Conversation, Screening

This two-day event, developed in dialog with Sondra Perry, brings together the work and voices of activists, artists, cultural critics and public intellectuals to consider how art and activism are shaping one another as visual materials that are recontextualized and recirculated at increasingly accelerated rates. On Friday, October 6, Perry screens a selection of works by video artists and filmmakers that use found footage to show the manifold identities of Blackness as they are expanded and flattened in contemporary culture. The event continues at The New School’s Theresa Lang Community and Student Center on Saturday and includes two panel discussions. The first conversation considers the contemporary professionalization of activism and the second provides a historical account of artist communities and their related roles as activists. Through this framework we think through the tools we can draw into the present from such experiences.

The title of the program takes its cue from Saidiya Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who will be in conversation with Maria Thereza Alves as a keynote discussant at the Vera List Center 25th Anniversary Conference on November 3, 2017.

On Friday, October 6, at 7:30pm, UnionDocs screens Tony Cokes’ Black Celebration, Ja’Tovia Gary’s An Ecstatic Experience, Arthur Jafa’s Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, Tony Ramos’ About Media and Sondra Perry’s Resident Evil. Following the screening Ja’Tovia Gary and James T. Green join Christopher Allen, UnionDocs Founder and Executive Artistic Director, and Sondra Perry for a conversation about the work. Please visit UnionDocs’ website for tickets and additional information.

On Saturday, October 7, two conversations are hosted at The New School’s Theresa Lang Community and Student Center.

Conversation 1: The Contemporary Professionalization of Activism
12:00- 2:00pm
The first panel considers the ownership of images and how they circulate in the art world versus the realm of journalism and news media broadly.

Participants
American Artist: Artist
Alexandra Bell: Artist
Kwame Rose: Activist
Dread Scott: Artist

Moderator
Mia White: Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, The New School for Public Engagement

Conversation 2: Interacting Artist and Activist Communities
2:30-4:30pm
The second panel considers the roles artist communities have played historically and their related roles as activists. In this context we discuss the representation of communities through such forms of activism, the material stakes for the artists representing these communities and their involvement in the communities themselves.

Participants
Gregg Bordowitz: Artist
Mendi and Keith Obadike: Artists
Greg Tate: Journalist

Moderator
Soyoung Yoon: Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School

Sondra Perry makes videos and performances that foreground the tools of digital production as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and to remobilize their potential. Perry has had multiple solo exhibitions, including at THE KITCHEN, for the installation “Resident Evil”, and in 2015, the artist’s work appeared in the fourth iteration of the Greater New York exhibition at MoMA/PS1. In 2017 Sondra was awarded the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize for a solo show at the Seattle Art Museum. Perry holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Alfred University. She lives and works in her hometown of Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

Thank you to Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) for their support of this program. Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) was founded in 1971 as one of the first nonprofit organizations in the United States dedicated to the support of video as an art form. EAI has played a pioneering role in the history of media art. As one of the earliest organizations in the emergent video art movement, EAI was created to provide an alternative system of support for this nascent art form and the artists engaged with it.