Tarek Elhaik

Position Title

Professor

telhaik@ucdavis.edu

129 Blue Ridge Office Building (formerly HR Building).

Office Hours

Fall 2024: Tuesday 10-12 (by appointment).

Education

Ph.D., Anthropology, UC Berkeley, 2007

About

My work is based on participant observation in several domains of creative practice related to contemporary art and experimental media worlds, with a special interest in the different modes of curatorial practice that animate those worlds. The aim of my fieldwork-based inquiries is both to problematize the mediatory role and increasing influence of curatorial practice in contemporary life and to evaluate the ethical, existential, political, and aesthetic implications of curation for imagining other ways of living and being human. My inquiry consists in "anthropo-curation" or "curating anthropos". My first book, The Incurable Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film & Media Arts (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), was based on intensive fieldwork in Mexico City. It took place during an effervescent moment acclaimed anthropologist and public intellectual Roger Bartra provocatively called the “post-Mexicanist condition”. During two years I engaged curatorial collectives whose critical practice and exhibition strategies signaled a breakdown of Mexicanist aesthetics and modernist cultural forms inherited from the Mexican historical avant-garde, including historical figurations of the New Man in Mexico (eg. Mestizaje, Mexicanidad, cosmopolitan-nationalist modes of existence). In Aesthetics and Anthropology: Cogitations (Routledge 2022), I took a different direction. Multi-sited rather than single sited, the book is a philosophico-anthropological journey across an ecology of venues and media: from conceptual art exhibitions to architectural environments; from large frescoes in late medieval churches to photographic interventions in natural history museums, and more. Moreover, the book approaches artistic practice as an anthropological problem of thinking.

I've collaborated on various public programs, symposia, research clusters, and editorial projects that examine what I call the "zone of mutual intrusion" between anthropology, art, and philosophy. I also direct AIL: the Anthropology of the Image Lab, a venue and online platform that explores the challenges posed by curatorial practice to fieldwork design and anthropological thinking. It is located in Young Hall 226.

Research Focus

In my new fieldwork and "curatorial design" I shift my attention to media practices situated in a marine mise-en-scène. Specifically, I follow and juxtapose three kinds of practices indexing three different yet intriguingly related ways of life: an artist, composer, and engineer's sound compositions, musical records, video installations, and sketches of encounters with grey whales, sperm whales, and bottlenose dolphins in the Sea of Cortez; the hydrophone recordings, spectrograms, drone footage, and photo-identifications by a team of cetacean scientists who run a research sailboat and a bio-acoustics lab in the Tyrrhenian Sea; and the multimedia online platforms of fishers who produce audiovisual diaries of interactions with marine mammals in the Strait of Gibraltar. I'm currently "recomposing" this assemblage of human practices, marine life, signals, noises, instruments, and communication attitudes into a book and radio series called The Strait and The Sea.

Publications

Elhaik, T. 2024. “The Strait and the Sea: Unsettling Scores”. Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind, and Art, 5(1), 179-200.
Elhaik, T. 2023. “Averroes At Mexico City’s Kiosko Morisco” in Philosophy on Fieldwork: Case Studies in Anthropological Analysis. Eds. Bubandt, N. and Schwartz Wentzer, T. New York: Routledge, pp. 302-319.
Elhaik, T. 2022. Aesthetics and Anthropology: Cogitations. New York: Routledge.
Elhaik, T. & Marcus, G. (2020) "Curatorial Designs" in The Anthropologist As Curator, Ed. Roger Sansi, Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 17-34.
Elhaik, T. (2016) The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film & Media Arts, Edinburgh University Press.
Elhaik, T. "What is Contemporary Anthropology?" (2013) in Critical Arts: Journal of Media & Culture Studies vol. 27.6. London: Routledge: 784-798.

Teaching

ANT191: Media Anthropology
ANT210: Aesthetic Anthropology
ANT201: Graduate Pro-Seminar
ANT136: Anthropological Cinema

Awards

Co-director of the research program Future Flourishing (2023-2028) that won the 2023 competition for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Global Call entitled the Future of Being Human.

Member of the research and curatorial program Experimental Cinema in Latin America (2014-2017) funded by the Getty Foundation's Pacific Standard Time initiative.