Heba Amin
The General’s Stork
Performance Lecture
5 July 2018, 7pm
In late 2013, Egypt made worldwide headlines when authorities detained a migratory stork traveling from Israel to Egypt because of an electronic device attached to its body. It was suspected of espionage. Almost one hundred years earlier, Lord Allenby, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, completed a major phase in biblical prophecy by launching ‘bird-like machines’ to capture Jerusalem from the Ottomans. The General’s Stork is a lecture performance that converges biblical prophecies, colonial narratives and the politics of surveillance to investigate the contemporary conditions of state paranoia that turned a migrating bird into an international spy.
Organized by Dr. Bettina Gräf and Ieva Zakareviciute, in cooperation with Kunstverein München.
The Lecture Performance is part of the 13th Media Workshop titled Drones: Conflict, Visual Culture, and Theory. The media workshops are organized every semester by the research unit Arab Mass-Media and (trans) Regional Network Cultures of the Institute for the Near and Middle East (Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies), at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. The goal is to critically discuss current research on contemporary Arab media and to classify recent events into larger contexts.
The 13th Workshop on "Drones: Conflict, Visual Culture, and Theory" will take place on July 5th and 6th, 2018. An informal registration at b.graef@lmu.de is requested.
Heba Y. Amin is an artist, researcher, and lecturer, and exhibits her work internationally. She is currently teaching at Bard College Berlin, is a BGSMSC doctorate fellow at Freie Universität, and a recent resident artist at the Bethanien artist residency program in Berlin. Amin has received many grants, including the Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant, DAAD and the Rhizome Commissions grant. She is the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, the curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal (US), and curator for the biennial residency program DEFAULT with Ramdom Association (IT). Furthermore, Amin is also one of the artists behind the subversive graffiti action on the set of the television series Homeland which received worldwide media attention.