Images Speak: a queer, anticolonial, abolitionist slideshow

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In this ongoing moment of political crisis, our screens have been inundated with images of death, destruction, ecological and infrastructural collapse. Live video feeds and still images are relentlessly transmitted to offer proof of mass death; evidence of human rights violations; the ongoing existence of life amidst rubble and ruin. But even those of us most committed to being in solidarity experience visual fatigue, overwhelmed with looking and feeling largely powerless to stop the carnage and the bleed. What is to be done (can anything be done) to slow the visual and material assault?

We come to this roundtable as writers, artists, curators, and transdisciplinary American Studies scholars– committed to photography as a medium, and yet also distraught over its unique power to aestheticize violence and render it inert. We offer no straightforward solution to the daily inundation of violent images we presently endure– images circulated to make necessary political and ethical claims in this harrowing moment of deep anti-trans, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-Arab, fascist resurgence– but instead offer a momentary pause. We do this through a performative roundtable, in which we each listen alongside images for the lessons it may impart for surviving this time, or another time (not yet) passed: alejandro t. acierto considers an image they have intentionally removed from mass circulation of Filipino death and carceral labor at the turn of the 20th century, and his own creative interventions to this colonial “archive of constraint.” dan paz thinks alongside performing bodies under confinement with a photograph from a track and field event in San Quentin Prison in Northern California, to consider how institutional memory, cognitive aesthetics, and photographic praxis can inform abolition and carceral studies. Ariel M. Goldberg mines the archives of lesbian activism in the US, where anti-imperialist resistance to weapons of war and state repression took the forms of both encampments and photography. Finally, Thea Quiray Tagle revisits the Philippine’s War on Drugs and the spectacularized and oddly beautiful photographs of its victims from the vantage point of 2025, to reconsider her earlier claims that to ethically witness death, we must refuse to look. Discussant Mimi Thi Nguyen will offer her comments and reflections on each of our statements, considering the mutually constitutive nature of violence and beauty, bondage and freedom. Together, we present an intentionally small and slow slideshow, to offer another way of being alongside images— listening to images intently so that we can actually hear them speak.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Mimi Thi Nguyen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Panelists

• Thea Quiray Tagle, Brown University

• alejandro t acierto, Wayne State University

• Dan Paz, University of California Davis

• Ariel M Goldberg

Comment

• Mimi Thi Nguyen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Biographical Information

Thea Quiray Tagle- Associate Curator of The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, Brown University, thea_quiray_tagle@brown.edu

Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD (she/her) is a Filipinx femme curator, writer, and transdisciplinary scholar whose research broadly investigates photography, socially engaged art and site-specific performance; visual cultures of violence and waste; urban planning and the environment; and grassroots responses to political crises and ecological collapse in and across the Pacific. Across her various research and creative projects, a question that drives Thea’s work is: how can socially engaged art and performance move us, collectively and individually, to work towards more just and livable futures that are anti-capitalist, feminist, and queer? How can art and performance model practices of right relation with other humans and non-human life, that might impact how we choose to live in the day-to-day? She earned a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego, and was the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in Asian American Studies at UIUC from 2015-2016; she previously held faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the University of Washington Bothell. Her research and arts writing have been published in outlets including American Quarterly, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, frieze, and Hyperallergic. Thea co-curated New York Now: Home (2023), the inaugural contemporary photography triennial at the Museum of the City of New York, and has curated performance and visual art exhibitions at institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Vachon Gallery at Seattle University; and the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries. Dr. Quiray Tagle is the Associate Curator of the Bell Gallery and Brown Arts Institute (BAI) at Brown University.


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alejandro t. acierto - Assistant Professor of Digital Arts, Wayne State University aacierto@wayne.edu

alejandro t. acierto produces creative projects, exhibitions, and performances that highlight the impact of colonial legacies across technologies, material culture, and the environment. Often taking shape within and across expanded forms of documentary, new media, creative scholarship, and sound, his works have been shown internationally at the Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), ISSUE (NYC), Radialsystem (Berlin), and MCA Chicago, among others. He has also published works with Parse Journal, Dilettante Army, Media-N Journal, and Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture. He was Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University, a Core Faculty Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College in the MA for Critical Craft Studies, and a Digital Humanities Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. He was also a Center for Craft Archive Research Fellow and an Ansel Adams Research Fellow at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. acierto is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Arts at Wayne State University located in Waawiyaataanong on the ceded lands of the Three Fires Confederacy, including the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot peoples.


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Dan Paz, Artist, PhD student at University of California, Davis
paz@ucdavis.edu


Dan Paz (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across photography, sculpture, and installation, focusing on gendered, queer, and carceral relations to the nation-state, particularly within the Latin(x)é diaspora. Their research considers the material conditions of institutionalization through analog and digital photographic ontologies, tracing the labor and life cycle of images at the intersections of exposure, capture, architecture, and abolition. Paz’s work has been featured both nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Michigan State University and Entre Gallery in Vienna, Austria. Their work has also been included in group exhibitions at Hayward Gallery (UK), the Havana Biennial (Cuba), NYU’s New Media Lab (NYC), Jacob Lawrence Gallery (Seattle), and Holding Contemporary (Portland), among others. In 2022, Dan was an Artist-in-Residence in Critical Race Studies and Creative Practice at Michigan State University. The following year, they were a Public Scholars for the Future Fellow at UC Davis. Currently, Dan is a 2024–25 Artist Fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (NY) and a Beyond the Barriers Research Fellow at the University of California, Davis where they are pursuing a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies with emphases in Science & Technology Studies and Feminist Theory and Research.


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Ariel M. Goldberg, Independent Writer, Curator, Educator
arielmalkagoldberg@gmail.com


Ariel Goldberg is a writer, curator, and educator working with trans and queer lineages in photography. Goldberg’s books include The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) and The Photographer (Roof Books, 2015). Goldberg was a 2024 Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow at the New York Public Library. Their exhibition on photography’s relationship to spaces for learning, Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s opened at Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati as part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial, co-presented with The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in NYC, where the show traveled in 2023. Images… arrived to the Chicago Cultural Center, or “People’s Palace” in 2024.

Goldberg has curated public programs at venues including Magnum Foundation, The Poetry Project, and Tucson Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center. With Noam Parness, they co-curated Uncanny Effects: Robert Giard’s Currents of Connection (2020) at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Their writing has appeared in Lucid Knowledge: On the Currency of the Photographic Image, Afterimage Journal, e-flux, Jewish
Currents, Artforum, and Art in America. Goldberg’s work has been supported by the New Jewish Culture Fellowship, New York Public Library Research Rooms, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and SOMA in Mexico City. They were a 2020 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for their book-in-progress on trans and queer image cultures of the late 20th century. Goldberg has taught photography, writing, and contemporary art practices at Bard College, The New School, New York University, Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, and Rutgers University.

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Discussant: Mimi Thi Nguyen, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; 475mimi@gmail.com

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of The Gift of Freedom and The Promise of Beauty, and co-editor with Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, and Yutian Wong for Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader. Both The Promise of Beauty and Bangtan Remixed were published with Duke University Press in 2024. She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, The Funambulist, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum. Her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University.