Military Imaginaries

Join us for 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 bringing together artists and scholars to explore military imaginaries, the mediation of violence, and critical visuality. 

This event 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. 

How can you participate? Join us in person by registering here or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca

Alexandra Marie-Sofia Martin –  Event Co-organizer, artist-researcher

Alexandra Marie-Sofia Martin 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. Working under the supervision of Dr. Krista Lynes and affiliated with the Feminist Media Studio, she examines the staging of war and racialized representations in military simulations. 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, postdoctoral supervisor

Krista Lynes is a Professsor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. Their research 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. 

Shimrit Lee – Keynote speaker 

Shimrit Lee is a Philadelphia-based writer, educator, and curator. 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. She is the author of Decolonize Museums (OR Books, 2022), and her writing has appeared in publications such as Warscapes, Africa is a Country, Jadaliyya, Trans Asia Photography, and Jerusalem Quarterly. Shimrit 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.

Gabrielle Marcoux – Curator of the Exhibition, roundtable speaker

Gabrielle Marcoux 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, such as the Indian Act and national maps. 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, such as highways, dams, parks, railroads, etc. She recently co-directed the collective work Urbanités autochtones en creation (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2025), in which she wrote a chapter on the urban installations created by the artists Sébastien Aubin, Kevin Lee Burton and Caroline Monnet of the art collective ITWÉ.

Marie-Hélène Leblanc – Roundtable speaker

Holder of 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

Natalia Espinel-Quintero is a recent Media Studies MA graduate (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. In addition to her Master’s degree in Media Studies, she also holds a Master's degree in Latin American Cultural Studies from Universidad Javeriana (Colombia) and a Bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts from Concordia University.

Milena Buziak  – Roundtable speaker

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. Based in Gatineau, Quebec, her performances are created with local and international partners and have toured in Quebec, Canada and abroad. 

Svitlana Matviyenko – Keynote Speaker 

Svitlana Matviyenko 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. Matviyenko is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019), a winner of the 2019 book award of the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and of the Canadian Communication Association 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson book prize.