Distinguished Visitors 2023-24

sHU LEA CHEANG WITH DALIA DAVOUDI AT PRATT ON APRIL 1, 2024

Shu Lea Cheang delivered a presentation on Sci-Fi New Queer Cinema at Pratt Institute. Dalia Davoudi introduced the filmmaker/activist/net artist and engaged in a lively conversation with her and the audience.

Cheang’s first feature FRESH KILL (newly restored) will be shown at BAM on April 9, 2024. https://www.bam.org/film/2024/fresh-kill

XIAOLU GUO AT PRATT ON MARCH 7, 2024

Xiaolu Guo at a screening of UFO in Her Eyes (2011) with HMS faculty members Evans Chan and Nancy Seidler on March 7, 2024.

JOIRI MINAYA AT PRATT ON FEBRUARY 21, 2024

Joiri Minaya (b. 1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multidisciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity, engaging themes of labor, decoration, beauty, leisure and service. Minaya works across performance, film, photography, sculpture, textiles, and painting.

This event was generously cosponsored by the departments of Humanities and Media Studies Department; Social Science and Cultural Studies; and Photography, as well as the Faculty Senate Academic Initiatives Fund.

The event was well attended with 50 members in the audience from the Pratt community and beyond. The post-talk discussion focused on the powerful ambivalence of Minaya’s aesthetic gestures–straddling at once ideas of camouflage and ambush, repose and work.

Karin Shankar, coordinator of the HMS Performance and Performance Studies minor, welcomed Joiri Minaya to campus on February 21, 2024. David Thomson, an HMS faculty member in Performance/Performance Studies also attended.

ADEENA KARASICK AND HER STUDENTS AT THE CENTER FOR BOOK ARTS WITH ZOE KATZ

On Wednesday February 21, Adeena Karasick’s Artist Book students visited The Center for Book Arts, dedicated to the art of bookmaking, promoting the active exploration of artistic practice related to the book as an art object. Led by award winning bookbinder, Zoe Katz, they spent the afternoon doing a book binding workshop learning a range of various folding and sewing techniques.

Ethan Philbrick visited PLAB Play class on Feb 24

Ethan Philbrick, composer, scholar, author, master cellist, improvisor and beautiful soul visited our PLAB Play class on Feb 24. Drawing from Pauline Oliveros, Augosto Boal and of course his own works, he led us into deep listening exercises, sounding, and eventually making our own instruments with found objects. The class ended with concerts and miniature sound baths.

LIZ MAGIC LASER AT PRATT ON FEBRUARY 5, 2024

Multimedia artist Liz Magic Laser talked with Amy Guggenheim’s Women in International Cinemas class about her documentary/installation work “Convulsive States” exploring themes of process, narrative, psych-physical therapies and cinematic discourse with with students.

Liz Magic Laser is a multimedia video and performance based artist from New York City. Her work intervenes in semi-public spaces such as bank vestibules, movie theaters and newsrooms, involving collaborations with actors, surgeons, political strategists and motorcycle gang members. Her recent work explores the efficacy of new age techniques and psychological methods active in both corporate culture and political movements. Laser’s work has been shown at venues such as Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2019); Metro Pictures, New York (2018) Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2017); the Swiss Institute (2016); the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015); Lisson Gallery, London (2013); the Performa 11 Biennial, New York (2011); and MoMA PS1, New York (2010). She has had solo exhibitions at CAC Brétigny, France (2017); Jupiter Artland Foundation, Scotland (2017); Kunstverein Göttingen, Germany (2016); Mercer Union, Toronto (2015); Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2015); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2015); Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2013) the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2013); and Mälmo Konsthall, Mälmo, Sweden (2012) among other places. She staged a daily performance and video installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018). Most recently she exhibited a major new commission, In Real Life (2019), an experimental reality show about online gig workers, at FACT, Liverpool, UK (2019).

https://lizmagiclaser.com

https://www.artforum.com/columns/liz-magic-laser-hysterical-crisis-alternative-healing-514648

Convulsive States, 2023

JONATHAN BELLER WITH KALI AKUNO AT PRATT ON DECEMBER 7, 2023

Kali Akuno is a co-founder and director of Cooperation Jackson, which is an emerging network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions. Cooperation Jackson is fighting to create economic democracy by creating a vibrant solidarity economy in Jackson, MS that will help transform Mississippi and the South. You can find more information about Cooperation Jackson at www.CooperationJackson.org.

Kali served as the Director of Special Projects and External Funding in the Mayoral Administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS. His focus was supporting cooperative development, sustainability, human rights and international relations.

Kali Akuno is an organizer, educator, and writer for human rights and social justice. He is the former Co-Director of the US Human Rights Network. Kali also served as the Executive Director of the Peoples’ Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) based in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. And was a co-founder of the School of Social Justice and Community Development (SSJCD), a public school serving the academic needs of low-income African American and Latino communities in Oakland, California.

ROSANNA BRUNO WITH ARLENE KEIZER AT PRATT ON DECEMBER 6, 2023

“Rosanna Bruno is a New York based artist who makes paintings, ceramics, and comics.

She received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in painting and has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Rauschenberg Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and LMCC. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, BOMB, TLS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Daily Beast, among others.

Her first book, The Slanted Life Of Emily Dickinson (Andrews McMeel) was published in 2017. Her newest book, a collaboration with poet and classicist Anne Carson, is a comic-book version of Euripides’s classic The Trojan Women, published in 2021 (New Directions). This was a New York Times “Best Graphic Novel of 2021.”

https://www.rosannabruno.com/about

Jessica Dunn Rovinell visits intensive FILM THEORY CLASS

Intensive Film Theory class meets guest filmmaker Jessica Dunn Rovinelli for an intense discussion on the intersection of theory and practice, organized by Prof. Mónica-Ramón Ríos.

Jessica Dunn Rovinelli is a film director, editor, colorist and critic based in New York. She is the director of two award-winning feature films and several shorts, which played at festivals including Berlinale, IndieLisboa, and BAM Cinemafest. Rovinelli is also a recipient of grants from the Centre national des arts plastiques (Paris), New York Foundation for the Arts, and Film Independent. In 2019, she was selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

Gloria Lim Steil welcomes author Bora Chung and translator Anton Hur to Pratt on November 2, 2023.

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE

“Like the work of Carmen Maria Machado and Aoko Matsuda, Chung’s stories are so wonderfully, blisteringly strange and powerful that it’s almost impossible to put Cursed Bunny down.” ―Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get In Trouble

Karin Shankar’s Introduction to Performance Studies class Visits

Karin Shankar’s Introduction to Performance Studies class visited

the Franklin Furnace Archives where Harley Spillers, Director, gave us

a fabulous tour and history of this vital space for avant-garde

artists.

Wonderful dancer, choreographer, and teacher David Thompson visited

Karin Shankar’s Introduction to Performance Studies class HMS 360 and

led students through a short physical score and a story creating

activity, as part of a “performance as research” module.

RACHEL O’DWYER AT PRATT ON OCTOBER 19, 2023

Dr. Rachel O’Dwyer is a lecturer in digital cultures in the School of Visual Culture in NCAD. Her research is at the intersection of digital cultures and cultural economies with a particular focus on money, algorithms and art. Previously Rachel was a research fellow in Connect, the SFI Research Centre in Trinity College Dublin and an IRC research fellow in the sociology department of Maynooth university. In 2018, she was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to visit UC Irvine, California and research blockchain technologies, crypto-art and art markets. She was also a recipient of the Royal Irish Academy Charlemont Grant in 2018 to do research on art markets, freeports and new technologies. She is an editor for Neural magazine of critical digital cultures and media art and the founding editor-in-chief of Interference, a journal of audio culture (2009 – 2017).

Rachel has published extensively on digital cultures, digital value (money, payment, cryptocurrency) and digital art in both academic and public scholarship contexts (MIT Press, Journal of Cultural Economies, Convergence, Fibreculture, Spheres Journal of Digital Culture, Institute of Network Cultures) and public scholarship contexts (London Review of Books, Circa, World Economic Forum, Longreads, UnDark, the Atlantic). She is regularly invited to present her work internationally (most recently at Moneylab, Institute of Network Cultures, Transmediale and Re:Publica). She is currently completing a book for MIT Press, Leonardo Art|Science Series on the ownership of the radio spectrum

Yuchen's Bookbinding Workshop

On Monday Oct 12, 2023, Adeena Karasick’s Artist Book class visited Printed Matter and were treated to a Bookbinding workshop with Book Artist, and Artist Book specialist, Yuchen Chang. Not only did she provide the class with a series of hands-on folding and binding techniques but tracked through the history, philosophy, aesthetics and politics of the genre. Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner – writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. By constantly entering and exiting each medium, she strolls against the category of things, the labor division among people. Yuchen was a recipient of Kahn | Mason SIP Fellowship, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award Grand Jury Prize, Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant and Luminarts Fellowship. She has shown/performed her work at Artists Space, UCCA Dune, Power Station of Art, Para Site, Taikwun Contemporary, Abrons Art Center and more. She was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA, Museum of Art and

Design, NARS x Governors Island, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Textile Arts Center. Yuchen has written for publications including Heichi Magazine, Press and Fold, Art in Print, Randian, and she lectures/teaches at Yale University, University of the Arts, Center for Book Arts, Printed Matter, among others.

Bonjour! Sabrina visits the French class

Bonjour!

The class had so much fun today with Sabrina as our speaker: she told us about her career in music management, and we learned that last summer Beyoncé asked the mayor of Paris to stop construction on the train lines so she could do a second date in Paris. The Mayor of Paris said "no"

They also did dialogues at a boulangerie, a clothing store, and trying to make a date to meet up with a friend. She's coming back this Wednesday, and students are going to do a dialogue about buying train tickets, then trying to do the same during a strike.

Sabrina cours 1.mp4

101A LC5/6 students visit the Pratt Manhattan Gallery

Visiting the Pratt Manhattan gallery, 101A LC5/6 students experience the Amazonia exhibit, gaining insight into the Amazon rainforest, native societies and ecologies.

Laura U. Marks and Ethan Spigland at Pratt on September 26, 2023

Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy, with an intercultural focus and an emphasis on appropriate technologies. Her fifth book, The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. With Azadeh Emadi she co-founded the Substantial Motion research Network. She founded the Small File Media Festival and leads research on the carbon footprint of streaming media. Marks is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

Nancy Seidler (HMS) welcomes award-winning author-filmmaker Xiaolu Guo. Lecture and screening at Pratt Brooklyn on September 20, 2023.

Xiaolu Guo is a Chinese British novelist, memoirist and filmmaker. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, and I Am China. Her memoir Nine Continents won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Costa Award. Her recent novel A Lover’s Discourse, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020 and longlisted for the Orwell Prize. Radical is published by Chatto 2023. Named as a Granta’s Best of Young British Novelist in 2013, she also directed a dozen films, includingHow Is Your Fish Today (Sundance Official Selection) and UFO In Her Eyes (TIFF). Her feature She, A Chinese received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno Festival 2009. Her documentary We Went to Wonderland was in the Official Selection of ND/NF at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Once Upon A Time Proletarian was selected for the Horizon Section at Venice Film Festival 2009. She had her film retrospectives at London’s Whitechapel Gallery 2019 and Cinematheque Switzerland 2011, as we as at the Greek Film Archive in Athens 2018.She was a 2021 visiting professor at Columbia University and Baruch College in New York. Guo is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Cem A. spoke for Media Encounters at Pratt (Brooklyn) on September 19, 2023. Moderator: Daniel Shinbaum

Cem A. is an artist with a background in anthropology. He is known for running the art meme page @freeze_magazine and for his site-specific installations. His work explores topics such as survival and alienation in the art world, often through a hyper-reflexive lens and collaborative projects. He is an artistic advisor to documenta Institut. Cem A.’s selected solo exhibitions and installations include Louisiana Museum, Barbican Centre, Berlinische Galerie, Grimmwelt Museum and Museum Wiesbaden. His group exhibitions include documenta fifteen and 14. Biennial of Young Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje. He has held lectures at Royal College of Art,

Central Saint Martins, Haus der Elektronischen Künste, HDK Valand, Universität der Künste and Istanbul Modern. He is a member of Hœr NY, a feminist queer and bisexual lesbian art collective.

The presentation asks what happens when digital memes cross the surface of the screen to become physically displayed in art exhibitions. If the defining factor (as well as the political efficacy) of a meme is not what is in the image, but rather how the image is shared, how can this hyper-relational, shareable quality be transferred to memes in physical contexts? I am interested in working with alternative social mediums where memes can be situated. Situating a meme refers to the application of memes (or meme culture more broadly) in physical contexts. It recognizes digital memes as the primary object while creating physical spaces that can deconstruct, appreciate or contribute to the visual and cultural qualities of memes. It hopes that these situated memes gain new connotations and find their way back to the internet.

Peter Sciscioli visits David Thomson's Intro to Performance Practice

CLASS

New York-based interdisciplinary artist Peter Sciscioli offered a master class to students in David Thomson's Intro to Performance Practice course, centered in Voice as Movement, an approach to the voice and body as one, integrated entity capable of coordinating both visual and aural perception simultaneously.

The class began with a movement warmup, tuning in to how we breathe and how breath can move through the body as an opener, an expressive tool, and as a starting point for making any sound. From there, a practice was shared of moving vocal/physical vibration into different parts of the body to discover and open resonance in some of its myriad forms. Shaping and sculpting breath and sound with the throat/tongue/teeth/lips, participants gained access to speaking with their whole bodies. Lastly, an approach to singing in a group was shared. One aspiration of this approach is to uncover the benefits of this practice in and of itself, and as a potentially potent tool for expressing ourselves more fully in the world.

Voice as Movement is informed by years of study and engagement in voice, music, movement and energy work, framed by Sciscioli’s early training in Western European classical violin and opera, sports and American Musical Theater, and later in contemporary dance, global theater traditions, Experimental Vocal Techniques, and Qi-gong. Exercises and approaches gleaned from working with Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble (extended vocal techniques), Jane Comfort (text and movement) and Daria Faïn (Qi-gong and locating sound within the body) were also referenced and incorporated.

Jason Vigneri-Beane AND lOLA fISH visits sACHA fREY'S CLASS

Over the Summer Jason Vigneri-Beane and Lola Fish had Artist Visits with Students in Future Worlds and other Science Fictions in July. Vigneri-Beane shared his latest research in speculative architectures, cyborg ecologies, and other crypto-entanglements. Lola Fish, acclaimed photographer and activist talked to students at Pratt Institute about their latest Afrofuturist-inspired series.

Page updated

Report abuse