Registration will open on Monday, February 24 at noon.

Photographer and Barnard Distinguished Artist in Comparative Literature Diana Matar traversed the United States for ten years, documenting locations where citizens were shot or tasered by law enforcement officers. In the resulting book of black and white photographs, writings, and detailed research, My America, she asks: “What does it mean to live in a land where the people responsible for protecting its citizens can so often be involved in their deaths?” 

Introduced by Professor of the Arts and Dean Emerita Carol Becker. Responses by Lisa Sutcliffe, Curator in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Kendall Thomas, Columbia Law School. 

About My America: 

In the US, approximately 1,000 people continue to die each year in encounters with police.  More than any other industrialised nation. My America is an archive of and memorial to victims of these encounters. The scale of the book­­­­­­­­­­ attests to the scale of the problem yet Matar asks us to remember these are individuals.

“Of the over 300 sites I visited only seven had any type of memorial. Something about these lives not being recognized, even on the land itself, upset me most. As a nation, we weren't taking stock. We rarely, if ever, marked the ground.”

The black and white photographs in My America are of city parks, shopping malls, parking lots,  mobile homes, empty fields, and roadside highways. By photographing these banal landscapes Matar declares that what happened at the locations matters and questions the link between landscape and memory. 

“Can a photograph tell us anything about what has happened before the photographer arrives… even if not, I believe there is value in documenting the ground where violence has taken place... Perhaps a photograph can offer ways to remember acts of injustice that have been forgotten or never made transparent.”

Previously, Matar, an American living in London, spent years documenting sites of state sponsored violence in North Africa, Eastern and Southern Europe. In 2015 she turned her lens on her own country and began researching who, how, and where citizens were dying in police encounters in the US. She created detailed maps in her studio and compiled information about each victim who died in 2015 and 2016. 

“I wanted to address the issue of police violence in a way that wasn’t just polemic.”  

Where Ideas Come From is curated by Carol Becker, Professor of the Arts and Dean Emerita of Columbia University School of the Arts. Events, panels, interviews and conversations bring together practitioners and theorists from multiple disciplines such as visual and sound arts, dance, theatre, writing, film, neuroscience, and politics to discuss where ideas originate and how they evolve.

Co-presented by the Program in Comparative Literature & Translation Studies at Barnard College and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.