A Symposium on
Aesthetics & Politics
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Combat Breathing at Wendy’s Subway
Combat Breathing Vol. II: A Symposium on Aesthetics and Politics is a multisite platform spanning film screenings, critical discussions, and focused workshops that unfolds throughout October 2026. Responding to the current geopolitical juncture, it asks what roles artistic and intellectual production, circulation, and collective study might assume amid intensifying imperial violence and renewed global mobilizations.
Each of the accompanying study sessions at Wendy’s Subway foregrounds the pedagogical function of aesthetic and discursive practice and the terms of these practices’ committed engagements with liberation struggles.
After Hours Film School
Marwa Arsanios
Study Session Joy James
Study SessionElizabeth Povinelli
Marwa Arsanios, Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4: Reverse Shot, 2022, 35 min.
After Hours Film SchoolMarwa Arsanios
Where can the militant image be found today? How does it emerge from current and historical struggles over land, and what role can images play within those struggles?
This study session critically explores the politics of land and the ways it moves between foreground and background in militant filmmaking. Beginning with excerpts from Marwa Arsanios’s films—often developed as part of larger research projects concerning land reappropriation, property and non-property, and the possibilities of communalization—the session will examine the reciprocal relationship between research and filmmaking in her practice. Arsanios will place these works in conversation with historical and contemporary militant and political cinema, as well as film and video works by artists working beyond explicitly militant traditions, to examine how land figures visually, politically, and conceptually. Approached as pedagogical objects, the selected works will be considered in relation to both the sociopolitical struggles from which they emerge and the material conditions through which they are produced. The objective is to understand what gives substance to militancy within the audiovisual terrain.
This is the first in a three-part series of focused study sessions held on the occasion of Combat Breathing Vol. II: A Symposium on Aesthetics and Politics. Each session foregrounds the pedagogical function of artistic and intellectual practice and the terms of these practices’ committed engagements with liberation struggles.
Marwa Arsanios’s practice tackles structural questions using different devices, forms, and strategies. From architectural spaces and their transformation and adaptability to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between communes and cooperatives, the practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures, allowing experimentation with different forms of assembly. Film becomes another device and space for connecting struggles through images and montage. In the past ten years, Arsanios has been attempting to think about these questions from a new materialist and a historical materialist perspective with different movements that are in a struggle for taking back their land. She looks at questions of property, law, economy, and ecology from specific plots of land, while focusing on the histories of the commons in the Levant region. She has been part of artist collectives and initiatives, the most recent being the legal communalization of a land in North Lebanon through its transformation to a Mashaa.
Solo shows include: Haus Für Kunst Uri (2026), Taxispalais Innsbruck (2026), Joan Miro Foundation (2025), Artium Museum (2025), Sandretto Foundation (2025), BAK Utrecht (2024), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2023), Heidelberger Kunstverein (2023), Mosaic Rooms, London (2022), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021); Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Art Center (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015); and Art in General, New York (2015). Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including: Documenta 15 (2022), Mardin biennial (2022), Sydney Biennial film program (2022), 3rd Autostrada Biennale, Pristina (2021); 11th Berlin Biennale (2020); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); Gwangju Biennial (2018); Lülea Biennial (2018); Kunsthalle Wien (2019); 1st Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019); SF Moma, San Francisco (2019); Warsaw Biennial (2019); 14th Sharjah Biennale (2019); Maxxi Museum, Rome (2017); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2016); Thessaloniki Biennial (2015); Home Works Forum, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2010, 2013, 2015); New Museum, New York (2014); 55th Venice Biennial (2013); M HKA, Antwerp (2013),); the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).
Her films have been screened at MoMA New York (2023), School of Art Institute Chicago (Gene Siskel Film Center) (2023), Cinéma du Réel, Paris (2021); Rotterdam Film Festival (2021); Film Fest, Hamburg (2020); FID Marseille (2015, 2019, 2022); tiff, Toronto (2019); Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2019); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2017); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011, 2017,2022); Berlin International Film Festival (2010, 2015).
Arsanios was a researcher in the Fine Art Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2010–12). She completed a PhD at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna.
Still from Ivan Dixon, dir., The Spook Who Sat by the Door, 1973.
Study Session Joy James
What drives us into rebellion towards the unknown, and what keeps us unknowingly paralysed from rebelling? What visible and invisible, unpaid and underpaid labor feeds structures of captivity and abandonment? What becomes perceptible when we attend to those working in the shadows rather than only to those rendered hypervisible?
In this study session, we will think collectively through categories developed in Joy James’s writing and political analysis, particularly the captive maternal, revolutionary love, rebellion, and the political “codes” through which societies and movements reproduce themselves. These codes comprise the often-unspoken political, emotional, and symbolic instructions that organize our desires and actions. They hold the tensions between declared political principles and undeclared liberal desires: working to abolish the state while seeking proximity to its power; caring for captives while reproducing the conditions of captivity; opposing how the state differentiates us while seeking its recognition of our equality in difference.
Holding these contradictions in mind, we will ask: how might the reproductive capacities captured by racial capitalism—care, love, sacrifice, grief, and protection—be wrested from the reproduction of captivity and reorganized as collective forces capable of ending it? By attempting to crack these codes, the session is both driven against what prevents rebellion and by what propels us toward it.
This is the second in a three-part series of focused study sessions held on the occasion of Combat Breathing Vol. II: A Symposium on Aesthetics and Politics. Each session foregrounds the pedagogical function of artistic and intellectual practice and the terms of these practices’ committed engagements with liberation struggles.
Ebenezer Fitch Professor of the Humanities at Williams College, Joy James is a political philosopher who works with organizers. Her recent books include In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (Divided Publishing, 2022); New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)Life of Erica Garner (Common Notions Press, 2023); and Contextualizing Angela Davis: The Agency and Identity of an Icon (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is the editor of Beyond Cop Cities: Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons (2024); ENGAGE: Indigenous, Black, Afro-Indigenous Futures (2024); and Confronting Counterinsurgency: Cop Cities and Democracy's Terrors (2025), published by Pluto Press.
Still from Karrabing Film Collective, The Jealous One, 2017. Video, 29:17 min.
Courtesy of the artists
Study Session Elizabeth Povinelli
How can we situate the present moment within a pervasive and ongoing structure of colonial catastrophe? What is the function of aesthetic practice under such violent planetary arrangements and their unique contemporary mutations? How might these questions unravel the enduring constitutive relationships between liberalism, settler colonialism, and capitalist extractivism?
The concluding study session in this series will work from Elizabeth Povinelli’s scholarship in political economy, aesthetic philosophy, and Indigenous studies. During the session, we will think through Povinelli’s writings and some associated texts on settler colonial governance as well as her conceptualizations of “late liberalism,” colonial backformations," and "differential materializations," in order to situate and navigate the current moment. Bringing philosophical texts together with historical accounts of evolving colonial infrastructures, the study session will focus on the question of what contemporary art practice is for, and more—art as a self-justifying end or art as a tactical means for building colonial disruption machines? Povinelli will share some excerpts from her own films and installation work and her collaboration with other members of the Karrabing Film Collective to reflect on how artistic practices might be retooled and functionally oriented toward negating ongoing colonialism while making space for reestablishing relations with more-than-human kin.
This is the third in a three-part series of focused study sessions held on the occasion of Combat Breathing Vol. II: A Symposium on Aesthetics and Politics. Each session foregrounds the pedagogical function of artistic and intellectual practice and the terms of these practices’ committed engagements with liberation struggles.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an academic and artist. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, where she also holds an appointment in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is one of the founding members of the internationally lauded Karrabing Film Collective. Their work received the Eye Filmmuseum Prize and The Visible Award, among others, and has been collected by numerous museums. Povinelli's academic and artistic research focuses on developing a critical theory of settler liberalism that would support a decolonizing project. This work has stretched across nine books, The Grit of the Real: Semiotics against Geontopower (Duke, upcoming); Routes/Worlds (Sternberg, 2022); Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Duke, 2021); The Inheritance (Duke, 2021); Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke, 2016); Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Duke, 2011); The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Duke, 2006), The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Duke, 2002); and Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Her artwork has been displayed in Museo della Civiltà, Rome; Promoteo Gallery, Milan; MADRE, Napoli; ar/te, Bolzano; and Wiels, Brussels. In 2024 she was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Antwerp.
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