Preventive Publics: The Burning Car in Thomas Hirschhorn’s Installations

Brianne Cohen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on contemporary art in the public sphere, and particularly, art engaged with concerns of global migration, postcolonial histories, political violence, and environmentalism. She is currently completing a book entitled “Preventive Publics: Contemporary Art and the Idea of Europe,” which examines art practices that model and instantiate plural publics among masses of strangers in order to prevent sociopolitical violence in 21^st-century Europe. She also recently co-edited an anthology, The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Leuven University Press and Cornell University Press, 2016).