What Remains: Memory, Suppression, and the Aftermath of State Terrorism

What persists after an episode of political or social violence is declared over? How does terror survive its immediate event by becoming embedded in the habits, defenses, and structures of everyday life?This panel brings together London-based Vali Mahlouji, New York-based Richard Vine, and Natasha Chuk, who will also moderate, for a conversation about their critical and cultural work with histories of conflict, state violence, and the cultural memory and legacies of these events. The discussion considers how violence can persist both through what is remembered and through what is suppressed, avoided, or rendered unspeakable, approaching a haunting and “absent-presence” as evidence of violence that remains active in social and psychic life. The conversation will consider what art, archives, and curatorial practice can do when conventional forms of representation and witnessing are insufficient, as well as address the interpretive challenges these forms present. How can institutions acknowledge histories of violence without simply containing them within exhibitions, archives, or official narratives? What does it mean to create conditions for ethical spectatorship when the structures that produce forgetting remain intact?