Short description from the abstract: My paper "Held at a Distance: Absence, Violence, and Materiality" explores how absence functions as an aesthetic strategy in Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance (1988) and selected later installations. Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of aesthetic negation—particularly his assertion that “only in the absence of images can the full object be conceived” (Negative Dialectics, 1973: 207)—the paper argues that Hatoum develops a practice of strategic erasure, deferral, and non-closure that gains particular resonance within the contemporary saturation of war images and representations of suffering.