Unlearning Together at the Thresholds of Museums

Ariella Azoulay engages with the museum as a world-destroying technology and addresses the impossibility of decolonizing colonial museums without decolonizing the world, with a special focus on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world.

The day before Azoulay’s lecture, she will join us for a screening of her film The World Like a Jewel in the Hand—Unlearning Imperial Plunder II. The screening will take place on Wednesday, March 6, at 4:30 pm, in Alice Cinema (L01). Learn more about the screening here.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, as well as a film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. She is the author of several books, including The Jewelers of the Ummah (Verso); La résistance des bijoux (Rot-Bo-Krik); Potential History—Unlearning Imperialism (Verso); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso); The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books); and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press). Azoulay is also known for her film essays: The World Like a Jewel in the Hand (2023); Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019); and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). Her exhibition credits include Errata (Fundació Tàpies, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020) and The Natural Violence of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).

Poster