Dana Buhl

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.

Ragnar Kjartansson engages multiple artistic mediums throughout his performative practice. The artist’s video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings incorporate the history of film, music, visual culture, and literature. His works are connected through their pathos and humor, with each deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theater. Kjartansson’s use of durational, repetitive performance to harness collective emotion is a hallmark of his practice and recurs throughout his work.

Kjartansson (b. 1976) lives and works in Reykjavík. The artist will soon have a mid-career retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Park, Washington DC, where it traveled from the Barbican Centre, London. Kjartansson has had major solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the New Museum, New York, the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and the BAWAG Contemporary in Vienna. Song, his first American solo museum show, was organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2011, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Kjartansson participated in The Encyclopedic Palace at the Venice Biennale in 2013, Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2014, and he represented Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The artist is the recipient of the 2015  Artes Mundi’s Derek Williams Trust Purchase Award, and Performa’s 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award.

Image credit: Elisabet Davids

Kerry James Marshall uses painting, sculptural installations, collage, video, and photography to comment on the history of black identity both in the United States and in Western art. He is well known for paintings that focus on black subjects historically excluded from the artistic canon, and has explored issues of race and history through imagery ranging from abstraction to comics.

Marshall has work in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Birmingham Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He is the recipient of several awards, grants and fellowships including the MacArthur genius grant in 1997. Kerry James Marshall was selected to exhibit in this year’s 2015 Venice Biennale: All the World’s Futures, May 9 – November 22, 2015.

Jeffrey Gibson grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, Korea, England and elsewhere. He is also a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half Cherokee. This unique combination of global cultural influences converge in his multi-disciplinary practice of more than a decade since the completion of his Master of Arts degree in painting at The Royal College of Art, London in 1998 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995.

Gibson’s artwork intermingles elements of traditional Native American art with contemporary artistic references. Thus powwow regalia, 19th century parfleche containers, and drums are seamlessly merged with elements of Modernist geometric abstraction, Minimalism, and Pattern and Decoration. Here there is an echo of Frank Stella, Josef Albers, and Lucio Fontana – canonized in our current dialogue which has little or no inclusion of Native American art which Gibson provides comparable weight and equivalence.

Gibson’s artworks are in the permanent collections of many major art museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Canada, the Nasher, the Nerman, Crystal Bridges, and the Denver Art Museum. Recent solo exhibitions include SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah and Atlanta), the National Academy Museum in New York, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Cornell Museum of Fine Art. The Denver Art Museum will mount a traveling mid-career survey in the Spring of 2018, to be followed by a smaller solo exhibition at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art in the fall of 2018. He has participated in Greater New York, Prospect New Orleans, the Everson Biennale, and Site Santa Fe. Gibson is a member of the faculty at Bard College and a past TED Foundation Fellow and Joan Mitchell Grant recipient. He is represented by MARC STRAUS (NYC).

Leeza Meksin is an interdisciplinary artist, who makes paintings, installations, public art and multiples. Born in the former Soviet Union, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1989. Meksin received a MFA from The Yale School of Art, a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a joint BA/MA in Comparative Literature from The University of Chicago. She has exhibited her work at Regina Rex Gallery (2011, 2014), Airplane Gallery (2014), Primetime (2013), Adds Donna (2011) and Thomas Erben Gallery (2009). Meksin has created site-specific installations at The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, UMOCA (2016), The Kitchen, NYC (2015), BRIC Media Arts, Brooklyn (2015), Brandeis University, Waltham (2014), the former Donnell branch of the New York Public Library, NYC (2011), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project in New Haven, CT (2012). Her work has been featured in BOMB magazine, TimeOut Chicago, Chicago Tribune and many other publications.  She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist grant (2015) and the co-founder of Ortega y Gasset Projects, a gallery and artist collective in Brooklyn, NY. Her website can be found here.

Wayne Koestenbaum has published eighteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction,including Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). Koestenbaum has had solo exhibitions of his paintings at White Columns (New York), 356 Mission (Los Angeles), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum. He has given musical performances at The Kitchen, REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art; this fall he will perform at the Centre Pompidou and the Walker Art Center. His first solo record, Lounge Act, will be issued by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in Fall 2016. He has also written the libretti for two operas, Michael Daugherty’s Jackie O and Mohammed Fairouz’s Pierrot. Koestenbaum’s essays and poetry have appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, Artforum, The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Believer, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Cabinet, and many other periodicals and anthologies. Winner of a Whiting Award, he has taught at Yale (in the English department as well as in the School of Art’s painting department), and is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Howardena Pindell was born in Philadelphia in 1943, and studied painting at Boston University and Yale University. She has taught at State University of New York, Stony Brook since 1979 and she lives and works in New York city. Pindell has exhibited extensively throughout her career. Notable solo-exhibitions include: Spelman College (1971, Atlanta), A.I.R. Gallery (1973, 1983, New York), Just Above Midtown (1977, New York), Lerner-Heller Gallery (1980, 1981, New York), The Studio Museum in Harlem (1986, New York), the Wadsworth Atheneum (1989, Hartford), Cyrus Gallery (1989, New York), and G.R. N’Namdi Gallery (1992, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2006, Chicago, Detroit, and New York).

Known for her textured, hole-punch canvases, Howardena Pindell has been a unique and important voice in the field of abstract painting since the 1960s. In the 1970s, Pindell began creating layered, rough surfaces out of tiny paper dots cut with a standard hole puncher, which she collaged onto canvases with layers of acrylic, sequins, glitter, and powder, experimenting with color, surface, and texture. In addition to working rigorously as an artist, from 1967-1979, Pindell worked as a curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art.

Pindell’s work is in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, including: the Brooklyn Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the High Museum of Art; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the National Gallery of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art; the Wadsworth Atheneum; the Walker Art Center; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Nico Muhly (b.1981) is a composer of operas, chamber and symphonic works, and sacred music whose influences range from American minimalism to the Anglican choral tradition. Described by The Guardian as “one of the most celebrated and sought-after classical composers of the last decade,” he is the youngest composer ever commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and has received additional commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Library of Congress, and Wigmore Hall, among other institutions. In more than 80 works for the concert stage, he has embraced subjects ranging from Renaissance astrology to the ethics of artificial intelligence while collaborating with artists as diverse as Benjamin Millepied, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Joanna Newsom.

Muhly has written two operas: Two Boys (2010), a cautionary tale about identity online, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and co-produced by the English National Opera with a libretto by Craig Lucas and directed by Bartlett Sher; and Dark Sisters (2011), about a community of polygamists in the American southwest, set to a libretto by Stephen Karam and directed by Rebecca Taichman. He is at work on a third opera, Marnie, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for its 2019-20 season and based on the novel that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name.

His additional works for voice include the song cycles Sentences (2015), written for countertenor Iestyn Davies and based on the life of British computer scientist Alan Turing, and Impossible Things (2009), written for tenor Mark Padmore on a text by Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. His major choral works include Bright Mass with Canons (2005); My Days (2011), a commemoration of Orlando Gibbons, written for Fretwork and the Hilliard Ensemble; and Recordare, Domine (2013), commissioned by Lincoln Center and the Tallis Scholars.

In 2015, Nadia Sirota premiered Muhly’s viola concerto, the first work in a three-part commission for the violist. Other recent orchestral works include Control: Five Landscapes for Orchestra (2015), a celebration of Utah’s natural landscape, written for the Utah Symphony; and Mixed Messages (2015), composed for the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Beyond the concert stage, Muhly is a sought-after collaborator across genres. He has worked on multiple occasions with choreographer Benjamin Millepied on scores for New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, and the Paris Opera Ballet. Additionally, he collaborated with choreographers Kim Brandstrup and Wayne McGregor on Machina (2012) for the Royal Ballet, and, for choreographer Stephen Petronio, composed I Drink The Air Before Me (2010), an evening-length work featuring a children’s choir. As an arranger, Muhly has paired with Sufjan Stevens, Rufus Wainwright, Antony and the Johnsons, The National, and Thomas Bartlett (Doveman), among others. He has also written for theater and film, contributing scores for the 2013 Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie, directed by John Tiffany, and for the films Kill Your Darlings; Me, Earl and the Dying Girl; and the Academy Award-winning The Reader.

Muhly is part of the artist-run record label Bedroom Community, co-founded by Icelandic producer-engineer Valgeir Sigurðsson, which was inaugurated with the release of Muhly’s first album, Speaks Volumes (2006). His second album for the label, Mothertongue (2008), included “The Only Tune,” a setting of the traditional murder ballad “Two Sisters,” featuring singer Sam Amidon accompanied by samples of scraping knives and brushed hair.

Born in Vermont and raised in Rhode Island, Muhly studied composition at the Juilliard School with John Corigliano and Christopher Rouse, and worked subsequently as an editor and conductor for composer Philip Glass. He currently lives in New York City.

Anouk Kruithof (b. 1981 in the Netherlands) is currently based in New York, Mexico City and Amsterdam.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as: Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MBAL Switzerland; The Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen China; The Center for Photography at Woodstock; Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, Erarta Museum, St. Petersburg; Culture and Arts Center, Daegu Korea; Capitain-Petzel Gallery, Berlin: KIT (Kunst Im Tunnel) Düsseldorf; Temporare Kunsthalle, Berlin, Autocenter Berlin; ICP, New York; Capricious Gallery, New York, Higher Pictures Gallery, New York, Museum het Domein Sittard, the Netherlands; Boetzelaer|Nispen Amsterdam, FOAM Amsterdam; The Netherlands Photo Museum, Rotterdam; MARCA Museum Catanzaro, Italy; MAMAC (Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art) Liege, Belgium, among others.

Anouk Kruithof is one of the five nominees of the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunstprijs 2016. She received the Meijburg Art Commission in 2015 and won the Charlotte Köhler Prize in the Netherlands in 2014. She has also received the Infinity Award of the International Center for Photography in New York in 2012 and the Jury Grand Prize of Festival International de Mode et de Photographie in Hyères in 2011.

Her works have found their way to public collections such as: FOAM, Amsterdam; The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Aperture Foundation, New York; and Museum Het Domein Sittard. Kruithof’s artist’s books are part of the public collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art Library, ICP Library, New York Public Library, Pier 24 Library, MBAL Le Locle, Switzerland and the library of The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

On her publishing platform stresspress.biz she presents the nine artist-books she published so far including: The Bungalow published by Onomatopee Eindhoven; Untitled (I’ve taken too many photos / I’ve never taken a photo) self-published (stresspress.biz); Pixel-stress published by RVB-books Paris; A head with wings, published by LBM Saint Paul, USA among others. Kruithof’s tenth artist’s book AUTOMAGIC will appear in August, which is a publishing collaboration between Anouk Kruithof’s publishing platform: stresspress.biz and the Spanish art book publisher Editorial RM. 

Kruithof is also co-creator, director and jury member of the new Anamorphosis Prize, which will award $10,000, no strings attached, to the creator of the best self-published photo-book from the previous year. The prize was launched for the first time in spring 2015.

Eddie Peake is an interdisciplinary artist that works in photography, video, performance, painting, sculpture and installation.  Based in London, Peake makes work that explores the lapses, voids, and mistranslations that occur between verbal and non-verbal forms of communication.  Many of Peake’s photographs and performances use the nude or nearly-nude human form.  Peake’s use of the body, dance and performance explores the formal and sculptural properties of the human figure, as well as the figure’s absurd and erotic potential.  In addition to performance and photography, Peake also makes vibrant, often playful paintings and sculptures that equally try to explore the gaps in language through turning simple sayings, words, or exclamations into provocative visual experiences.

Born in London in 1981, Eddie Peake has lived in Jerusalem, Rome and London. Having graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2006, he undertook a residency at the British School at Rome from 2008 to 2009, and in 2013 graduated with a Master’s degree from the Royal Academy Schools, London. Recent performance projects include The David Roberts Art Foundation (2012), The Tanks, Tate Modern in conjunction with the Chisenhale Gallery (2012); The Royal Academy of Arts (2012) Cell Project Space (2012) and Performa 13 (2013). International solo exhibitions include Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2011), Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome (2012), Southard Reid, London (2012) (with Prem Sahib), Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2013) and White Cube Sao Paulo (2013).