Around the World: Jeremy Scahill’s “Dirty Wars,” Latin America’s Alfredo Jaar, and Istanbul’s Museum of Innocence
By Caille Millner, Elena Shtromberg, Kaya Genç, Tom GallagherDecember 8, 2013
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In this month's edition of "Around the World," Tom Gallagher examines Jeremy Scahill's book and just-released documentary film Dirty Wars: a revelatory investigation into America's covert unit JSOC, national security policy under President Obama, and secret American raids taking place in countries all over the world often leading to civilian casualties. In addition: two feature articles on one of the great Latin American contemporary artists today, Alfredo Jaar, whose work delves into the mechanisms of how we relate to the world; and Kay Genc reports on Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence in his latest dispatch from Istanbul.
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Tom Gallagher responds to Jeremy Scahill's groundbreaking investigation into JSOC and the ramifications of a global "War on Terror" spinning out of control.
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Elena Shtromberg examines how one of Latin America's great contemporary artists, Alfredo Jaar, nudges us into a more heightened perception about the world.
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Caille Millner recalls Alfredo Jaar's Studies on Happiness project.
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A little more than 500 days has passed since Orhan Pamuk opened the doors of the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. Kaya Genc takes us there.
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LARB Contributors
Caille Millner is the author of a memoir, The Golden Road: Notes on my Gentrification. She is an editorial writer and cultural columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Elena Shtromberg is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Utah. She received her PhD from the Department of Art History at UCLA. She specializes in contemporary Latin American art, with a specific focus on Brazil and the U.S.-Mexico Border region. Her book project, Art Systems: Brazil and the1970s (forthcoming with the University of Texas Press) focuses on the encounter of artistic practice with information and systems theories in the politicized climate of the 1970s.
Kaya Genç is the author of three books from Bloomsbury Publishing: The Lion and the Nightingale (2019), Under the Shadow (2016), and An Istanbul Anthology (2015). He has contributed to the world’s leading journals and newspapers, including two front page stories in The New York Times, cover stories in The New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, and The Times Literary Supplement, and essays and articles in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New Statesman, The New Republic, Time, Newsweek, and the London Review of Books. The Atlantic picked Kaya’s writings for the magazine’s “best works of journalism in 2014” list. A critic for Artforum and Art in America, and a contributing editor at Index on Censorship, Kaya gave lectures at venues including the Royal Anthropological Institute, and appeared live on flagship programs including the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC and BBC’s Start the Week. He has been a speaker at Edinburgh, Jaipur, and Ways with Words book festivals, and holds a PhD in English literature. Kaya is the Istanbul correspondent of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Tom Gallagher is a writer and activist living in San Francisco. He is the author of Sub: My Years Underground in America’s Schools and The Primary Route: How the 99 Percent Takes On the Military Industrial Complex. He is a past member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
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