December 3 – 6, 2020. The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, Wesleyan University (online).

“Choreographies of the Archipelago: Artists in Conversation” is a series of online exchanges between interdisciplinary performance artists who work across diverse aesthetic and political contexts. Artist pairings include: Yasuko Yokoshi and mayfield brooks, Tanya Lukin Linklater and Okwui Okpokwasili, Arkadi Zaides and Ligia Lewis, as well as Eleonora Fabião and Jelili Atiku.

How do singular, dispersed artistic gestures teach us ways of listening, touching, and assembling across distance and difference? How can interdisciplinary performance practices articulate the felt and embodied relations of global uprisings happening both through and against the networked ecologies that capitalize on our attention? Staging a series of conversations, Choreographies of the Archipelago invites artists who work across a variety of geopolitical and disciplinary contexts to reflect on both their shared and differing understanding of what vital concerns, methods, and gestures are called for by the pressing challenges faced at both local and transnational levels. From the immediacy of state violence and the rise of autocracy, to the ongoing and ever intensifying struggle against the separatist and extractive logics of capitalist and colonialist regimes, art’s world-making capacity has never been more essential to forging a collective future. These dialogues invite artists to discuss how their creative and critical practices may participate in this diverse endeavor, while pushing back against the demand that art serves as a symbol of global salvation.

The title draws on Édouard Glissant’s foresight that “the entire world is becoming an archipelago” to reaffirm the necessity of thinking singularities in common while resisting epistemological fixity and political homogeneity. Instead of dictating a way forward, these online dialogues emerge as a score for movement and variation; they stage a virtual rehearsal for the metamorphosis of an era and the dissolution of a stable paradigm of “the global.”

September 14 –November 9, 2020. Eugene Lang College, The New School (online). More information available [here].

VIRTUAL BODIES is a weekly series of webinar discussions, presentations, and performances featuring artists and curators, hosted by faculty from the Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. All events are free and open to the public, but require registering.

The body is virtual - a multiplicity that exists not as a fixed and knowable entity, but finds itself containing and attached to many selves, identities, singularities, and ways of knowing itself and its relations to others. Artists and choreographers, in particular, have long explored this virtual potentiality, pressing at the limits of what the body can be and do. But what happens when this sense of the virtual meets with its other connotation - that of being “online”? "Virtual Bodies" presents a weekly series from artists and curators whose practices have long engaged with the politics of the body - providing a space for them to reflect on their work and the way it addresses the limits and possibilities of the virtual today.

Featuring CHEAP Collective / Bill T. Jones & Ricardo Montez / Julie Tolentino & Ted Kerr / Jackson Polys & J. Mae Barizo / Serubiri Moses / Liz Deschenes / Tania Bruguera / Yvonne Rainer / Mason Leaver-Yap / and more.

May 16, 2017. Artists Space.

Amid the heightened polarization of social and political life, some have suggested that we may be experiencing a "return of the culture wars"—a metaphor that allows us to reflect on enduring connections between art, culture, and power. More than a binary debate between ideologies on the left and right, this alludes to an ongoing and embodied contestation of power, as progressive and reactionary forces struggle to imagine and enact alternative futures. Within this framework, artworks are redoubled as potential sites of intervention, and the artist’s implication within institutional structures becomes increasingly charged.

In the Last Instance is an expanded roundtable discussion on the contradictions and possibilities of developing a critical aesthetic practice within this terrain. The conversation will be framed through short prompts from invited speakers Avram Finkelstein and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, each of whom work in unique ways to intervene in the space between institutions, artists and power. Facilitated by Joshua Lubin-Levy and Aliza Shvarts, this open forum invites audience participation throughout.

September 25 - October 23, 2016. Abrons Arts Center.

Reexamine The Space invites six artists whose work often takes the form of dance, performance or choreography to install work in the visual arts galleries at Abrons Arts Center. Works by Kim Brandt, Walter Dundervill & Iki Nakagawa, Moriah Evans, Dean Moss, Cori Olinghouse, and Julie Tolentino feature video, photography, sculpture, installation, and text, extending or augmenting each artists’ distinct and ongoing practice. Each artists was invited to:

“consider the way dance materializes in mediums or forms other than live performance…to think about the relationship between performance, film and photography beyond the notion of a document or archive…to facilitate an experience of dance beyond conventional definitions or limits (i.e. the raising lowering of the “curtain”)”

Not traces, not documents, not archives, not performances, the resulting works are also not entirely art-objects in the most traditional sense. Yet they inhabit the gallery, using its distinctive structure and temporality to think anew the long tradition of dancers serving as the content for visual artworks. In that way they invite the viewer to reconsider the space between visual art and performance, a particularly poignant threshold at Abrons Arts Center, while contributing to a potent redefinition of “dance” within a field beyond the event of live performance.

In relation to the exhibition, a film screening of I Was A Male Yvonne de Carlo (1967 – 70) by Jack Smith will take place on the evening of Wednesday September 28th, 7pm. Film courtesy of Jack Smith Archive and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Screening organized in partnership with Dirty Looks.

March 3 - April 17, 2016. Abrons Arts Center.

We are not only subjects of, but also subject to capitalism. Artists and theorists have mounted powerful critiques of the way capital’s economic system is built upon the conditions of our exploitation. And while such critiques point to capitalism as a system of domination that looms over our lives, perhaps less well attended is the way capitalism figures the very form for our subjectivities. Capitalism tells us what to be (productive, efficient, autonomous) as well as what to want – exacting violence against deviant formations that persist in spite of being illegible to this system. Noting the way capitalism circumscribes life to a relation with the market, Allan Sekula writes “[t]hese forces sought to organize people as atomized ‘private individuals,’ motivated en masse by the prospect of consumption, thus liquidating other dangerously oppositional forms of social bonding.”*

If we are stuck with capitalism, then capitalism is stuck with us – it flows through us as pedestals and frameworks that sustain its very function. Being subject to capitalism, in that sense, points to the duality of being ruled and yet depended upon by structures of capitalist power. How we take shape within these forces can as easily reproduce us as good subjects as it can throw the entire system off course.

Drawing on feminist and queer methodologies, the artists featured in Subject To Capital both illuminate and circumvent the violence of a capitalist logic. Utilizing perceptual, visceral, and mediatized strategies, the collected works unmoor a given sense of subjectivity as fixed or singular while simultaneously hypothesizing alternative modes of representation. If being “subject to” calls to mind subjugation and contingency, then the forms of subjectivity proposed by the collected works refuses any easy recognition. It is ultimately not a matter of who is seen in these works, but how they unfold the subject as a site that may be traversed by interruptions, and even resistances, to the smooth functioning of capitalism.

June 5 - 29, 2014. Visual AIDS and La MaMa Galleria.

Featuring D-L Alvarez, Nao Bustamante, Vincent Chevalier, Clit Club Archive, Rosson Crow, Luke Dowd, Chloe Dzubilo, Benjamin Fredrickson, Tony Just, Kiki & Herb (Justin Vivian Bond & Kenny Mellman), Kia Labeija, Nancer LeMoins, Charles Long, Kevin McCarty, Eric Rhein, Michael Slocum, Jack Smith, Hugh Steers, Carmelita Tropicana, Conrad Ventur, Jack Waters & Peter Cramer, James Wentzy and Jessica Whitbread & Anthea Black.

Taking its title from a 1996 essay written by José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013), Ephemera as Evidence brings together visual art, performance, and pedagogical projects that evidence past lives and future possibilities in the work of artists confronting HIV/AIDS. Thinking through the ephemeral as necessary to the political life of HIV, the exhibition acknowledges a larger history of silence and erasure while at the same time making salient strategies for survival and worldmaking potentials in the face of a violently phobic public sphere. Yet, to consider ephemera in the social and cultural life of HIV/AIDS today is to consider both the burden and blessing of continued life. Within our contemporary moment the question is not merely one of survival but of how survival reverberates beyond the immediacy of a crisis. The works in this show ask us to consider how changing demographics of those affected by HIV/AIDS and the resulting reorientations to crisis force new kinds of temporalities in an engagement with both the past and the future.

Ephemera As Evidence was organized according to three distinct yet interrelated modes of worldmaking—performance, intimacy, and pedagogy. The ephemeral projects collected and staged throughout the run of the show indexed loss and longing central to queer worlds and social formations. They helped to challenge notions of inauthenticity often associated with the ephemeral, not merely using traces to reconstruct a past but also to imagine pasts or futures both longed for and lost, finding new ways to tell untold stories. We presented opportunities for visitors to visually and somatically engage with the art works and had constructed an explicitly performative experience in which ephemeral elements reinforce the materiality of the exhibition space as an ever-shifting environment, continually reconstituted in relation to each body that passes through it. Showcasing moments of live performance, evidence of its potential and absence, and student encounters in the archive, the exhibit explored powerful modes of learning that arise in the apprehension of slippery and contingent realities.

Saturday October 25th, 2014, Performance Studies (NYU).

A one-day symposium with lectures by Gerard Forde (independent scholar) and Marc Siegel (Goethe University), and a round-table discussion with Danielle Goldman (The New School), Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania), Richard Move (Queens College, CUNY), Ara Osterweil (McGill University) and Julia Robinson (NYU).

Organized by Joshua Lubin-Levy. Faculty sponsor Andrè Lepecki. Co-presented by the Department of Performance Studies (NYU) and the Goethe-Institute New York. Tisch Institute for Creative Research and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. Associated programming by the New York Performance Artists Collective. Co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Public Policy (NYU) and the Department of Art History (NYU).

October 30 – November 7, 2010. New York University.

Featuring Moustafa Bayoumi, Claudia Bernardi, Mohamed “Hame” Bourokba, Nora Chipaumire, Yael Farber, Michael Fitzpatrick, Din Q. Le, David Taylor, Shirin Neshat, Mark Danner, among others.

Bodies on the Line is a 10-day colloquium at New York University, bringing together 9 artists and writers from across genres and around the world to share work, ideas and process. Our subject is borders. There are the real borders, such as the ones that are the focus in debates about immigration policy in this country and around the world. There are also political and ideological borders that divide us. On the one hand, borders limit us, and make us vulnerable. On the other hand we want to look at the possibilities and opportunities at border lines.

Bodies on the Line will consider the border as a point of energy and creativity in different regions and spheres of life. The symposium is structured around small working groups and some public presentations. Assisted by respondents, expert witnesses, and the collaboration of several universities and cultural organizations, Bodies on the Line Fellows will explore each other’s artistic representations and investigations of immigration, statelessness, and identity in the contemporary world. The goal of the colloquium is to create new artistic partnerships, to inspire future projects, and to use artistic practice as a way of investigating new and historical ideas. Above all, we seek to bring artists around a table to discuss, in their own unique ways, and with their own unique creative resources, some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Featuring Effie Bowen, Marianna Valencia, and Jack Ferver, co-sponsored by Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and The Center for Performance Research.

Co-produced with Performa and Abrons Arts Center.

Fueled by racism and xenophobia, millions of refugees, fleeing economic and political oppression, are left permanently displaced and discarded around the globe. Children bear the brunt of these hardships. Separated from families and deprived of education, they are consigned to lives of limited possibilities, sometimes stemming from forced separation and associated trauma, and, in some very shocking circumstances, death. This is a global humanitarian crisis that at its core represents the denial of the essential humanity of whole classes of people.

Artists are at the vanguard of society. Artists mine and reflect the currents that they observe first. They reach people well before the problem is fully articulated or appreciated; making our world aware, even before an issue erupts through the surface and becomes headlines of newspapers, or online posts and tweets. The language and logic of artists, be they poets, novelists, photographers, filmmakers, painters, sculptors, dancers, or performers, are ones of feeling, and intuition, rhythm and gesture, shape and color. Artists lay a foundation upon which new fields of knowledge and understanding are structured. Examples of this prescience abound: Black artists of the early-mid 20th century whose writings, songs, and pictures of the experience of African Americans in the United States and elsewhere anchored the canon for the fields of African-American and Black Studies. The pivotal work of ACT UP brought attention to the AIDS crisis and mobilized efforts towards equal rights in the LGBT community, which would not have been as influential without artistic sensibility. All of the movements of the 1960s were accompanied by vibrant changes in the music and fashion industries, and in the world of letters.