“Nightmare Landscapes, Ambient Splendor, and the End(s) of Art”

Neferti X. M. Tadiar
“Nightmare Landscapes, Ambient Splendor, and the End(s) of Art”
[Response: Paul Nadal]
Tuesday, March 28, 2023 @5pm ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

In this talk, Neferti Tadiar shares readings of contemporary Philippine art in the context of catastrophe from her book Remaindered Life. She reads the work of Kiri Dalena, Lyra Garcellano, and others in intricate, expressive relation to the nightmare landscapes proffered by a global fantasy of city everywhere, an uber-urban world built on unimpeded value-productive movement, connection, and circulation, which demands and depends on relentless violent life-expenditures through war. Dwelling on these works’ affective sensibility of the life of the dispossessed imprinted within these very landscapes, their rendering of the ambient splendor of remaindered life, Tadiar asks what in this context might be the end(s) of art.

Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization; Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order; and most recently, Remaindered Life.

Paul Nadal is Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of literature and economy, he is completing a book on novels and remittances in the Philippine diaspora, a chapter of which appeared in American Quarterly and won the Best Essay Prize from the American Literature Society.