Conversation, Panel, Performance

In early 20th century Russia, circus performers were referred to as “eccentrics,” a term picked up by the St. Petersburg-based avant-garde group of artists, writers, and filmmakers who comprised the “Factory for the Eccentric Actor” or FEKS. For them, using stunts, gags, and tricks became ways to address the changing pace of life with new developments in technology and media culture. The circus emerged as a touchstone because it was a place where the impossible happened, and social orders and scientific laws were stretched to challenge the conventions of the reality outside of the tent.

This panel discussion extends from these ideas, which inform the concurrent exhibition The Eccentrics at SculptureCenter, and features two of the exhibiting artists, Sanya Kantarovsky and Jeanine Oleson, as well as exhibition curator Ruba Katrib and New School faculty member Margot Bouman. The role of special effects in contemporary art and performance is key to their discussion as well as strategies of belief and suspense of belief that are used by artists and performers to elicit particular emotional and cognitive responses from their audiences.

Participants
Margot Bouman: Assistant Professor of Visual Culture
Sanya Kantarovsky: Artist
Ruba Katrib: Exhibition Curator
Jeanine Oleson: Artist

Margot Bouman is an Assistant Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons. She is at work on two book projects: From Television’s Avant-Garde to the Televisual and the Avant-Garde: 1968-1988 and _Cut, Shift, Paste: Sampling and the Site-Specific in Contemporary Art_. The first is a historical examination of the unintended consequences of the avant-garde’s incursions into television in the 1970s and the 1980s. The latter takes as its subject contemporary — or late 1990s to present — works of art that live at the intersection of sampling and site-specificity. With Alice Crary she is a founding co-director of the Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies at The New School. In 2016, she is serving as the interim director of Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester’s Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies in 2009.

Sanya Kantarovsky (b. 1982, Moscow, Russia) lives and works in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Gushers at Marc Foxx gallery (2015) , Los Angeles and Apricot Juice at Studio Voltaire, London (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Tightrope Walk: Painted Images After Abstraction, White Cube, London 2016 curated by Barry Schwabsky, and the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts curated by Nicola Lees, 2015. Currently, Kantarovsky work is included in The Eccentrics, curated by Ruba Katrib on view at the Sculpture Center. Kantarovsky’s solo exhibition In the Gutter is currently on view at Tanya Leighton gallery. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition at Stuart Shave Modern Art, London (2016) and a monograph made in collaboration with Stuart Bailey of Dexter Sinister.

Ruba Katrib is the Curator at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, New York where she has produced group shows The Eccentrics (2016), Puddle, Pothole, Portal (2014) (co-curated with artist Camille Henrot), Better Homes (2013), and A Disagreeable Object</i> (2012). Recent solo shows include exhibitions with Rochelle Goldberg (2016), Anthea Hamilton, Gabriel Sierra, Magali Reus, Michael E. Smith, and Erika Verzutti (all 2015). In her previous post as the Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), North Miami, she organized several acclaimed solo and group exhibition including The Reach of Realism (2009), which explored the traditions of realism within the digital age, as well as the first museum retrospectives of Cory Arcangel and Claire Fontaine (both 2010). Katrib has contributed texts for a number of publications and periodicals including Art in America, Parkett, and cura. magazine.

Jeanine Oleson is an interdisciplinary artist who makes complex and humorous objects, images, films and performances. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rutgers University. Oleson has exhibited and performed at: SculptureCenter, NY; New Museum, NY; Exit Art, NY; Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico; X-Initiative, NY; Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Monya Rowe Gallery, NY; MoMA/P.S.1, NY; and White Columns, NY. Oleson has been in residence at the New Museum, Smack Mellon Studio Program, NY and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has an upcoming residency at Macdowell and a residency/project at the Hammer Museum, LA. Oleson is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design.