Tara Kohn signed an advance book contract with Amherst College Press. Her study, tentatively titled Ancestral Time: Toward a Postnational History of the Photographic Book, examines the ways that the pressures of assimilation for newly-arrived immigrants, the dangerous reverberations of Nazism and white nationalism, and the processes of Jewish state-building converge and collide in a collection of visual anthologies published in the United States across the twentieth century: Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work (1903-1917), Raphael Abromavitch’s The Vanished World (1947), Sharon Strassfeld’s and Arthur Kurzweil’s Behold a Great Image (1978), and Mikael Levin’s War Story (1997).
Accomplishments
Tara Kohn presented new research on the Ithaca-based artist Ben Altman’s decade-long, camera-centered performance The More That Is Taken Away at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting in Montreal, Canada. Her study explores his strenuous, repetitive labor of carving and reshaping the earth in his own backyard — and the rituals he performed along the edges and within the depths of the pit he dug as an allusion to a mass grave — as an experiment in what it means to embody inherited pain as an act of witnessing catastrophic violence.
As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Maine-based artist Lauren Fensterstock, Tara Kohn was invited to participate in the panel “Embodied Form: Material Engagement as a Path to Environmental and Social Justice” at the Scope International Art Fair in Miami Beach, Florida. The conversation, inspired by Fensterstock’s sculptures and the paintings of LaNia Roberts,
explored the ways that meditative practices and mindful responses to visual materials draw our attention to the interconnections between our bodies and the entangled political and ecological landscape.
Kohn also presented her paper “Stone Memories: Reflections on Photographic Originality and Absences in the Jewish Archive” at the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference in San Francisco, California. Grounded in her discovery of a missing photograph in a cache of extant prints by the Warsaw-based writer, translator, and artist Alter Kacyzne, this study is a reflection on what it means to handle images that, in the wake of destruction, no longer have an original or an origin.
Tara Kohn, Assistant Professor of Art History, presented her paper “Sinking” at the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference in Chicago. She developed this new research—a study of the 1939 Yiddish-language film Without a Home—as part of her current book project and in conversation with the students in her seminar Becoming American: The Immigrant Journey in Art and Culture.