The Body That Moves
Performance & Lecture Program

Platform 82 | Goethestraße 82, 10623 Berlin

11.06.2024, 20h
lecture
Heba Y. Amin
The Peculiar Case of the Algerian Nuclear Test Dummies

A haunting photograph from 1960 depicts two rows of human-like figures awaiting the detonation of an atomic bomb in the Algerian desert. The image has come to represent France’s nuclear testing in the Sahara between 1960 and 1966 (after Algerian independence) and serves as a testimony to the colonial legacies of territorial destruction. In 2022, Amin reproduced a miniature model of the image  (Atom Elegy, 2022). Using archival material, government documents and other historical ephemera to analyse the catastrophic vision of nuclear destruction and the neocolonial will to occupy future realities, Amin activates the photograph, raising many questions about the true horror of these experiments which have only recently been partially declassified.

Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin grounds her work in extensive research that looks at the convergence of politics, technology and architecture. She engages with political themes and archival history, using mixed-media including film, photography, lecture performance and installation. Her artistic research takes a speculative, often satirical, approach to challenging narratives of conquest and control.

Amin is a Professor of Digital and Time-Based art at ABK-Stuttgart, the co-founder of the Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for the MIZNA journal, and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War.

Program by: Marjolein van der Meer & Nazlı Yayla

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