cari ann shim sham*, Arts Professor at Tisch School of the Arts Department, developed a film, "pandemic statements", now exhibited at the 17th Biennial Symposium, for Arts and Technology, "Contact" in the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College, Nov10-Dec 10, 2022.
"pandemic statements" is a film by cari ann shim sham* centered around emotional states, written statements, sounds and movements of, from and for a pandemic captured and witnessed through screens. It is a work that creates space for how we've seen and been seen by each other, how we need to be seen now; demonstrating how we continue to move through it all seeing differently. Ultimately it is a creative space for processing, for mourning, and for healing through physical, written, sounding and emotional state practices and the effects that the pandemic has had upon us.
The Ammerman Center presents the Contact Exhibition in the Cummings Arts Center galleries (Nov 10–Dec 10, 2022), organized by commissioned curator René Cepeda.
Excerpt from the Curator's statement: "Over the past few years “contact” has become a contradictory word. We are encouraged to avoid it in person while at the same time craving for it. We have the ability to reach out across oceans and yet we are more isolated and alienated than ever before. This contentious relationship with contact on the abstract level highlights how the need to touch, communicate and share is integral to the human experience.
In this exhibition you will find works that address contact in all its contradictions through three main themes: physical and social contact with each other, contact with and through the non-human world, and contact with and through technological systems that both amplify and constrain it. As you enter the exhibition, Pandemic statements, and our commission, In Silence turn the panopticon onto itself and convert it into a tool of contact and healing. During the pandemic, remote video and webcams, usually tools of the surveillance state brought us imperfectly closer to each other."
Read the rest of the Curator's Statement and learn more about the Arts & Technology Symposium at the links below.
