Author Archives: Ariella Azoulay

About Ariella Azoulay

Assistant professor of comparative literature and modern culture and media at Brown University. Her recent books include From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto, 2011); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012); co-authored with Adi Ophir, The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone, 2008); and The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (Stanford, 2012). She is a curator and documentary filmmaker. Among her recent projects are the Leuven STUK exhibition Potential History (2012) and the film Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012).

A Tour of the Museum of Regime-Made Disasters

The civil awakening in the Middle East and all over the world reveals more and more facets of regime-made disasters, and the extent to which democracy itself, rather than being their foil, is one of the regime forms wherein such disasters actually take place. This museum, inspired by the Arendtian effort to analyze totalitarian regimes, adopts the widely accepted claim that totalitarian regimes of the kind analyzed by Arendt are a thing of the past, but insists on understanding the disasters afflicting various populations in the world as regime-made ones. The museum follows the way in which such disasters take place and are interlaced in a democratic fiber of life, while being perceived as external to the regime that generates them. This museum is a layout, an outline for visual studies of regime-made disasters and the condition for the emergence of the civil language of revolution.