6th Annual Curating Symposium
Join the Department of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts for our 6th Annual Curating Symposium. Each year PS organizes a day-long symposium drawing expertise from other NYU departments, visiting artists, and curators in New York City art institutions, to highlight the many aspects of performance curation and promote trans-disciplinary exchanges to meet the rapidly changing practical, critical and theoretical challenges associated with this work.
This year's event is co-sponsored by the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research.
Schedule:
9:45am -10:00am: Welcome and Opening Remarks, André Lepecki
10:00am -11:00am: Curating and Gatekeeping
Curating performance from contemporary Arab artists is often met with extremes. From fetishism, to rejection, orientalism to xenophobia, curating Arab performance evokes multiple challenges that this panel will tackle. Gathering scholars who are equally specialists working in the fields of curation, education, and production, the panel will look at notions of canon and fetishism as proposed by Ismail Fayed, will look at migration and culture policy through the work of Mey Seifan, and the necessity for developing new economic and entrepreneurial structures to advance radical performance curation, through the work of Sarah El Miniawy.
This panel is curated by Adham Hafez, the founder and artistic director of New York Arab Festival
New York Arab Festival is the first festival in New York dedicated to supporting Arab and Arab American artists during the National Arab American Heritage Month, by creating platforms in-person, online, and on-chain throughout New York City during the month of April.
11:15am - 12:15pm: The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance: Nestings: Experimental Infrastructures for Performance
This panel will feature Deborah Goffe, Joshua Lubin-Levy, jumatatu poe, Alma Quintana, and Noémie Solomon.
Drawing on Deborah Goffe’s notion of “nested dance ecosystems,” this panel discusses a range of frameworks, tools, and practices that rethink the ways in which we can together study, build, and inhabit spaces for performance. The nest—an intensive, protective pocket that is always connected to the outside—supports local needs while gesturing toward global concerns. Especially in light of the heightened violence and precarity arising from current conditions, how might these nestings support experimentation while providing shelter for artists from the exploitation that has become all too conventional in the field of presenting and producing performance? Featuring artistic, curatorial, and research projects, this conversation reflects the reciprocal relation between artists and curators (and artist-curators) who have been affiliated with the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance and exemplifies its commitment in developing alternative models for artist support that align with collective actions for racial justice and economic equity.
1:00pm - 2:00pm: My Barbarian & Adrienne Edwards
My Barbarian just concluded their twenty year retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Join the founding company members in conversation about their experience of putting this show together with Whitney curator, Adrienne Edwards.
My Barbarian is an art collective whose work uses performance to play with social difficulties, theatricalize historical problems, and imagine ways of being together. For over twenty years, its members Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade have made plays, masks, videos, drawings, music, installations, texts, events, puppets and dolls, presenting their work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and many other institutions, galleries and performances spaces. A 20-year survey of their work was presented at the Whitney Museum, New York in 2021; the exhibition travels to the ICA LA in 2022. Gaines is associate professor of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch; Segade is assistant professor of Visual Arts at UC San Diego; and Gordon is an independent teaching artist, leading workshops on mask-work, political theater, and other performance techniques.
2:15 - 3:15pm: "In the skin of things: Letícia Parente’s first video" with Katia Maciel
Born in 1930 in Salvador, Bahia, Letícia Parente was an artist, and chemistry researchers and university professor. In the early 1970s she participated on the first artist’s group of video art in Rio de Janeiro. One of her videos became an icon in Brazilian videoart—Trademark (1975)—in which the artist carefully sews the expression “Made in Brasil” on the sole of her own foot. This work synthesizes the artist’s concern with the body in relation to the politics of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).
Though Parente’s first video has been lost, it exists from narratives told by the artist and her close family members. From these stories, the researcher and artist Katia Maciel will present Letícia Parente’s entire audiovisual oeuvre through the construction of a sensitive and conceptual map that involves the house, the feminine body, and daily tasks into a profound critique of the social, political, and cultural determinations from 1960s and 1970s Brazil that persists until today.