Dark Opacities Lab

UPDATE: Seminar cap has been reached! Thanks to everyone for their interest! Stay tuned for future programming (in person, hybrid, online)! Also it is seminar X, not XIII—I'm not sure why I always seem to refer to it as such. Maybe it is my repetition compulsion, for I love the number. --- Call for participants for summer community seminar: Psychoanalysis of an Eye 🧿 w/ @darkopacitieslab Six weeks of study on race and psychoanalysis. See link in bio to apply. poster credit @setilism ◆◆◆ "This is why lalangue is black—that is to say, it reveals a form that is illegible as law, rule, subject or object, and one that cannot be found in the operations of the speaking being or its logic." —David Marriott, Of Effacement: Blackness and Non-Being "At the same time, blackness poses irresolvable problems for form, which no amount of formalist interpretation can fully reconcile." —Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form "This is precisely why it was so useful to set out in the first phases of this disquisition on anxiety the essential distinction between these two registers—on one hand, the world, the place where the real bears down, and, on the other hand, the stage of the Other where man as subject has to be constituted, to take up his place as he who bears speech, but only ever in a structure that, as truthful as it sets itself out to be, has the structure of fiction." —Jacques Lacan, Anxiety

A lil last minute: Dark Opacities Lab will be tabling at Constellation: Salon du livre anarchiste this Saturday 16 May from 10am - 5pm. We will have copies of our zines there along with some lab ephemera, and while the zines are free, there will be QR codes so that you can donate any funds to a few choice fundraisers including The Sameer Project and Solidarité sans frontières. Bring your friends and comrades, hope to see you there ⚫️♦️⚫️

Please join us for our final event of the Nazar 🧿 Speaker Series on Thursday 26 March! We are thrilled to welcome scholar and writer Zoé Samudzi to Montréal for a talk entitled “The Citizen and the Anthropophage: The Cannibal Boom and Postcolonial Amnesias.” The talk is hosted in collaboration with Harambec. THE CITIZEN AND THE ANTHROPOPHAGE: THE CANNIBAL BOOM AND POSTCOLONIAL AMNESIAS ZOÉ SAMUDZI Thursday 26 March 5pm MB 9F SGW Campus, Concordia Following the talk, Gabby Moser will be in conversation with Zoé. Please note that for those out of town or unable to make it in person, we will be having this talk in a hybrid format, with Zoom registration available at the link in bio. In addition, we will be hosting Zoé in the lab the following morning on Friday 27 March at 10am for a workshop, spots are limited so please sign up at the link in bio. The workshop is in person only. (Update: the workshop is now full.) — Zoé Samudzi is a Provost’s Fellow to Faculty postdoc in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at Ohio State University and a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg. Her work contends with genocide memory and denialism, mythologies of the postcolonial African state, and the politics of visuality. Samudzi is also a writer and an associate editor of Parapraxis Magazine, as well as a co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018). She is a 2026 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant grantee, a 2026 resident at La Becque’s Principal Residency Program, and an awardee of the 2026 Fire Station Studios’ International Curator Residency. — Poster credit: @setilism 🧿

We are very excited about our next Nazar Speaker Series event! Please join us on Thursday 12 March at 5pm in MB 9EG for a talk by scholar Salar Mameni. Details below: ANGEL OF CRITIQUE Salar Mameni Thursday 12 March 5pm MB 9EG SGW Campus Concordia University This talk will be hybrid, and the zoom registration link is in our bio. In addition, there will be a workshop at noon on Friday 13 March in the lab, please register using the Google Form link, also in our bio. — Salar Mameni is an artist, art historian and associate professor of comparative ethnic studies and affiliated faculty in the History of Art Department at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author ofTerracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), which received honorable mention from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present in 2024 and Outstanding Achievement in Media, Performance, and Visual Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2025. Mameni is the recipient of the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and is currently completing a second book project titled Blood of Tulips. Mameni’s essays have appeared in scholarly journals Representations, Qui Parle, Catalyst, Ramus, Resilience, Signs, Women & Performance, Critical Ethnic Studies, Visual Studies, Routledge Companion to Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change, and Al-Raida. His art criticism has been published in Canadian Art Journal, Fuse Magazine, and Fillip Review and in exhibition catalogues at the Third Line Gallery in Dubai, Mana gallery in Istanbul, and Sharjah Biennial. As an artist, Mameni has participated in numerous exhibitions with drawings in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia. Most recently, Mameni has collaborated on lecture performances with Roshanak Kheshti performed at Human Resources in Los Angeles, ProArts Gallery in Oakland, Goldsmiths college in London, the Listening Academy in London, and the Hemispheric Institute held in Mexico City. — Poster credit: @setilism 🧿 Please share with friends, colleagues, and networks. We can’t wait to see you on the 12th!

@darkopacitieslab Nazar zine launch at @briquexbrique this evening! An intro by Sue Shon, and panel with Balbir K. Singh, Prathna Lor and Eloisa Aquino, followed by a workshop 🧿 ❤️

We are excited to launch our zine on Thursday 26 February at Brique par Brique! If you are in Montréal, please join us for a panel discussion and kit-making workshop on our two-volume zine: Volume 1: Study in Nazar 🧿; Volume 2: How to Nazar. We will have speakers from the lab’s Nazar: A Theory of the Evil Eye Research Cluster as well as @banddpress —our fave collaborators and zine press. We will be disseminating zines, which include kits to imagine anew Nazar and its attendant modes of superstition, that we will spend the second half of our time together making. Details include: Nazar: A Theory of the Evil Eye Zine Launch Thursday 26 February 5-7pm @briquexbrique 633 Beaumont Ave, Montreal, Quebec H3N 1V7 In person only; masks 😷 strongly recommended We hope you will join us for what will be an exciting and celebratory launch! Poster credit: @setilism

Dark Opacities Lab is pleased to present our first speaker of the Winter 2026 Nazar Speaker Series: MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI “ON QUEER MYTHMAKING + SPECULATION” Thursday 12 February 6pm EV 1.615 SGW Campus Concordia University Zoom registration link 🔗 in bio Morehshin Allahyari is a Bay Area based Iranian-Kurdish artist and an assistant professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University. She uses 3D simulation, video, code, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of MENA (Middle East and North Africa). Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Architettura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, MoMa, Victoria and Albert Museum, Queens Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, Taipei. She has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, and Al Jazeera, among others. Morehshin’s work has been the subject of critical analysis across books, academic articles, and dissertation chapters of over 100 publications. She is the recipient of the Gold Art Prize (2025), Creative Capital Award (2025), The University of California, Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (2024), The United States Artist Fellowship (2021), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), The Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship (2019), and the Leading Global Thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Photo credit: Niloufar Emamifar Poster credit: @setilism 🧿 In addition, we plan to host an in-person workshop in Dark Opacities Lab on Friday 13 February at 11am. If interested, please reach out to us at [email protected]. We hope to see you on the 12th for this not-to-be-missed talk! (Second time posting’s a charm 🙏🏽)

🧿 @darkopacitieslab

Announcing our second speaker series for our multi-year project “NAZAR: A THEORY OF THE EVIL EYE” 🧿 Please save the dates! All events will take place on Concordia’s downtown campus, and we will publicize each speaker with their own flyers including exact room numbers and exact times for all lectures and workshops. We are hoping to make as many events as accessible as possible, so we will work on getting Zoom webinars set up as well. We are incredibly excited about our lineup of artists, writers, and scholars, whose work all differently complement concepts and themes relevant to our ongoing study of “Nazar” 🧿 as an object and optic. We are also thrilled to be able to host workshops with some of our speakers, which will be open to participants with a limited number of spots available. Thursday 12 February Morehshin Allahyari “On Queer Mythmaking and Speculation” (Workshop on Friday 13 February) Thursday 19 February - POSTPONED Anjali Nath Book Talk: /A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War/ Friday 20 February - POSTPONED Esmat Elhalaby Book Talk: /Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization/ Thursday 12 March Salar Mameni “Angel of Critique” (Workshop on Friday 13 March) Thursday 26 March Zoé Samudzi “The Citizen and the Anthropophage: The Cannibal Boom and Postcolonial Amnesias” (Workshop Friday 27 March) We are excited to see you soon! 🧿

👀 SNEAKY PEAKY 👀 🧿 “NAZAR: A THEORY OF THE EVIL EYE” 🧿 Winter 2026 Speaker Series Stay tuned y’all!

Source: https://www.birzeit.edu/en/news/statement-birzeit-university-israeli-military-invasion-its-campus-and-shooting-students

We are super excited to have had our second zine launch’s poster placed as part of the immense Palestine Poster Project Archives. Our ongoing project was inspired by the archive, created and collated by Dan Walsh. He reached out to the lab to let us know, and we hope to have many of the postcard sized art created in workshops and in and out of the lab, archived on the PPPA website in the new year. Special shout out to our fave collaborators @banddpress , the flyer designer extraordinaire @setilism , our vitrine leader and Constellation member Marcela Torres Molano, and zine collaborator and Surrounds member @melinda.pierrepaul . Link to the PPPA entry in our bio. Until liberation, it remains, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Free 🇵🇸