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Military Imaginaries
Exhibition & SymposiumMay 27-28, 2025
4th Space
J.W. McConnell Building
1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
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Exhibition: May 27-28
Military Imaginaries is an immersive exhibition that critically examines the visual regime of the U.S. military and the broader militarization of culture. The images were captured in 2012–2013 at Fort Irwin, California, where soldiers train in simulated Middle Eastern villages in the U.S. desert. Framed as “cultural training” meant to save lives, these simulations raise pressing questions about the role of operational images and how they circulate within military and media infrastructures.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a day-long symposium on the 27th.
How can you participate? Register to join us in person or online via Zoom or by watching live on YouTube.
Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca
Symposium: May 27
Doors Open
10:00 am
Opening Keynote
10:30 am-12:00 pm
Selling (In)Security through the Commercial War Image by Dr. Shimrit Lee, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
While the commercial advertisement, with its undertones of symbolism and desire, is often considered to be separate from the decisive truths of the war image, arms advertisements are a unique fusion of both— what Shimrit Lee terms the “commercial war image.” In this keynote address, Lee explores how Israeli and American security companies have used these images to transform objects of war into marketable commodities that can easily circulate the globe. What are the visual strategies used to offer up warfare as a commercial enterprise, and how have artists and activists challenged this way of seeing to lay the foundation for a new aesthetic order?
Lunch Break
12:00-1:30 pm
Roundtable
1:30-3:30 pm
Mediating violence: Visual Culture & Countervisuality in Times of Conflict
Speakers: Gabrielle Marcoux, Marie-Hélène Leblanc, Natalia Espinel-Quintero, Milena Buziak; moderator : Alexandra Martin
Bringing together artists, curators and scholars to explore military imaginaries, the mediation of violence, and critical visuality, this roundtable hopes to foster a conversation on the visual cultural strategies employed to train militaries in conflict zones, and the larger processes of mediation in and through which media and technology are mobilized against populations in situations of armed conflict and so-called peace times.
Closing Keynote
4:00-5:00 pm
War Subjects: Of and Against the Environment of Terror by
Dr. Svitlana Matviyenko, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
What does it mean to conduct war environmentally? What materialities and assemblages are entangled in the environment of war? And how wide is the gap between political and legal conceptions of genocide? The war is bad; could anything be worse? This talk proposes a theorization of the terror environment—a realm in which civilian populations are double-targeted by military violence, information warfare, and war pollution in the context of the Russian Federation’s ongoing war against Ukraine. This environment is not merely the backdrop of war, but an active medium, or rather milieux of destruction and manipulation, shaped through entangled infrastructures, ecological degradation, and psychological operations. It is within this milieux that the subject of war is produced—of the terror environment through exposure and injury, and yet potentially against it through acts of endurance, resistance, and counter-imagining.
Expo - Open Visit
5:00-6:00 pm
Exhibition: May 28
Expo - Open Visit10:00 am-12:00 pm
Expo - Guided visit + Public exchange with the artist-researcher and the curator
12:00-2:00 pm
Expo closes
2:00 pm
Pop-up Expo + Conference Day: Organized by Dr. Alexandra Martin & Prof. Krista Lynes, Supported by the Feminist Media Studio, Exhibiton curated by Dr. Gabrielle Marcoux.”
About the Participants
Alexandra Marie-Sofia Martin – exhibited artist, event co-organizer – is an artist-researcher with a background in anthropology, museology, and sociology. Currently a postdoctoral fellow in Communication Studies at Concordia, she explores the construction of otherness through visual culture. Her project is supported by a research-creation postdoctoral fellowship from the FRQSC. The exhibition Military Imaginaries is the result of her postdoctoral work.
Krista Lynes – event co-organizer – examines the role contemporary art, experimental media, and infrastructures play in mediating social life under conditions of political struggle or precarity. They have analyzed media interventions in times of war, occupation and crisis, as well as conditions of systematic disenfranchisement and vulnerability in and through bordering regimes. Their focus on the politics of visibility engages feminist and queer theories, feminist STS, critical race studies, postcolonial and transnational examinations of culture, and theories of embodied subjectivity.
interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, performance, and critical security studies, Shimrit’s research interests relate to how violence is perpetuated, packaged and sold in contemporary culture, and the role of visual art and performance in decolonizing and building community.
Gabrielle Marcoux – exhibition curator, roundtable speaker – holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Montreal. Her thesis focuses on the strategies developed by Indigenous artists and writers who dismantle, indigenize, and bypass the state-sanctioned texts that determine how traditional lands are managed in Canada. Her current projects as an independent curator and researcher focus on the resurgence of Indigenous storytelling, ways of knowing, and textuality through the creative remapping of landscapes, public spaces and infrastructures.
Shimrit Lee – opening keynote speaker – is a Philadelphia-based writer, educator, and curator. She holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from NYU and an M.A. in international human rights law from SOAS, University of London. She teaches community-based adult education at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. An interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of visual culture, performance, and critical security studies, Shimrit’s research interests relate to how violence is perpetuated, packaged and sold in contemporary culture, and the role of visual art and performance in decolonizing and building community.
Svitlana Matviyenko – closing keynote speaker – is an Associate Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication and Associate Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. Her research and teaching, informed by science & technology studies and history of science, are focused on information and cyberwar, media and environment, critical infrastructure studies and postcolonial theory. Matviyenko’s current work on nuclear cultures & heritage investigates the practices of nuclear terror, weaponization of pollution and technogenic catastrophes during the Russian war in Ukraine.
Marie-Hélène Leblanc – roundtable speaker – holds a doctorate in art studies and practices from the Université du Québec à Montréal, Marie-Hélène Leblanc has held the position of director and curator of Galerie UQO, at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, since 2015. Having curated nearly forty exhibition projects, Leblanc defines herself as a curator/exhibition-maker/author/practitioner/researcher.
Natalia Espinel-Quintero – roundtable speaker – is a recent Media Studies MA graduate from Concordia University. Her work examines the intersection of visual culture, affect, and politics, exploring how the circulation of images on social media shapes and challenges political and affective structures, with a specific focus on Latin America. Her master’s thesis looked at the online and offline affective reverberations of the 2021 Colombian National Strike through its visual culture to understand what counter public digital expressions revealed about how Colombians engaged with the events and the affective histories of the nation surrounding these moments.
Milena Buziak – roundtable speaker – is an artist without borders. As the founding director of the creation company Voyageurs Immobiles, Polish-born director Milena Buziak delights in inviting people of all backgrounds, cultures and identities to her creative table. In 2020, she was awarded the John Hirsch Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts in recognition of her talent and the uniqueness of her artistic vision. She creates both for adults and for young audiences. Women's stories, intercultural encounters, and freedom of interpretation offered to the audience are at the heart of her practice.