Contemporary Southeast Asian Video Works

Brianne Cohen will curate an evening of contemporary video works by Southeast Asian artists (TBD). The screening will be followed by a short conversation about the videos and Brianne’s forthcoming book, The Empathic Lens - How lens-based art from Southeast Asia offers alternative visions for ecological sustainability. The book explores the new paradigm of ecologically minded artistic practices is taking shape in Southeast Asia—one that at once tracks ecological destruction and works specifically to cultivate deeper feelings of empathy toward the environment. Examining a range of photography and video work, The Empathic Lens explores how these lens-based projects respond to increasingly urgent concerns related to climate disaster and capitalist acceleration.
Read more about The Empathic Lens‍ ‍HERE.

Brianne Cohen is an art historian and Associate Professor at CU Boulder, specializing in contemporary art and visual culture in the public sphere, with a particular focus on Europe and Southeast Asia. Her research and teaching explore issues of empire and decolonization, violence prevention, ecology and the environment, and health and medical issues. Her first book Don’t Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe (Duke University Press, 2023, open access) examines contemporary art that grapples with cross-cultural affiliation and the active imagining of nonviolence in 21st-century Europe. Her second book, The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia (forthcoming fall 2026, University of Minnesota Press, open access), continues investigations into histories of imperial violence and artistic-public resistance to such aggression. Brianne has co-edited an open-access volume Deep Horizons: A Multi-sensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects (Amherst College Press, 2023), which traverses multiple disciplines and diverse forms (essays, poems, multimedia artworks) as an “archive of feelings” in response to the climate crisis. Additionally, Brianne co-edited The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Leuven University Press and Cornell University Press, 2016), which explores the different ways that art, cinema, and other forms of visual culture respond to a digitized, networked world, where traditional discourses of medium specificity, developed in distinct disciplines, fail to provide an adequate description of the transformations that photography and film have undergone. Before arriving at CU Boulder in 2017, she also held Visiting Assistant Professor positions at Amherst College and Brown University.

Screening details forthcoming.