Juli Carson: After After Before Event

Juli Carson will discuss Sharon Hayes? After Before, a quasi-documentary multi-channel film, in which two figures interview people on the streets of New York City, throughout the month of September, just two months before the 2004 US Presidential Elections.

In Fall 2016 the University Art Gallery at UI Irvine restaged After Before along a similar time line, installing it on the eve of what activists and politicians predicted would be ?the most consequential presidential election in US history? without yet knowing what the outcome would be. In this mise-en-scène, two moments in time, 2004 / 2016, are (re)staged and perceived neither as sequential nor as simultaneous. Rather, these moments are imbricated in an uncanny temporal duet, one in which two U.S. elections are seen – one depicted, the other evoked – alternately as a moment of truth, a moment of possibility and an already determined fate – a non-moment. In each instance, After Before presents a heterogeneous moment onto which we, as participants, continue to project contested ideas of what it means to be a U.S. citizen – and a world citizen – in both historical and contemporary terms.