Combat Breathing Vol. II: A Symposium on Aesthetics and Politics

Combat Breathing Vol. II: A Symposium on Aesthetics and Politics is a multi-site platform, spanning film and video screenings, critical discussions, and focused study sessions that will take place throughout October 2026. Responding to the current geopolitical conjuncture, it asks what roles artistic and intellectual production, circulation, and collective study might assume amid intensifying imperial violence and renewed global counter-mobilizations. In an era when imaging and communications technologies are increasingly deployed to discipline and cultivate collective imagination and stabilize statist and capitalist power, the symposium responds by foregrounding insurgent poetics, militant pedagogy, and autonomous or repurposed infrastructures of media production, distribution, and reception.

Drawing on the histories of Third Cinema and other anti-colonial and anti-imperial cultural movements, the moving-image program at Anthology Film Archives considers how these traditions persist, mutate, and reemerge in the present. Organized into six chapters comprising twenty-seven film and video works, this segment of Combat Breathing explores the convergences of aesthetics and politics: how abstractions and contradictions can take sensate form on screen; where the militant image resides today; how images index and reveal infrastructures of labor; the pervasiveness of and resistance to carceral logics; strategic reappropriations of imaging technologies; and the capacity of media to institute and reorganize desire.

The program includes works by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Shiva Addanki, John Akomfrah & Black Audio Film Collective, Nadir Bouhmouch, Larry Clark, Tony Cokes, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Filipa César, Camila Galaz, Sara Gómez, Nicolas Gourault, Sky Hopinka, Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, Alex Johnston, Maissa Maatouk, Jumana Manna, Dina Mimi, Bahar Noorizadeh, Valentin Noujaïm, Michelle Parkerson, Naomi Rincón-Gallardo, Marlon Riggs, Reem Shilleh, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Mila Turajlić, and Peng Zuqiang.

Each of the chapters of the moving-image program involves introductions and discursive contributions by a range of cultural workers; this group will include Omar Alsayyed, Carmen Amengual, Nour Annan, Omar Berrada, Alma Chaouachi, Harris Chowdhary, Chris Knowles and Laura Whitehorn (RAPP), Tiffany Malakooti, Carlos Motta, Perwana Nazif, and Christian Nyampeta.

The two panel discussions at New York University aim to interrogate the transhistorical claims and ideological complexities of aesthetic autonomy. The first panel, Breaking the Aesthetic Contract, with Nasser Abourahme, Denise Ferreira da Silva, David Lloyd, and Lama El Khatib, examines the metaphysical foundations of aesthetics within the longue duree of colonial modernity and racial capitalism, while illuminating alternative modes of aesthetic experience and practice generated by various revolutionary traditions. The second panel, These Poems Went Down Fighting, with Hannah Black, Adelita Husni-Bey, Antonia Majaca, Ghalya Saadawi, and Ciarán Finlayson, centers on aesthetic autonomy through political-economic critiques that investigate its labor and infrastructural contradictions.

The study sessions at Wendy’s Subway focus on the pedagogical function of specific aesthetic and discursive practices and the terms of their committed engagements with collective liberation struggles. Led by Marwa Arsanios, Joy James, and Elizabeth Povinelli, the sessions respectively explore the historical and contemporary articulations of militant images and their relationship to land struggles; the political “codes” through which societies and movements reproduce themselves; and the evolving entanglements of aesthetic production with late-liberalism, settler colonialism, and capitalist extractivism.

Curated by KJ Abudu and Adam HajYahia.

Special thanks to all the program’s participants and to Andrew Weiner, Fred Moten, Leila Pourtavaf, and Rob Slifkin (New York University); Bob Hunter (Icarus Films); Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Cali Guisto (Frameline); Greene Naftali Gallery; Haitham Haddad (Studio Mnjnk); Hanan Coumal (LUX); Jed Rapfogel (Anthology Film Archives); Kristin MacDonough & Emily Martin (VDB); Lisson Gallery; Miguel Abreu Gallery; NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality; NYU Department of Art and Art Professions; NYU Department of Art History; NYU Department of Comparative Literature; NYU Global Media Lab; The Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies (NYU); Roselly Torres (Third World Newsreel); Sunny Iyer and Rachel Valinsky (Wendy’s Subway);  and Todd Wiener & Steven Hill (UCLA Film & Television Archive).