Bio

Ashley Hunt’s practice centers on the construction of political discourse—the narratives, cartography, and architecture by which we can collectively discuss and ultimately challenge relations of power. To render visible these stories and demands, especially those obscured by the authorities, he regularly assumes the perspective of the witness. Notes on the Emptying of a City revolves around Hurricane Katrina and the questions of race, visibility, and speech that the catastrophe continues to reveal. Alone on stage, Ashley Hunt occupies the role of a journalist, a documentarian, an activist, and an artist, narrating his experiences of working with a delegation of social justice activists in New Orleans while presenting images of the city interspersed with video of citizens’ testimony. Hunt traces patterns of systematized economic and racial dispossession while reactivating the memory of Katrina. What looks at first like a traditional slide lecture quickly turns into storytelling, completed at the end by a discussion with the audience.