Monthly Archives: November 2016

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is artist-archivist based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from East Palo Alto, CA with brief stints in Johannesburg, South Africa, Kameelah’s interdisciplinary and research intensive practice considers ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing.

She has exhibited her work at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, BRIC Art Gallery, Weeksville Heritage Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Vox Populi Gallery, TOPAZ Arts, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Leroy Neiman Gallery, etc.

Selected residencies, fellowships and honors include: Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Print Studio (2015), Commissioned Artist, Triple Canopy Commissions at New York Public Library Labs (2015), Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue Grant (2015), A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship, Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship (2015), Process Space Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency (2015), Artist in the Marketplace – Bronx Museum Participant (2015), Art Matters Grantee (2014), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grantee (2014), New Museum R&D: Choreography Seminar Participant (2014), Vermont Studio Center Residency (2014), Working Classroom Teaching Artist (2014), The Center for Book Arts Residency (2013), The Laundromat Project Fellow (2013), Visual Artist Network Exhibition Residency (2013), Visual Artist Network Community Fund Expansion Grantee (2013), Center for Photography at Woodstock Residency Juror (2013), STEP UP Emerging Artist Awardee (2012) and Center for Photography at Woodstock Residency (2012).

Her work has been reviewed and written about in The New York Times, Art 21, Wall Street Journal, ArtSlant, and Hyperallergic.

Rasheed has spoken on panels and symposiums at universities including School of Visual Arts, Parsons, The New School, New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Illinois; arts institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, Christie’s, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, the Center for Book Arts, Residency Unlimited and Creative Time; and archival institutions including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Weeksville Heritage Center, and Interference Archive.

Her long form interviews and essays have been published in The New Inquiry, Gawker, The Guardian, Creative Time Reports and featured on the Creative Time Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn’s radio station, Otabenga Jones & Associates (OJAK Radio).

Currently, she is the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine and a contributing editor at The New Inquiry.

Phong Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator and former curatorial advisor at MoMA PS1, 2007 to 2010. He is also the Co-Founder, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of the monthly journal the Brooklyn Rail and the publishing press Rail Editions, as well as the Host/Producer of “Off the Rail” on Art International Radio. He is a board member of the Third Rail of the Twin Cities, the Miami Rail, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, and the International Association of Art Critics United States Section (AICA USA).

In 2013, he founded the Rail Curatorial Projects which aims to curate exhibits that respond specifically to location, cultural moment, and economic conditions. Recent exhibits include Bloodflames Revisited at Paul Kasmin Gallery, Spaced Out: Migration to the Interior at Red Bull Studios (2014), Intimacy in Discourse: Reasonable and Unreasonable Sized Paintings at Mana Contemporary and SVA Chelsea Gallery (2015), and Hallway Hijack at 66 Rockwell Pl., Brooklyn (2016). Forthcoming projects include An Anthology of The Brooklyn Rail Interviews, Volume I to be published by David Zwirner Books in Spring 2017, and Occupy Rail, a two part endeavor to both encourage and support motivated individuals to create their own Rail publications in their local communities, and to stage the Rail’s production cycle of one issue on site at a selected art gallery for one month, turning the Rail into a “social environment,” a consequential step since Joseph Beuys’ “social sculpture” and Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics.”

Performance by Ho Rui An

Investigating the rise of speculative aesthetics as a practice of futurecraft in a post-securitization crisis era, Horizon Scanners examines various futures and “horizon scanning” programmes devised by the Singapore government to anticipate “black swans” or rare, hard-to-predict events of great consequence. Accordingly, this displacement of positivist models of probability and prediction by the “metaphor” as an uncertain epistemological ground produces a narrative economy of “weak signals” struggling to emerge from the noise. The lecture approaches this predicament by considering how in a time of horizon scanning, what matters are the conditions of legibility that allow us to affirm some narratives while extinguishing others.

Shapiro Theatre from 6-8pm,  Schapiro Hall, 605 W. 115th Street

Filmmaker Lizzie Borden is best known for her groundbreaking anarcha-feminist classic, BORN IN FLAMES (1983), which B. Ruby Rich calls, “A precursor to New Queer Cinema in its genre hybridization (radical-lesbian-feminist-sci-fi vérité) and political fury.”

In New York in the late 70’s, Borden aspired to be a painter and was invited to write for Artforum Magazine by critic Robert Pincus-Witten. While covering performance artists such as Joan Jonas, Yvonne Rainer and Vito Acconci – who experimented with various forms of film, Super-8 and video – Borden saw a retrospective of Godard films and realized film could combine essay and story. She made her first feature, REGROUPING (1976), a semi-experimental film about a women’s consciousness-raising group, which she put away for many years, and, troubled by the homogeneity of race and class in the group, embarked on what became the iconic BORN IN FLAMES.

BORN IN FLAMES is a “political science fiction” set in a near-future New York ten years, a conceit, after a peaceful socialist democratic revolution. In the film, women come together across racial, cultural, and socioeconomic divides to form the women’s army, combatting the sexism and racism that still run rampant post-revolution. As Borden says, “the science fiction in the film is to posit this thought: what if the very ordinary oppression that women have been experiencing for generations finally became something that would force a group of women to become armed and take over the media in order to redirect meaning, reclaim the language.” Shot over a five-year period with many non-actors and without a script, the film incorporates a dynamic use of strategies ranging from documentary, verité cinema, fictional news coverage and media takeovers, and improvisation, with a feverish soundtrack made in collaboration with Red Krayola and several of the performers in the film. Thirty years later, BORN IN FLAMES feels as relevant, potent, radical, and energetic as ever in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased divisiveness across the political spectrum.

Borden’s 1986 fiction film WORKING GIRLS follows a day in the life of women working in a middle-class brothel in Manhattan. Today WORKING GIRLS is still one of the most radical, honest, unromanticized portrayals of women’s work in the sex industry. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival that year.

In recent years, Borden has written pilots for Fox and Skype; a play about Nina Simone, “The Queen of Shebang;” “Rialto”, a film about abortion; and is developing various film and TV projects, including a limited series about the art world in the 80’s.

Ho Tzu Nyen makes films, videos and theatrical performances that often draw upon historical and philosophical texts and artefacts. He appropriates the structures of epic myths, invoking their grandeur while revealing them to be not merely stories, but discursive tools. His work deconstructs the idea of modernization via Western influence or beneficence, by presenting viewers with a paradox. In it, Eastern and Western forms appear at once disjointed and seamless, coexisting in a fluid aesthetic interpretation that allows for the complexities of influence and adaptation to drift through each other.

Ho Tzu Nyen was born in Singapore in 1976. He earned a BA in Creative Arts from Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2001), and an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore (2007). His work has been presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Bilbao, 2015); DAAD Gallery (Berlin, 2015); Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2013); Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2012); the 54th Venice Biennale (Venice, 2011); Artspace, (Sydney, 2011); Tate Modern (London, 2010); the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial (Brisbane, 2009); the 1st Singapore Biennale (2006) and the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale (2004). His films have premiered at Cannes Film Festival (2009) and the 66th Venice International Film Festival (2009).

HO RUI AN is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. He writes, talks and thinks around images, with an interest in investigating their emergence, transmission and disappearance within contexts of globalism and governance. Working primarily across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, his recent research considers questions surrounding liberal hospitality, participatory democracy and speculative futures.

He has presented projects at the 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale, TPAM Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, Serpentine Galleries (London), Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard Galleries (Annandale-on-Hudson), NUS Museum (Singapore), QUT Art Museum (Brisbane), LUMA/Westbau (Zürich), Para Site (Hong Kong) and Witte de With (Rotterdam). He is the Singapore desk editor for ArtAsiaPacific and has contributed to numerous publications. He lives and works in Singapore.