Nina Grønlykke Mollerup, ”'Well, Assad is still there…' - Violence, temporality and images for elsewhen”

At this week's IMS seminar, we will be visited by Nina Grønlykke Mollerup (associate professor of ethnology at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies at Saxo Department, University of Copenhagen), who will give a presentation titled 'Well, Assad is still there…' - Violence, temporality and images for elsewhen.

Abstract:

This presentation explores the temporality of images of violence through the prism of the unprecedented visual documentation of the past decade's historic uprisings in Egypt and Syria and the ensuing violence. This period could pertinently be termed, not only a time of uprisings, but also a 'Time of the Image' (cf. Bryant and Knight 2019:30; Hobbes 1962:100). The Time of the Image, capitalised, designates a period in history in which images have been significant, but where images have also been 'a way of organising time itself' (Bryant and Knight 2019:30). Engagements with images are inherently a temporalizing practice, always entangled in other times. When an image is taken, it already reaches into the past, carrying along a presence of a certain time and place and through this preservation, it reaches into the future. As Roland Barthes (1981, 91-93) has argued, photographs violently force on us time's passage (cf. Bryant 2014, 692). But by bringing a moment forward and at times entailing re-membering the past, it can also provide orientations towards the future. The presentation draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out over the past 13 years with Egyptian and Syrian activists, photographers, journalists and archivists, and NGO-workers, who have been at the forefront of visually documenting violence in the two countries and preserving this documentation. For a while, these images were urgent. Shared immediately with fellow protesters as well as on newspaper front-pages and in evening news across the globe, these images were crucially invested in the politics of the present. While hope and urgent engagements in the present turned to trauma and despair, these images are now part of compelling archiving efforts, put together as a collective testament for other times. This presentation focuses on how these images are revisited, reconstructed and employed for new purposes, allowing for engagements with future-making.

Bio:

Nina Grønlykke Mollerup is associate professor of ethnology at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies at Saxo Department, University of Copenhagen. She was trained as an anthropologist and holds a PhD in communication. She has worked extensively on practices of visually documenting (mainly) state-sanctioned violence in relation to the uprisings and ensuing violence in Egypt and Syria. She has published in journals like Social Analysis and Journalism Practice and is chair of the EASA Media Anthropology Network e-seminar series.

Read more about Nina Grønlykke Mollerup here.

You are welcome to join the seminar on zoom by emailing us at ims@lnu.se

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen