Critical Image Forum is a research project that focuses on the political, ethical, aesthetic and social dimensions of expanded documentary practices. The Forum's primary medium of research is photography, with an interest in how the proliferation of moving images, performance, sound and digital networks have challenged and complicated the veracity of the visual document.

Join us for a lecture Nothing Primordial About It: The Political Ecology of Adivasi Art by Mumbai-based cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania. This event is presented by the Critical Image Forum and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, and the Surrey Art Gallery. Critical Image Forum is a collaboration between the Belkin and the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at UBC.

All are welcome.

Join Shawn Michelle Smith for her talk Witness Trees: Ken Gonzales-Day re-surveys the US West, which proposes that Gonzales-Day's photographic series Searching for California Hang Trees brings into view the intertwined ecosystems of racialized human violence.

Join multimedia artist Elizabeth M. Webb for a talk and film screening; both events are free and open to the public, no registration is required. Masks and proof of vaccination are mandatory. Webb is an artist and filmmaker originally from Charlottesville, VA. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs. She has screened and exhibited in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria, Norway and Germany and was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award in 2014.

Please join us for a dialogue between Heather Igloliorte and Taqralik Partridge. The speakers will discuss their previous collaborations as well as broader issues in curating and producing contemporary Inuit Art in institutional and community contexts.

As part of the University Art Association of Canada's online conference, panel chairs Heather Diack (University of Miami) and Terri Weissman (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) brought together art historians and artists committed to deepening the discourse of photography studies and expanding its points of reference in Canada Global Photography: Critical Histories.

For this episode of the Critical Image Forum Dialogue Series, Tobias Ewé talks with Danish sound artist Sandra Boss about her practice-based research into mid-century German hearing machines, conceptions of hearing and how these shape the listening subject. The discussion takes its outset in Boss's dissertation, Tuning the Ear: Exploring Conditions and Conceptions of Hearing, which is much more than a collection of textual chapters, but a sound art object in and of itself.

In this episode, through a far-reaching discussion of his illustration and photographic practice, and in dialogue with UBC professor emeritus John O’Brian, Robert Del Tredici touches on political, ethical and philosophical aspects of nuclear technologies and deployments. Through photographic projects from Three Mile Island, Hiroshima, Kazakhstan, Dene Territory in the Canadian Arctic and many other places and sites, Del Tredici’s presentation frames the enormity and devastation of the global nuclear industrial complex, helping to counter its forces of abstraction.