Online discussion with b.h. Yael, Cooper Battersby, and Emily Vey Duke, moderated by Irmgard Emmelhainz

Join us on Tuesday, August 3, 2021, at 1pm EST for an online discussion with b.h. Yael, Cooper Battersby, and Emily Vey Duke, moderated by Irmgard Emmelhainz.

No biological organism can be alive on its own, yet our relationships to others and to the environment are determined by the modern fantasy of the independent individual fending for herself in a Darwinist drive for success and survival. These relationships also give shape to how we sustain ourselves, how we survive in the world, and how we think of ourselves as individual subjects. Under globalized capitalism, the qualities and intensities of interpersonal and environmental relationships also pass through the market and are characterized by extreme alienation and dissociation. The works in this program deal with the hopes and dysfunctions of contemporary subjectivity and interrelational arrangements as determined by modernity and capitalism. Today, the market has erased the boundaries between biological life and politics, perpetuating the colonial hierarchy of a racialized social and political life that makes certain bodies vulnerable and subject to technologies of oppression and dispossession, while it protects others. As precarity is exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, discussions on decolonial interrationality, reciprocity, and mutual aid emerge seeking to finally transcend the white-savior complex behind human rights and welfare state discourses. In our hyper-individualized imaginaries, we have set empathy in place as a structural emotion to relate to others, yet we are either insensitive to their pain or embedded in toxic forms of empathic codependency. We can only hope for impossible attachments and autonomous forms of mutual aid.

The discussion accompanies the films in “Interrelational Arrangements (Interdependency and Survival),” the third program of the series Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization, curated by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film.

Watch the films here, and read more about the series here.

b.h. Yael is a Toronto-based filmmaker and installation artist. Yael’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and shown in various settings, from festivals to galleries to community and activist groups, as well as at various educational venues, and has been purchased by many universities. Yael’s films and installations have dealt with the many intersections of identity and family; it has focused on activist initiatives in Palestine/Israel, as well as apocalypse, and geopolitical and environmental urgencies. She is Professor of Integrated Media at OCAD University and, in 2021, Visiting Scholar at Massey College, University of Toronto. A book about Yael’s work titled b.h.Yael: Family States, published in 2021, is available in pdf from Cinema Politica and on editor Mike Hoolboom’s website, and in hardcopy from Another Story Bookshop in Toronto.

Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby have been working collaboratively since 1994 in printed matter, installation, new media, curation, and sound, with their primary practice being single-channel video. Their work has been exhibited internationally including at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and at The Renaissance Society, Chicago, and nationally at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In Toronto their work is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her book Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2019. The translated expanded version of The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion is coming out this fall with SUNY Press, and so is Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives as Resistance (Vanderbilt). She is a member of the SNCA in Mexico (National System for Arts Creators).

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.