WATCH A RECORDING OF THE EVENT HERE
Statue of the duc d’Orléans, anonymous photographer, Algiers (July 2, 1962). Getty Images
Magnum Foundation invites you to a conversation and book signing in honor of White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness (MIT Press, 2023), a new book from 2020 Magnum Foundation scholar-in-residence Nicholas Mirzoeff. The event will feature Mirzoeff in conversation with Omar Berrada and Nicole Fleetwood, followed by a book signing. Copies of the book will be available for purchase on site.
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 | 6:30 - 8:30 PM ET
In-person and online
59 East 4th St, 7W | New York, NY 10003
About the book: White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that white sight was not always common practice, we can devise better ways to dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff connects Renaissance innovations—from the invention of perspective and the erection of Apollo statues as monuments to (white) beauty and power to the rise of racial capitalism dependent on slave labor—with ever-expanding surveillance technologies to show that white sight creates an oppressively racializing world, in which subjects who do not appear as white are under constant threat of violence. Analyzing recent events like the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd and the Central Park bird watching incident, Mirzoeff shows that we are experiencing a general crisis of white supremacy that presents both opportunities for and threats to social justice. If this moment is not taken to dismantle white sight, then white supremacy might surge back stronger than ever. To that end, he highlights activist interventions to strike the power of the white heteropatriarchal gaze. White Sight is a call to action for anyone who refuses to continue to live under white-dominated systems.
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. The Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, in 2020-21 he was ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation. His new book White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness is forthcoming from MIT Press in early 2023. Among his earlier publications, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013. How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). It has been translated into eleven languages and was a New Scientist Top Ten Book of the Year for 2015. Since the 2017 events in Charlottesville, he has been active in the movement to take down statues commemorating settler colonialism and/or white supremacy and co-convened the 2017 collaborative syllabus All The Monuments Must Fall, fully revised after the 2020 events. A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in Hyperallergic, the Nation, the New York Times, Frieze, the Guardian, Time and The New Republic.
Omar Berrada is a writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. His work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including Album: Cinémathèque de Tanger, about film in Tangier and Tangier on film (2012); The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (2016); and La Septième Porte, a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020). Berrada’s writing was included in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, The University of California Book of North African Literature, and Poetic Justice: An Anthology of Contemporary Moroccan Poetry. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he and Leslie Hewitt co-organize the IDS Lecture Series.
Nicole R. Fleetwood is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Steinhardt School at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, photography studies, art and public practice, performance studies, gender and feminist studies, Black cultural history, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies. She is the author Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism, the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize of the American Studies Association, the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and both the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in art history and the Frank Jewett Mather Award in art criticism. She is also the curator of the traveling exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Era of Mass Incarceration, which debuted at MoMA PS1 (September 17, 2020-April 5, 2021).
Magnum Foundation is in an elevator building and has a restroom that is wheelchair accessible and gender-neutral. For access requests or questions, please contact events@magnumfoundation.org. As a small team, we will better be able to respond to requests made at least one week in advance.
Masks are currently appreciated, but not required. We may provide additional instructions ahead of the event.