Yearly Archives: 2017

17 posts

Tuesday, December 5th @ 6:30pm TANIA BRUGUERA

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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:
-Her fabulous website:
-her art21:
-her conversation with our own recent VALS guest, Claire Bishop:
-a very fascinating take by the incredible Coco Fusco on the controversy around her detention in 2015:
and of course a Bomb interview:

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

 

Tuesday October 24 @ 6:30pm SONDRA PERRY

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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/

Thursday October 19 / Claire Bishop

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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.

Tuesday September 19th @ 6:30pm: RENEE COX

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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.

(by Ruhee Maknojia)
Some research material:
Bio/CV
Lecture:
Reviews:
Interviews:
Dope Brooklyn Museum Archive
Her Website’s Collection of Press:
Finally some thought by me (Yasi), if you want to tolerate my rambling mind
Yesterday, I was walking the streets of this city, with the never-ending anxiety I carry—specifically about our weird world and the limits of all I can do as a maker,
and I had a sudden unexpected talk with the people of our beloved juice place “Oasis” and he told me, enthusiastically, of the revolution of his Ethopia that is in the making right now.
And I felt a warmth,
I thought of the poem below.
And I thought how happy I was Renee Cox coming, this fighter that has never stopped speaking up, never even paused.
How delighted I am to meet and listen to one of those that has been carved this path I’m on.
Anyway, That’s all
.
“To be in a time of War”, Etel Adnan, (the Lebanese poet/painter writing in response to the news of war in Iraq)
To destroy both the inner and the outer wall. To inhabit the city which has been conquered by murder. To add ruins over ruins. To be jealous of Babylon. To spray hatred on its corpses as well as on the living. To burn live matter. To water the palm trees with
fire; that’s a barbarian’s job. To diagnose madness in those who exterminate Iraq. Not to forget the British in this. Not to
forget, ever. To swear by the mountain and its height that nothing will ever be forgotten. To brand the brain’s skin with Inanna’s
name, to call her to life. To bring her to resurrection. To revive the belief in metempsychosis. Not to love. To sleep in order to
stay late at night. To discover that the infinitive is a delusion. To lose one’s footing. 
[…]
To turn the page without moving into a new life. To put on the radio. To listen and receive much poison on one’s face. To curse the hour, the fire, the deluge and hell. To lose patience. To lynch misfortune. To prevent the trajectory of inner defeat from reaching the centre. To resist. To stand up. To raise the volume. To learn that the marches against the war are growing in number. To admit that human nature is multifaceted. To know that war is everywhere. To admit that some do win. To drink some water. To turn in circles. To pretend that one is not spent out. To believe it. To pretend. To discuss with one’s heart. To talk to it. To quiet it down, if possible. To curse the savagery of the technologically powered new crusades. To remain in doubt. To come out of it in triumph.
[…]

To dream of deserts, to count the cactuses and all venomous plants

Chux Y’all

Tuesday September 12th @ 6:30pm: ANICKA YI

VALS Fall 2017

WHEN ANICKA YI began making art in her late thirties with no formal training, her entry point was unusual: a self-directed study of science. She doesn’t fully identify with the term “artist.” The art world was not her destination but simply a receptive venue for her ideas, which she culls from the experimental corners of cuisine, biology, and perfumery.

The Korean-born Yi, who studied at Hunter College in New York, produced her first artworks in 2008 with a collective called Circular File, numbering among its members artist Josh Kline and designer Jon Santos. Around the same time, she took an interest in natural fragrances, which led to early, self-directed tests with tinctures and olfactory art. One of her first projects in this vein was a scent named Shigenobu Twilight, after Fusako Shigenobu, leader of the radical left faction Japanese Red Army. The fragrance blended cedar, violet leaf, yuzu, shiso, and black pepper.

Yi’s work is characterized by unorthodox combinations of esoteric ingredients. She often uses materials that are—or were recently—alive, which can make her sculpture volatile and difficult to archive. She deep-fries flowers, displays live snails, grows a leathery fiber from the film produced by brewing kombucha, and cultivates human-borne bacteria. For her 2015 exhibition “You Can Call Me F” at the Kitchen in New York, Yi asked one hundred women to swab their microbe-rich orifices, cultured the samples, and used the resulting green-brown growth to paint and write on an agar-coated surface set in a glowing vitrine. The final work had an overwhelming smell, with notes of cheese and decay, both corporeally familiar and sensorially challenging.

by Ross Simonini for Art In America

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/in-the-studio-anicka-yi/

Tuesday, April 25th: Talia Chetrit

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.

Thursday, April 13th: Mariam Ghani

VALS Spring 2017

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker and teacher. Her research-based practice spans video, installation, photography, performance, and text. Her exhibitions and screenings include the Rotterdam and CPH:DOX film festivals, the Sharjah and Liverpool Biennials, dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul and Kassel, the National Gallery in DC, the St. Louis Art Museum, the CCCB in Barcelona, and the Guggenheim, Met Breuer, Queens Museum, and MoMA in New York. Recent texts have been published by Creative Time Reports, Foreign Policy, Ibraaz, Triple Canopy, and the Manifesta Journal. Recent curatorial projects include the international symposium ‘Radical Archives’, the traveling film program ‘History of Histories’ and the collaborative exhibition ‘Utopian Pulse’. Ghani has collaborated with artist Chitra Ganesh since 2004 as Index of the Disappeared, an experimental archive of post-9/11 detentions, deportations, renditions and redactions; with choreographer Erin Kelly and composer Qasim Naqvi since 2006 on the video series Performed Places; and with media archive collective Pad.ma since 2012 on the Afghan Films online archive. Ghani has been awarded the NYFA and Soros Fellowships, grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters, the Graham Foundation, CEC ArtsLink, NYSCA, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Experimental Television Center, and residencies at LMCC, Eyebeam Atelier, Smack Mellon, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Schell Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA from SVA. Ghani currently teaches at Cooper Union and in the Social Practice MFA program at Queens College.

 

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

Tuesday, March 28th: Sascha Braunig

VALS Spring 2017

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).

Tuesday, March 21st: Wynne Greenwood

VALS Spring 2017

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.