Terrorientalist Landscapes conjures a history of orientalism in the California Mojave desert across the decades, and through war and colonialism—from the introduction of date palm in 1902, and the Indio Palm Date Festivals of the 1940s-1980s, to the contemporary simulacrum “Middle Eastern” towns of U.S. military training centers in the War on Terror. The project ponders the role of fiction and speculation in the construct of the “Middle East,” one that is founded on the violent act of conflating languages, landscapes, cultures and geographical territories. The presentation begins in the desert where the roots of beheaded date palms are soaked in seeping crude oil, 7,777 miles away from its simulation.
Field of Vision is Gallery 44’s thematic public programming series exploring the larger conversations surrounding photography and contemporary image culture. Taking a variety of forms – performance lectures, artist talks, readings, dinner parties, film screenings – each programming year explores a theme and its relevance to contemporary image making practices and dialogues.
This year's theme, Representation and Visibility, looks at how photography, as a mode of self-address, can act as a marker of perseverance and a tool to confront structural inequalities.
Gelare Khoshgozaran گلاره خوشگذران (B. 1986, Tehran) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working across video, installation performance and writing. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2009 and her BFA from the University of Arts, Tehran. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, Museo Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Malmö Konsthall, LACE, The LA Municipal Art Gallery, Southern Exposure, Human Resources, Interstate Projects, The AC Institute, and Thomas Erben Gallery, among others. She was the recipient of the 2017 Art Matters Foundation fellowship, the 2016 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award for Emerging Artists, the 2015 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. Living and working in Los Angeles, she is the co-founding editor of contemptorary.org.
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