Empire

Empire features contemporary projected art both metaphorical and documentary examining from many viewpoints the mechanisms of empire building and destruction, modernity and its discontents. Many of these artworks, both single-channel and complex multimedia installations, are presented for the first time in the United States.

Napoleon on the Nile, presented concurrently with Empire, offers a look at an important historical project of stalking, seizure, and specular mastery—what filmmaker and theorist Trinh Minh-ha calls “all-owning-spectatorship.” In contrast, Empire is organized around a question that colonial projects like the Description de l’Égypt, France’s attempt to map and make useful the country of Egypt, raise for contemporary artists. How does one create art today without re-inscribing (colonial) patterns of domination? The projected art here offers complex, even contradictory, figures of difference; provisional notions of identity; mingled pasts and presents; and shifting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion as possible responses to this question.