Needles in the Eye: Refusal and the Necropolitics of Cultural Production

A cross-disciplinary research project, Needles in the Eye is a collaboration between Gelare Khoshgozaran (Assistant Professor of Arts) and artist Izdihar Afyouni. The collaborative project engages diverse methodologies of refusal as feminist praxis through a transnational and abolitionist approach. Its inaugural phase features a collection of commissioned essays authored by an international group of queer feminist artists, writers, and academics whose practices(s) are deliberately tied to their political liberation. It is in the resonances of this collectivity that new forms of feminist historiography emerge.

Needles in the Eye aims to shift artistic and pedagogical approaches away from issues of representation and towards a disruption of embodied power dynamics. Despite their varied expertise, the contributors in the volume refuse to distance their work from institutional violence. Instead, they question how to produce while confronting this inescapable entanglement. Our project alters the standard format whereby a catalog or book publication follows an exhibition. Instead, we intend to use the conversations generated through the book launch events and other discursive programming to shape the direction of our research for the exhibition. As such, the second phase of Needles in the Eye involves a traveling exhibition beginning in Los Angeles. Taking essays and conversations in the book as its departure point, the group exhibition will historicize refusal through the work of contemporary and living artists, focusing on artist collectives and artworkers who have withdrawn their labor throughout history as a form of resistance. It will unite artists and abolitionists who have used refusal tactics in feminist organizing and labor movements, emphasizing Southern California communities in conversation with global majority artists. The exhibition connects the practices of withdrawal and withholding by artist collectives and artworkers, both in the U.S. and internationally, across different periods, and comprises a series of discursive events, including film screenings, panel discussions, and performances in partnership with different UC campuses.