Affiliation:
1. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Abstract
This essay offers a close reading of Archive (2014), an hour-long performance
by Israeli dancer and choreographer Arkadi Zaides, during which the artist
conducts a corporeal dialogue with audio-visual documentation of human
rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. I will point to
the ways in which the work’s atypical engagement with the mediation
of violence resonates Judith Butler’s thought on opaque subjectivities,
collective responsibility, risk and complicity. I will further place Butler’s
call for ethical responsibility in dialogue with current debates on the
production, circulation, and reception of images of violence, both in the
specific context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in relation to more
general conceptualizations of spectatorship.
Publisher
Amsterdam University Press