A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Elvan Zabunyan & Renée Green

A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Elvan Zabunyan, and Renée Green

Friday March 23, 2007
Lecture Hall, 5:00pm

Elvan Zabunyan is a contemporary art historian and art critic based in Paris. She is Associate Professor at the Rennes University, France; and Associate Researcher at the Center for North American Studies, EHESS, Paris and at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Her publications include Black is a Color: A History of African American Art (Dis Voir, 2005), which received the first prize for research from SAES/AFEA (Société des Anglicistes de l’Ensegnement Supérieur, Association Française d’Études Américaines) in 2005. She writes on contemporary theories concerning feminism and postcolonialism.

Born in Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer, and music composer. Her films include Night Passage (2004), The Fourth Dimension (2001), A Tale of Love (1995), Shoot for the Contents (1991), Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Naked Spaces—Living is Round (1985), and Reassemblage (1982). Her recent books include The Digital Film Event (2005), Cinema Interval (1999), Drawn from African Dwellings (in collaboration with Jean-Paul Bourdier, 1996), Framer Framed (1992), When the Moon Waxes Red (1991), Woman, Native, Other (1989), En minuscules (1987), and African Spaces: Designs for Living in Upper Volta (in collaboration with Bourdier, 1985). She has presented three large-scale multi-media installations, Nothing But Ways (in collaboration with Lynne Kirby, 1999, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco), The Desert is Watching (in collaboration with Bourdier, 2003, Kyoto Art Biennial), and recently completed, with Bourdier, a large audio-visual installation, L’Autre Marche, for the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Trinh T. Minh-ha is Professor of Women’s Studies and Rhetoric (Film) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series, and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories, as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought. Recent one-person exhibitions include Wavelinks, Neuberger Museum of Art (2006) and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2004); Unité d’habitation,Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris (2006); Index (From Oblivion): Paradoxes and Climates, Einstein Spaces, Berlin (2005); Relay, Kunstraum Innsbruck (2005); Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan (2005); and Elsewhere? Here, Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon (2004). Other venues include Documenta XI, Kwangju Biennial, Whitney Biennial, Aperto, Centre Georges Pompidou, MACBA (Barcelona), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), UCLA Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), and recently a project for Caltrans/Morphosis (Los Angeles), Code: Survey (2006), http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist07/index.php. Her recent books include Negotiations in the Contact Zone (editor, Assirio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2003), Between and Including (Secession/Dumont, Vienna, Germany, 2001), and Shadows and Signals (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 2000). Green is Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor
at SFAI.