What Remains: Memory, Suppression, and the Aftermath of State Terrorism

​What persists after an episode of political or social violence is declared over? How does terror survive its immediate event by becoming embedded in the habits, defenses, and structures of everyday life?

This panel brings together London-based Vali Mahlouji, New York-based Richard Vine, and Natasha Chuk, who will also moderate, for a conversation about their critical and cultural work with histories of conflict, state violence, and the cultural memory and legacies of these events. The discussion considers how violence can persist both through what is remembered and through what is suppressed, avoided, or rendered unspeakable, approaching a haunting and “absent-presence” as evidence of violence that remains active in social and psychic life. The conversation will consider what art, archives, and curatorial practice can do when conventional forms of representation and witnessing are insufficient, as well as address the interpretive challenges these forms present. How can institutions acknowledge histories of violence without simply containing them within exhibitions, archives, or official narratives? What does it mean to create conditions for ethical spectatorship when the structures that produce forgetting remain intact? And can artistic and curatorial experiences expose those structures to encourage critique and transformation?

The panel is part of the Badiyeh Arts Exchange Program, in partnership with Archaeology of the Final Decade (London), and is hosted by Fridman Gallery.

Badiyeh Arts is an artist-run initiative founded by Negin Mahzoun and Tooraj Khamenehzadeh, dedicated to international cultural exchange, curatorial practice, and long-term collaboration across artistic contexts, with a particular commitment to Global South perspectives.

Vali Mahlouji is a London-based curator and the founder of Archaeology of the Final Decade, a curatorial and research platform working with cultural material that has been lost, censored, or erased.

Natasha Chuk, PhD, is a media scholar, arts writer, educator, and independent curator based in New York City. Her work is focused on the ways in which individual, collective, and political identities and behaviors are imagined, performed, and perceived through creative systems.

Richard Vine is an art critic, novelist, and former managing editor of Art in America. His books include New China, New Art and the art-world crime novel SoHo Sins, and he has curated exhibitions in Beijing, New Delhi, Ho Chi Minh City, and New York.