokhtar, Beatrice Steinert, Julia Sharpe, and Kristen Zipperer.

Walid Raad, who received this year’s Solomon Fellowship at Harvard, is an artist whose works include photography, video, mixed media installations, and performances. His works include the creation of The Atlas Group, a fifteen-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, as well as the ongoing projects Scratching on Things I Could Disavow and Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut). His books include Walkthrough, The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead, My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair, and Let’s Be Honest The Weather Helped.

Raad’s solo exhibitions have been featured at institutions including the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza (Madrid), Louvre (Paris), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), ICA (Boston, USA), Museo Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico), Kunsthalle Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland), The Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, UK), Festival d’Automne (Paris, France), Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels, Belgium), The Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany).

CMP students Beatrice Steinert (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and History of Science), Noah Toyonaga (Physics), and Soumya Ghosh (Physics) co-organized Unfiguring, a Mahindra Humanities Center Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference co-sponsored by CMP in March 2024, which brought together practitioners from the arts and sciences for three days of intensive discussion and play. The title and subject of the conference foregrounded the scientific “figure” – the name for any photograph, drawing, diagram, or plot of data in an academic paper – as a mode of thought and site for intervention. 

Unfiguring was organized around a series of presentations and artworks on topics ranging from ant acoustics to fluid dynamics to visualizations of infinity. Following the presentations – which ranged from academic and artist talks to video works, photographs, and beyond – a curated panel of professional artists and scientists provided critical insight and seeded conversations which spilled into breaks.

These discussions revolved around tactics of production, aesthetics of interpretation, and forms of community – all of which articulated and simultaneously challenged the distinctions of discipline in science and art.