Red Thread Talks and Conversations - 4: Blank Spots on the Map: State Secrecy and the Limits of the Visible
Trevor Paglen
The fourth talk of the series was held in ITU Faculty of Architecture on July 26th, Friday, at 18.00. Trevor Paglen presented the talk entitled "Blank Spots on the Map: State Secrecy and the Limits of the Visible".
*This talk is organised within the scope of Garanti Gallery, Platform Garanti's "Transdisciplines" Lecture Series and 11th International Istanbul Biennial's "Red Thread" Talks and Conversations series, with the collaboration of Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Architecture.
"Blank Spots on the Map: State Secrecy and the Limits of the Visible"
Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen takes us on a road trip through the world of state secrets, hidden budgets, covert military bases, and disappeared people in the USA: through a landscape that military and intelligence insiders call the "black world." Over the course of his talk, Paglen leads us from "non-existent" Air Force and CIA installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure "black sites" startlingly close to home. Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world's internal contradictions give rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.
Trevor Paglen lives and works in Berkeley, California. He is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us.
His work has recently been exhibited at Transmediale.08 Festival, Berlin; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, 2007; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2007 and Kunstraum Munich, 2006.
Paglen's first book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights (co- authored with A.C. Thompson, published by Melville House, 2006) was the first book to systematically describe the CIA's 'extraordinary rendition' programme. His second book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Melville House, 2007) is an examination of the visual culture of 'black' military programmes.
Trevor Paglen
26 June Friday, 18.00
ITU Faculty of Architecture (Taşkışla-Taksim) Hall 109
*The lecture will be in English with simultaneous Turkish translation.
