Places of a Present Past brings together three exhibitions presented at the Pollock Gallery at SMU, Meadows School of the Arts in 2014. These exhibitions addressed the traces trauma left on particular sites; with specific focus on the colonial relationship between Japan and Korea in the first half of the twentieth century, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the legacy of the Holocaust in Germany and beyond. The artworks in this book are bound together by a historiographical impulse. The artists included here are less interested in the truth than the way that we feel through the legacies of past traumas. They reveal the oblique ways that we repress historical trauma, burying it in the very sites of their origin. Places of a Present Past is filled with an archaeological ethic, metaphorically digging down, both spatially and psychologically into the depths of transnational grief.

The book represents the work of several video and new media artists working internationally: Aissa Deebi, Kamal Aljafari, Dor Guez, Sarah Morris, and Jin-me Yoon.

In association with the following Pollock Gallery Exhibitions:

Jin-Me Yoon: Extended Temporalities
March 7-29, 2104
Curated by Sally Frater

Where Are You From?
August 29-September 26, 2014
Curated by Noah Simblist

1972: Sarah Morris
October 10-November 8, 2014
Curated by Sally Frater

Release events:

September 18th @ Wendy’s Subway, 722 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn

October 12th @ Publication Studio Vancouver, 222 East Georgia St., Vancouver, B.C.

October 27th @ Publication Studio Rotterdam, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, Rotterdam