10.23.15: Art, Politics & the City in Mexico and China


Image: Ever, "Religious silence in a comunism context," 2012.

Thursday, October 22, 2015, 8:00 p.m. Screening of Juan Carlos Rulfo's In the Pit at Wurster 101 and Q&A with the filmmaker.

Friday, October 23, 2015, 8:30AM-6PM Symposium
Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley

Register by October 16.

Schedule | Speaker Info | Exhibits/Exhibitions | Photos | Videos

This wide-ranging interdisciplinary symposium will examine art, commerce, politics, violence, history, and urban space on both sides of the Pacific. Creative artists and scholars will explore contemporary performance, film, art, and activism in Mexico City from the Revolution to today. Ruben Gallo of Princeton University will give a keynote examining the place of ruins in Mexico City imaginaries. Discussions of modern and contemporary culture and politics with leading performers, filmmakers, and scholars will follow, including Gaston Alzate, Minerva Cuevas, Michael Dear, Ivonne del Valle, Tatiana Flores, Daniel Hernandez, Edward J. McCaughan, Jesusa Rodríguez and Juan Carlos Rulfo, and Maite Zubiaurre.

As a counterpoint from the other side of the Pacific Rim, Margaret Crawford and Winnie Wong of UC Berkeley will present an exhibition on current art and urbanism in China’s dynamic Pearl River Delta, manufacturer to the world of both smartphones and mass-produced Van Goghs." Research on contemporary Shanghai by a team from the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative will also be presented by Dana Cuff and Jonathan Crisman in a video-based exhibit, and new UC Berkeley publications and websites on participatory urbanisms (focusing on São Paulo and New Delhi) and urban pilgrimage will be unveiled.

The symposium is sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, a transdisciplinary experiment in innovative methods of investigating cities. The UC Berkeley Global Urban Humanities Initiative and the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative are both supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The symposium and exhibitions will highlight the ways in which methods from the arts and humanities can be combined with techniques from architecture and city planning to analyze and represent urban form and human experience.

The symposium will be held at the University of California, Berkeley, at Wurster Hall. The exhibitions will be presented at the Wurster Gallery and other spaces in Wurster Hall, and the curators will be available for discussion and tours.

FEATURED SPEAKERS, CURATORS and DISCUSSANTS:

Keynote: Ruben Gallo: “Mexico City: from Revolutionary Ruins to Global City and Back Again”

• Gaston Alzate, CSU Los Angeles
• Margaret Crawford, UC Berkeley
• Jonathan Crisman, UCLA
• Minerva Cuevas, Artist
• Dana Cuff, UCLA
• Michael Dear, UC Berkeley
• Ivonne del Valle, UC Berkeley
• Tatiana Flores, Rutgers
• Ruben Gallo, Princeton
• Daniel Hernandez, Journalist
• Kirsten Larson, UC Berkeley
• Padma Maitland, UC Berkeley
• Edward J. McCaughan, San Francisco State University
• Mia Narell, UC Berkeley
• Jesusa Rodríguez, Resistencia Creativa
• Juan Carlos Rulfo, Filmmaker
• Karin Shankar, UC Berkeley
• Winnie Wong, UC Berkeley
• Lawrence Yang, UC Berkeley
• Maite Zubiaurre, UCLA

For more information on this symposium's speakers and curators, see the Speaker Info page.

Read about the event on our blog:
Art, Politics & the City in Mexico and China: Keynote Presentation
Art, Politics & the City in Mexico and China: Panel 1 | Modernity in Process
Art, Politics & the City in Mexico and China: Exhibit(ion)s and Publications