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Dear All,

It is of great pleasure to invite you on behalf of the VALS team to our upcoming lecture of Ulrike Muller on Tuesday, January 16, 6:30.

Born in Austria, Ulrike Müller’s paintings explore precise geometric forms that engage with feminist and queer histories. She is also the editor of “Herstory Inventory: 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists (2009–2012)”.

Frieze Article about Ulrike Müller’s work.
Bomb Magazine interview about “Herstory Inventory”, by Thom Donovan.

“In her artistic work, Ulrike Müller explores the relationships between abstraction and bodies through a conception of painting that is not limited to brush and canvas. Investigations of the visual strategies of modernism and of feminist practices of the 1960s and 1970s result in images that are closely related to current questions of body and identity politics. The geometries of figure and color in her compositions are never “purely” abstract. They carry erotic and sexual associations, they tease, touch, and penetrate each other without collapsing into binary logics. Müller uses abstraction as an idiom that can be figuratively appropriated, emotionally charged and politically connoted—depending on the context and the viewer.” – Manuela Ammer, Mumok, Vienna, 2015

“Ulrike Müller’s practice investigates form as a mode of critical engagement. Employing a wide range of materials and techniques, from text to audio and video, performance, publishing, and, most recently, intimately scaled drawings and paintings, it moves between different contexts and publics, invites collaboration, and expands to other realms of production in processes of exploration and exchange.” – Barbara Schröder, DF Press, New York, 2012

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Dear All,

It is of great pleasure to invite you on behalf of the VALS team to our upcoming lecture of Tania Bruguera on Tuesday, December 5, 6:30.

There is perhaps no other artist that has risen more conscious dialogue (and indeed at times controversy) when it comes to the Social role, possibilities, and responsibilities of artists within the political climate of our Globalizing, Post-Socialist, Neoliberalist world.
I will put a pause on my enthusiastic rambling mind and simply invite you to check some extra resources below and once again, just confess our excitement over the upcoming lecture.

Extra Resources:

-bio by Guggenheim:

https://www.guggenheim.org/map-artist/tania-bruguera

-Her fabulous website:

http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/

-her art21:

https://art21.org/artist/tania-bruguera/

-her conversation with our own recent VALS guest, Claire Bishop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4raYhes7OwI

-a very fascinating take by the incredible Coco Fusco on the controversy around her detention in 2015:

http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/30175/on-the-detention-of-cuban-artist-tania-bruguera-by-coco-fusco/

and of course a Bomb interview:

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/tania-bruguera/

And finally for the soul a bit of Foucault from his interview There Can’t Be Societies Without Uprisings

“That’s where we meet back up again with this conception of Uprising I was just talking about. The Idea that the role of the intellectual is to show how this reality that’s presented to us as self-evident and taken for granted is in fact fragile”

Thank you,
VALS Team

VALS is pleased to announce Sondra Perry on Thursday October 19.

Sondra Perry is a media artist whose work investigates the role of digital technology in the systemic oppression of black identity, often centering on the way blackness influences technology and image making. Perry explores the duality of intelligence and seductivity in the contexts of black family heritage, black history, and black femininity.

Interviews with Sondra:
http://www.artnews.com/2016/03/15/abstraction-isnt-neutral-sondra-perry-on-the-ncaa-subjecthood-and-her-upcoming-projects/

Poster by Ana Rivera

VALS is pleased to announce Claire Bishop on Thursday October 19.

Bishop is currently a professor at CUNY (City University of New York) Graduate Center, and has taught at Warwick University and the Royal College of Art, in London. One of Bishop’s most iconic works of writing which remains relevant and urgent to this day is “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (2004), an essay that presents a critique to Nicolas Bourriaud definition of relational aesthetics. Bishop is also the author of the book “Radical Museology” where she analyzes the role of contemporary public institution. In this book she portrays the problematics of the rise of the museum as entertainment and offers an alternative in a case study of three unique and self-critical European museums that have reinvented themselves beyond the spectacle.

VALS is pleased to present Renee Cox Tuesday September 19th 2017 at 6:30 P.M.

Renee Cox is a Jamaican-American who uses the body as a subject to evoke conversations about culture, gender, and activism. Cox uses digital technology to reconfigure the black woman’s body and disturb religious imagery. Her work from the beginning is concerned with social issues in America, particularly in relation to racism and sexism. Some of Renee Cox most notable works are American Family, Yo Mama’s Last Supper, and The Discreet Charm of the Bougies.

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“To be in a time of War”, Etel Adnan, (the Lebanese poet/painter writing in response to the news of war in Iraq)

Chux Y’all

Ella Kruglyanskaya’s paintings and drawings employ fashion, facial expression, and full figured women in tense, exuberant compositions. Figures and faces, depicted as prints on the fabric of subject’s clothing, play out nested psychosocial dramas. Her paintings use push and pull on all levels: the foreground flips to background, the picture plane is taught, two sets of eyes lock, or a purse string tugs on an arm.

Ella Kruglyanskaya was born in 1978 in Riga, Latvia. She received her MFA in painting from Yale in 2006, and her BFA in painting from Cooper Union in 2001. She has had recent solo shows at Studio Voltaire in London, at Kendall Koppe in Glasgow in 2013, and at Gavin Brown here in New York in 2013. She has attended residencies at the Abrons Art Center in New York, and Studio Voltaire in London.

Ella will have studio visits with Jenny Cho and Rachel Stern.

Chitra Ganesh is a Brooklyn based artist whose drawing, installation, text-based work, and collaborations suggest and excavate buried narratives typically absent from official canons of history, literature, and art. Ganesh graduated from Brown University with a BA in Comparative Literature and ArtSemiotics, and received her MFA from Columbia University in 2002.

She has held residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Smack Mellon Studios, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, among others. Her works have been widely exhibited across the United States including at the Queens Museum, Asia Society(New York), Berkeley Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (California), and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, with solo presentations at PS1/MOMA (New York), and The Andy Warhol museum (Pittsburgh). Ganesh is the recipient numerous awards and fellowships including the Art Matters Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation for Painting and Sculpture, and a 2012 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in the Creative Arts. 

You can see her solo exhibition Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Herstory Gallery at the Brooklyn Museum until July 12th.

http://artforum.com/words/id=49752

http://hyperallergic.com/170531/brooklyn-museum-mural-irks-self-appointedspokesman-for-all-hindus/

Studio Visits: Julia and Filip