Assembling a Linguistics of Liminality
Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of The Arts is thrilled to welcome Amina Ross to our Department on Wednesday April 12th, 2023 at 7pm ET, for an evening of video work, with live sound accompaniment by Bao Nguyen, and conversation with Chip Kimura (PS M.A. Candidate ‘23).
Ross’s practice draws from intimate conversation, embodied experience, ancestral genealogies, dreams, mass media, and the architecture of these relations, to articulate specific gestures within an ever shifting linguistics of liminality. This corporeally embedded language becomes material in its assemblage of speculative environments and discourse that directly address systems of power, while actualizing survival tactics for black, queer, trans and femme communities. Their work invites audiences to reach beyond simple acts of witnessing toward a complex and open landscape of mutual participation that “strives for a better elsewhere”. Post-screening discussion will touch on lines of desire and refusal that permeate collective cultural labor. We will think through how these threads and seepages coalesce, rupture, and co-produce multiple realities at once—weaving “new pathways for people to connect and find meaning in the work”.
“Living inside a specter of the present we go to war everyday and still find ways to breathe together.” - quotation from 'The Underling’s Vision,' a poem by Amina Ross, 2021
Amina Ross is an artist, educator, and lifelong learner. Ross makes videos, sculptures, sounds, and situations that consider feeling, embodied knowledge, and intimacy as survival technologies for black, queer, trans, and femme people. Their work questions how systems of power condition reality and how communities facing oppression navigate, resist, reimagine, and refigure these systems to thrive in safety. Ross worked as an educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, was a lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a critic at Rhode Island School of Design. They received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. They have recently exhibited work at Sentiment (Zurich, CH), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Iceberg Projects (Chicago, IL), M23 (New York, NY), Springsteen Gallery (Baltimore, MD), and Centro De Cultura Digital (Mexico City, MX) among other venues. Ross was a recent artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting (Madison, ME), Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Abrons Art Center (New York, NY), and Harvestworks (New York, NY). Website: https://www.aminaross.com
Bao Nguyen is a performance artist, experimental vocalist and curator born in Vietnam and based in Baltimore. Through performance, sound, video and interactive media, Bao’s practice examines oral traditions to reconsider the history of Vietnamese nation-building and devise new connections between ourselves and the landscape. They are pursuing their BFA in Interactive Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. Bao recently completed their residency at Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art. They have exhibited in the U.S and abroad, including shows at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Ewha Woman University, Korea. In 2022, they were awarded the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award from the New Media Caucus. Website: https://nguyenbao.myportfolio.com
****Registration is required for this event for non-NYU guests. Registration closes at 5:30pm the day of the event.