Eduardo Cadava, Philip Mayhew Professor of English at Princeton University, delivers the keynote lecture for a two-day symposium entitled “The Way of Images in a Time of Loss and Upheaval,” held on the Berkeley campus on February 20-21. The symposium marks the closing of the BAMPFA exhibit Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry, whose works explore life during the Syrian Revolution.

In Syria, following the fall of the Assad regime, a new world is taking shape, haunted by multiple dangers and by the gaze of the dead. The work of the Syrian film collective Abounaddara, devoted to pursuing a “way of images” as an ethical, aesthetic, and political project, may offer a path into a renewed imagination of a common world. In their reflection on this work, symposium participants engage with the material life of images: their circulation and proliferation, their destructive and creative force, and the ways in which they imprint themselves onto viewers living through to a state of perpetual war.

Keynote lecturer Eduardo Cadava is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, and, with Fazal Sheikh, of Fazal Sheikh: Portraits. His two most recent books are Paper Graveyards (2021), winner of the College Art Association’s 2023 Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism, and Politically Red (2023), co-authored with Sara Nadal-Melsió.

Friday, February 21 symposium details: Charif Kiwan, filmmaker and founding member of Abounaddara, delivers the opening paper. Symposium speakers include Fadi Bardawil, Natalia Brizuela, Brent Eng, Samera Esmeir, Niklaus Largier, Anneka Lenssen, Stefania Pandolfo, Vyjayanthi Rao, and Stefan Tarnowski.

Morning symposium sessions take place in 470 Stephens Hall; afternoon and evening sessions take place in the Geballe Room at the Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall.