Suzannah Henty - Oral History and Radical Future

Home A M Qattan Foundation Media Video Gallery Suzannah Henty - Oral History and Radical Future

 

In this lecture was held at A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah - Palestine on 10 June, 2019, Suzannah Henty explores the subject of courage, resilience, resistance as read through a selection of contemporary artists working with video and film in Palestine and the continent now known as Australia, examining the intimate relationship that landscapes share with past and present coloniality and conflict. The title, “Oral Histories and ‘Radical’ Futures,” speaks to the decolonising of the radical imagination by a radical futurity through selected video works - attentive to the past as it scrutinises the present, but also generously thinking of what is beyond. There is an urgency to revisit expansive geographies, liberatory lyrics, decolonial gestures, subjects of caring inquiry in works that continue to be both nourishing and sustaining for those who witness them. The lecture will deliberate upon the challenges of coloniaity, geontology and capital, looking at the capacity of video art to create alternative visual narratives and oral histories, to image and imagine decolonial futures. Suzannah Henty is a Narrm (Melbourne) and Paris-based Australian art historian, writer and educator currently undertaking a jointly awarded and cross-disciplinary PhD at the University of Melbourne and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Her research is concerned with the destabilisation of settler colonial discourses by means of resistant contemporary art practices. She has published with the Funambulist, Jerusalem Quarterly and Kunstlicht; worked as a researcher at Villa Vassilieff, Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine and Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art; taught gender studies and art history the University of Melbourne and given guest lectures at Victoria University and SOAS University of London.