Category Archives: A Curriculum of Imposters

In 1889, Congress openly seized land in Indian Territory for white settlement. The land runs thundered. Many of the settler towns created in the land runs are ghost towns now. Timber, railroads, and mining leaving a host of cavernous emptiness in their wake. What is a ghost town in a nation whose settlements, roads, and […]

But empire, its idiot families and colonialist invasions, land grabs and resource exploitations, goes further back. As does its exploitation of language, both visual and linguistic. Auder’s new video installation The Course of Empire (2017) is inspired by the eponymous series of paintings created by Thomas Cole from 1833 to 1836. A “text film,” constructed from iPhone […]