Harrison focuses on what Cai Guo-Qiang’s installation Inopportune reveals about the phantom-like nature of contemporary terrorism. He argues that it is because we live in an age of terror that terrorism has the power to wreak havoc with our imaginations. In his view, Inopportune probes the deeper sources of this terror, revealing them to be connected to the drive of contemporary technology, drawing everything into its planetary network of consumption and distribution.

Harrison is the Chair of the Department of French & Italian and Director of Graduate Studies in Italian at Stanford University. He is the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization which deals with the multiple and complex ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology. His latest work, The Dominion of the Dead examines the special role that the dead hold for the living, and how the connections between the living and the dead are observed, nurtured, and maintained in diverse secular realms. He contributed an essay to the catalogue Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune, which accompanies this exhibition.

Co-sponsored by LewAllen Contemporary.