As part of her 2025 Stuart Black Fellowship at the Victorian College of the Arts, VLC Fellow Joyce Joumaa hosts a presentation and conversation with historian Quinn Slobodian exploring their shared concerns around IQ, race, and migration. Drawing on his most recent book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, Slobodian examines far-right political and cultural discourse surrounding intelligence testing and its role in shaping racialized and exclusionary migration regimes. 

Joumaa’s VLC Fellowship project, Calibrated Alien, investigates the historical and ongoing use of intelligence testing as a tool of classification, racialization, and exclusion within systems of migration governance. Building on her video installation Memory Contours—initially produced for Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th Venice Biennial exhibition—the project traces a chapter in the eugenics movement in the United States, specifically the “intelligence” drawing tests administered to immigrants arriving at Ellis Island to identify mental deficiency. 

In conversation, Joumaa and Slobodian extend this inquiry into the present, tracing the throughlines between early eugenic cognitive tests and today’s algorithmic decision-making systems that weaponize intelligence to regulate mobility and enforce racial and ethnic boundaries. 

For the in-person audience at Composite, the conversation is followed by a screening of Joumaa’s video work. 

Co-presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and the Drawing and Printmaking Studios at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne, in collaboration with Composite Moving Image Agency and Media Bank.