VALS Spring 2017

Talia Chetrit (1982) lives in New York. Her work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Sculpture Center, NY; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; among others. Chetrit’s most recent solo exhibitions include a solo show at Kaufmann Repetto in Milan and in New York, NY, Parents at Off Vendome, New York, NY and I’m Selecting at Sies + Hoke, Dusseldorf, Germany. Her work has been written about and reviewed in numerous publications including Artforum, Art in America, Frieze Magazine, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Image: Index of the Disappeared: Parasitic Archive, vinyl cling, 66 x 35 inches, installed at NYU’s Kevorkian Center, 2014

Sascha Braunig (Born 1983, Qualicum Beach, BC, Canada) is an artist who currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, and an MFA in painting from Yale University. Braunig’s works primarily manifest as paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Her illusory works combine vibrant colors and forms to create dream-like, hypnotic compositions. Repetition and patterning often merge the foreground with the background, where her subjects can float in and out of focus.

Braunig is a current resident at the Waltenas-Sharpe studios in DUMBO, Brooklyn. She is represented by Foxy Production in New York, and solo exhibitions include: Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA (upcoming 2017); MoMA PS1, New York (2016-2017); Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway (2016). Selected group exhibitions include: “Stranger,” Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2016); “Surround Audience: 2015 New Museum Triennial,” New Museum, New York, NY (2015); “A Top Hat, A Monocle, and A Butterfly,” Etablissement d’en face projects, Brussels, Belgium; “Animal/Vegetable/Mineral: The Artistʼs Guide to the World,” Florence Griswold Museum, CT; and “Surreal Selves,” Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (all 2013).

Working across video and performance, Wynne Greenwood explores constructions of the self, tracing how subjectivities are formed in public and private spaces and always in relation to others—be they imagined or real-life personae. Greenwood is widely known for her work as Tracy + the Plastics, in which she played all three parts in an all-girl band. As Tracy + the Plastics, Greenwood performed live as vocalist Tracy, accompanied by videos of herself portraying backup singers Nikki and Cola, and toured across the country from 1999 until the project’s end in 2006.

In 2015-16, Greenwood had a solo exhibition and residency at the New Museum, “Kelly,” for which she premiered the complete, recently re-performed and newly mastered archive of Tracy + the Plastics’ performances. Bringing this archive into dialogue with more recent work exploring the artist’s interest in what she has called “culture healing,” “Kelly” considered the poetics of the pause while mining electric gaps of meaning in conversation and offering possibilities for feminist, queer, and other experimental models of collaboration and dialogue.

Greenwood has exhibited, performed, and screened her work internationally including at the New Museum, New York; Participant, New York; Hayward Gallery, London; The Kitchen, New York; Susanne Vielmetter Berlin Projects, Berlin, Germany; Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Tate, London; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

****Special timing: Lecture Starts at 7:40 pm****

Exploring the seduction, magic, and desperation of our hyper-capitalist, globally-connected reality, Mika Rottenberg’s elaborate visual narratives draw on cinematic and sculptural traditions to forge a new language––one that uses cause and effect structures to explore labor and globalization, economy and production of value, and how our own affective relationships are increasingly monetized. Through film, architectural installation, and sculpture, her work illuminates an interconnectedness between seemingly unrelated economies; collapsing geographies and narratives, Rottenberg weaves documentary elements with fiction into complex allegories for human conditions and global systems.

Rottenberg has exhibited her work internationally, including at the 2015 Venice Biennale, the 2008 Whitney Biennial; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern, London; the ICA Boston; Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; and the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. Honors include fellowships at Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2011) and The Flaherty International Film Seminar (2010); awards from The Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2004) and The Cartier Award in conjunction with the Frieze Art Fair (2006). Her videos have been included in juried selections by Planete Doc Film Festival, Warsaw (2011) and CPH:DOX FIlm Festival, Copenhagen (2010).

Huma Bhabha has gained widespread recognition for her raw, sculptural forms, which evoke primeval, ritualistic personages or the post-apocalyptic inhabitants of a world gone awry. Constructed from such humble materials as air-dried clay, wire, mud, Styrofoam, studs and scavenged wood, her work explores the fertile ground where the amorphous and the material collide. In Bhabha’s hands, for example, a dilapidated, rusted and discarded chair is recycled into a throne upon which a cyborg king sits. Architectural materials, junk and baubles are thus re-assembled into hybrid beings.

Bhabha received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and her MFA from Columbia University, New York in 1989. Bhabha’s first solo museum exhibition took place in 2012-13 at MoMA PS1 and she has had recent solo exhibitions at VeneKlasen Werner Gallery, Berlin (2014), Collezione Marmotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2012), and the Aspen Art Museum in Aspen (2011). Her work is included in the public collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Huma Bhabha lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Morgan Bassichis makes live comedic solo performances that have been described as “out there” (by Morgan’s mother) and “super intense” (by Morgan). Morgan’s work has been featured at MoMA PS1 as part of the 2015 Greater New York exhibition, as well as at the Poetry Project, Artists Space, and the Whitney Museum. Morgan lives in Brooklyn.

Wu Tsang‘s films, installations, performances, and sculptures move fluidly between documentary, activism, and fiction. Her work often addresses experiences of transness, focusing on the roles that language and “voice” play in the construction of personhood. Her 2016 film, “Duilian” explores the history of the Chinese poet Qiu Jin and her intimate relationship with the calligrapher Wu Zhiying, engaging translation, the distortion of history, and martial arts. Her 2012 project “Wildness” circles around a weekly experimental performance night that Tsang and her collaborators host at the historic LA bar Silver Platter, long home to a cross-generational Latin LGBTQ community. The bar itself becomes a character in the film, teasing out notions “safespace” through a magical realist lens.

Tsang‘s projects have been presented at museums and film festivals internationally, including MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MCA (Chicago), MOCA (Los Angeles), Berlinale Film Festival (Berlin), SANFIC (Santiago), Hot Docs Festival (Toronto), and South by Southwest Film Festival (Austin). Her first feature film WILDNESS (2012) premiered at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, and her work was also featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and in “The Ungovernables” New Museum Triennial in New York. She has received grants from Creative Capital, the Warhol Foundation, and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations.

Luis Camnitzer (b.1937) is a German-born Uruguayan artist and writer who moved to New York in 1964. He was at the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, working primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. Camnitzer’s artwork explores subjects such as social injustice, repression, and institutional critique. His humorous, biting, and often politically charged use of language as art medium has distinguished his practice for over four decades. Camnitzer’s work has been shown at important institutions since the 1960s, including one-person exhibitions at El Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago, Chile (2013); Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2011); El Museo del Barrio, New York (1995); Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (1993); and List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T., Cambridge, MA (1991). Retrospectives of his work have been presented at Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx, New York (1991); Kunsthalle Kiel, Germany (2003); Daros Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, El Museo del Barrio, New York; and Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin, Bogota, Colombia (2010–13).  His work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions, including Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2014); the seminal Information show at Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970); among others. He has been featured in several international biennials, including the Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (1984, 1986, 1991, 2009); Pavilion of Uruguay, 43 Biennale di Venezia, Italy (1988); Whitney Biennial (2000); and Documenta 11 (2002).

Aliza Nisenbaum (b. 1977 Mexico City, Mexico) is a New York based artist. She is an assistant professor at Columbia University School of the Arts and has exhibited both in the United States and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Mary Mary, Glasgow, UK; White Columns, New York, NY;  and Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico. Her work was also included in the Biennial of the Americas, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; the Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy;  The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL; and the Poor Farm, Manawa, WI. Her works will be included in the upcoming 2017 Whitney Biennial curated by Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks.