The artist, activist and filmmaker Ashley Hunt—who employs video, photography, mapping and writing to engage social movements and facilitate public discourse—will speak on Thursday, February 19, as part of the Watkins Visiting Artists Series (VAS).
The presentation, which begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Watkins Theater, is free and the public is invited. The Watkins VAS is funded in part by a grant from Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Through various projects over the past 15 years, Hunt has focused on the ways people understand, respond to and conceive of themselves within systems of power. Rather than seeing art and activism as distinct pursuits, he approaches them as complementary, drawing upon the ideas of social movements and contemporary cultural theory as his work addresses important trends towards documentary and participatory practices in contemporary art.
The day before Hunt’s visit – Wednesday, February 18 — Watkins will present a free screening of “Corrections” (2001, 57 minutes) at 6:30 p.m. in the Watkins Theater. The film is part of an ongoing interdisciplinary project “The Corrections Documentary Project,” in which Hunt investigates the institution of the prison and, more specifically, how incarceration helps structure and preserve racial and economic divisions within society. “Corrections” looks at the privatization of the prison system, exposing the conflict between for-profit corporations focused on pleasing investors and the communities which must deal with the consequences of high incarceration rates. Probing further to explore links between political campaign strategies and the increasing penalties for nonviolent crimes, Hunt uncovers a complex system of desires and incentives that lie behind the growth of the American prison system.
“Ashley Hunt has addressed some of the most pressing social issues of our era, and he has done so with political savvy and artistic sophistication,” said Tom Williams, assistant professor of art history at Watkins. “His work offers a permanent rebuke to anyone who still believes that the merger of art and politics means the triumph of politics over art.”
About Ashley Hunt
Ashley Hunt has played the role of an activist-journalist in his investigations of power and politics in contemporary society, using video, photography, mapping and writing to engage contemporary social movements, modes of learning and public discourse. His work addresses systems that enable certain people to accumulate power and those that disempower others. Among his most celebrated works are his ongoing video series on the prison system, entitled “The Corrections Documentary Project” (and which includes footage he filmed in Tennessee), and his “Prison Maps.”
Other investigations by Hunt have focused on community identity and the demise of welfare state institutions (“Communograph”), war and disaster capitalism (“A World Map: in which we see…”), documentary representations (“As Flowers Turn Toward the Sun,” “Par Course A”), and political activism (“Undeliverable Address”). His 2010 performance, “Notes on the Emptying of a City,” explored the first-person politics of being in New Orleans with a camera in the months following Hurricane Katrina, when he engaged with community activists to research the city’s refusal to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison. His work has been screened and exhibited at the P.S.1/MOMA, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta. He was also included in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany and the 3rd Bucharest Biennial. In 2007, Hunt collaborated with Sharon Hayes and other artists on “9 Scripts from a Nation at War,” a project that has been the subject of a number of exhibitions internationally.
Based in Los Angeles, Hunt is Co-Director of the Program in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). He is an alumnus of the University of California at Irvine (BFA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA), and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
For more information, visit ashleyhuntwork.net and correctionsproject.com.