News

The soprano and Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna Julia Bullock is on the verge of an unconventional career.

The Television Academy has honored Boris FX, the leading developer of visual effects plugins and applications, with three Engineering Emmy Awards. The Boris FX products Sapphire, Mocha Pro, and Silhouette have each been recognized for their technical achievements and contribution to the world of television. Bardian Ross Shain is the chief product officer for Mocha, and he accepted the award at the 71st Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening, October 23, 2019, at the JW Marriott Hotel Los Angeles. 

Avallone’s 2019 Bettie Page Halloween Special is “a tribute to Bard,” he writes. The plot unfolds at “Annandale College” in upstate New York, where settings and characters are modeled on Avallone’s memories of Bard.

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Human Rights Project announced today that Turkish sociologist, activist, and architectural theorist Pelin Tan has been selected as the sixth recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Her appointment coincides with the generous renewal by the Keith Haring Foundation of the five year-grant supporting the Fellowship, an annual award for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at CCS Bard and the Human Rights Project at Bard College. Tan’s appointment marks the beginning of the Fellowship’s second phase, and reaffirms the shared commitment of the College and the Foundation both to exploring the interaction between political engagement and artistic practices and to bringing leading practitioners from around the world into Bard's classrooms.

“The Keith Haring Fellowship brings some of today's most incisive and engaged voices to Bard.  This innovative, cross-disciplinary, fellowship provides for research, teaching and production of new ideas among the undergraduate and graduate programs,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Pelin Tan's current research concerns political movements that focus on climate justice, landscape, agriculture, and indigeneity, and particularly activist projects that put interactions with the non-human world at the forefront of their practice. She asks about how our concepts of justice and rights can be extended to landscape and territory, and about the role that critical artistic and architectural interventions can play in making these claims. She also continues to explore, and experiment with, alternative modes of pedagogy, new modes of teaching that work from the bottom up to challenge and transform the institutions of art and design education.   

Her practice combines scholarship, curating, and artistic and architectural creation. She was Associate Professor and Vice-Dean of the Architecture Faculty at Mardin Artuklu University in Turkey from 2013-2017, and has held visiting fellowship and research positions around the  world, from Hong Kong to Cyprus. Most recently she curated the Gardentopia: Cosmos of Ecologies project, in Matera, Italy, a program of European Cultural Capital 2019.

"Throughout her career, the work that Pelin Tan calls 'action research' has demonstrated that the borders between scholarship, activism, and creation can and must be transgressed if we want to pursue justice in this world. In this way, Pelin is an artist very much in the spirit of Keith Haring," said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Project.

Tan will take up her one-year appointment in September 2019, and spend the spring semester of 2020 teaching at the College. She succeeds the artist and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden, curator Galit Eilat, architects Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, the artist and curator Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and the first recipient, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk.
 

Sillman’s The Shape of Shape at the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art in New York City is “among the most valuable of the inaugural shows.” Sillman “ranges throughout the collection, across media, generations and styles, seeking out overlooked or excluded artists and unfamiliar works. Her effort parallels the approaches at work in the permanent collection galleries, but reflects a relatively robust visual appetite — the artist’s unfettered eye — that the museum needs more of.  The show’s dense installation encourages surprising connections …”
 

Anne Bogart—Obie Award–winning director, Bard alumna, and regular director of Bard SummerScape productions—answers five questions about her work.

Bard professor and acclaimed photographer Stephen Shore was honored with The 2019 Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art at the annual Gala Awards ceremony on Tuesday, October 22 at Carnegie Hall in New York. The awards are part of the Lucie Foundation’s mission to honor master photographers, discover and cultivate emerging talent, and promote the appreciation of photography worldwide. Since 2003, the foundation has paid tribute to more than 135 of the most important figures in contemporary photography through the Lucie Awards.

Professor Shore’s work has been widely published and exhibited for the past 45 years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, 40 years earlier. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. More than 25 books have been published of Professor Shore’s photographs. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Carolyn Lazard’s cross-disciplinary practice centers on the experiences of disability and accessibility, appropriating existing materials and, in the artist’s words, “the labor of others as a structural element of the work.” The annual Pew Fellowships provide awards of $75,000 to individual artists working in visual art, literature, dance, and theater.

In addition to a solo turn at London’s Pilar Corrias Gallery, Self is included in the group show Rock My Soul at Victoria Miro, which features works by renowned black women artists Sonia Boyce, Frida Orupabo, Howardena Pindell, and Betye Saar, among others. Through November 2.

In its review of the Freehand New York, Business Insider points to the hotel’s abundant art—commissioned from students and alumni/ae of Bard College for its public spaces, corridors, and all 395 guest rooms—as its not-to-be-missed feature. “Take time to explore,” their critic writes, “and appreciate the fact that you’re practically living in a gallery.”

New Faculty Chairs and Distinguished Professorships include Susan Aberth in Art History, Valeria Luiselli in Written Arts, Kelly Reichardt in Film and Electronic Arts, and An-My Lê in Photography

Bard College has appointed four new chairs and distinguished professorships across disciplines this fall. In the Division of the Arts’ Art History and Visual Culture Program, Susan Aberth has been named Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History. This chair was formerly held by Jean French. In the Division of Languages and Literature’s Written Arts Program, Valeria Luiselli has been named Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. In the Division of the Arts’ Film and Electronic Arts Program, Kelly Reichardt has been named S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence. In the Division of the Arts’ Photography Program, An-My Lê has been named Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts. This chair was formerly held by Peter Hutton.

Susan Aberth is an art historian whose area of specialization is surrealism in Latin America. Aberth’s teaching interests focus on Latin American art, African art, Islamic art, and other religious art and practices. Additional interests include African religious practices in the Americas, and the art and iconography of Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and the occult. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries), she has contributed to Seeking the Marvelous: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2020), Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos mágicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror, and the Journal of Surrealism of the Americas. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles; MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Aberth has been at Bard since 2000.

Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. A 2019 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times and one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Question, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are; and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. Luiselli founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She received her BA from UNAM in Mexico, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. She has been at Bard since 2019.

Kelly Reichardt is a filmmaker whose latest film, Certain Women—starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone—premiered in 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival and won the top award at the London Film Festival. Her other films include: Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006), and River of Grass (1994). Her film First Cow is currently in postproduction. Reichardt has received the United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at the Whitney Biennial (2012), Film Forum, Cannes Film Festival in “un certain regard,” Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BFI London Film Festival. She has had retrospectives at the Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the Moving Image, Walker Art Center, and American Cinematheque Los Angeles. Reichardt received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. She has taught at Bard College since 2006.

An-My Lê is a photographer who was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960, but left that country during the final year of the war in 1975 and subsequently found a home as a political refugee in the United States. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Her film and photography examine the effects and representation of war and have included the documentation of (and participation in) Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, and has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and MoMA PS1. An-My has been teaching at Bard since 1999.

Blake, whose work explores the fluidity of race and gender, has long been an accumulator as much as a creator. “There’s a particular way that culture is articulated in museums and galleries,” Blake says, “but then there’s another way that we all experience it through the stuff that we put in our houses.” It’s no surprise, then, that the artist’s one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where they have lived for the past 17 years, is crammed floor-to-ceiling with kitschy novelties and personal totems. 

Participating Artists Include Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Tashweesh, Mirna Bamieh/Palestine Hosting Society, Ali Chahrour, Rudi Goblen, Emily Jacir, Tania El Khoury, Jason de León, and Emilio Rojas

Live Arts Bard (LAB), the residency and commissioning program of the Fisher Center at Bard, announces Where No Wall Remains, the third edition of the acclaimed LAB Biennial, temporarily reconfiguring the Fisher Center as a site for innovative and interactive performances and installations (November 21-24). Co-curated by Lebanese live artist Tania El Khoury, a 2019 Soros Art Fellow, and Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director for Theater and Dance, this four-day festival considers the subject of borders: political borders, physical borders, historical and contemporary borders, borders seen and unseen, the borders of the body, borders between art forms, between performers and spectators, the borders that divide or define us, borders to be crossed, tested, resisted, destroyed, rebuilt, or transcended. Where No Wall Remains follows The House is Open (2014), which explored the relationship between visual and performing arts, and We’re Watching (2017), which examined contemporary states of surveillance. This third edition of the festival features nine new performances and installations by contemporary artists from the Middle East and Central America, commissioned by Live Arts Bard. Please see below for dates and times for each work.

As curators Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester describe, “We started planning [this edition of the festival] January 2017, in the week that the Trump administration’s ‘Muslim ban’ came into effect, accompanied by increasingly xenophobic rhetoric and the specter of a wall along the US/Mexico line. It was inevitable that the current edition would focus on the subject of borders… The recent near-elimination of the American immigration program, together with an increase of human rights violations on the Mexican border, have made the subject of the festival even more grimly present than we could have imagined in 2017. Current US immigration policy has particularly affected people from the Middle East and Central America, and we therefore invited artists from those regions to join us in creating the festival.”

November 2019, the month of the festival, marks the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of the most significant and celebrated events of the 20^th century, at the time it seemed to promise a future of open borders and unification. Three decades later, the heady dreams of 1989 are very far from us; walls are being built up, not torn down. The title Where No Wall Remains, taken from a love poem by Rumi, is an invitation to imagine a utopian state of being—a fully unbordered world.

The festival is sited throughout the Fisher Center and beyond it, at the Bard Farm and in the nearby village of Tivoli, NY. The political potential of each work evokes many ideas and representations of borders: Emily Jacir’s letter to a friend, Rudi Goblen’s FITO, and Tania El Khoury’s Cultural Exchange Rate re-center the political debate around the personal, presenting autobiographical, familial, and neighborhood accounts of border crossing and navigating broader systems of oppression; Ali Chahrour’s Night brings the audience to the most intimate site of alienation, the human body, reminding us that love stories are also stories of borders and how we transcend them.

The entire program responds to the urgency of our political climates, not by merely advancing critique, but by also producing knowledge. Works such as Jason de León’s Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94), Mirna Bamieh/Palestine Hosting Society’s Menu of Dis/appearance, Emilio Rojas’ m(Other)s: Hudson Valley, and At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (part 2) (a site-specific video and sound installation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with a performance by Tashweesh) engage dispossessed bodies, erased cultures, and forgotten artifacts. Rojas’ Naturalized Borders (to Gloria) redraws the Mexico-US border as an imagined line by communities who have historically asserted the intersection between labor rights, land sovereignty, and migration. We are reminded of the everyday price many people pay for borders: the marginalization of indigenous communities, the uncounted and unrecorded deaths at border zones, and the erasure of entire life worlds. The festival’s cover image, Samar Hazboun’s photograph of the wall in her town of Bethlehem, represents a global community of artists who refuse to be imprisoned by racism or cement.

The festival is the culmination of a two-year partnership with many programs at Bard (including Middle Eastern Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Experimental Humanities, and the Human Rights Project), which have included undergraduate courses, public programs, and artist residencies.

The curators write, “We acknowledge the vast production that came before this program by artists and activists who are most affected by discriminatory border politics. We pay homage to them and hope to build on the ongoing discussion and mobilization on borders with this timely and inspiring body of work.”

The themes and artists of Where No Wall Remains are further explored in the digital realm via the festival blog (nowall.bard.edu), which includes a syllabus, interviews with the artists, digital resources, and more.

Where No Wall Remains will take place at the Fisher Center over four days, Thursday, November 21-Sunday, November 24, 2019. Admission to several events and installations is free; tickets prices for paid events are listed below, and are now available for sale. All tickets can be purchased at to fishercenter.bard.edu or 845.758.7900. The Fisher Center at Bard Arts is located at 60 Manor Avenue, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, 12504. A round-trip coach from New York City will be available on November 24.

Where No Wall Remains – Schedule of Events

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Tashweesh
At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (part 2)
LAB Commission / World Premiere
Installation: November 21, 6-9pm; November 22, 7:30-9pm; November 23, 1-4pm, 5:30-7:30pm; November 24, 3-6pm
Performances: November 22, 6:30pm; November 23, 4:30pm and 8pm; November 24, 2pm & 6:30pm
Resnick Studio, Fisher Center
Tickets: $15

At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (part 2) brings together a site-specific video and sound installation by Palestinian-American artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme and a new performance by Tashweesh, an improvised constellation that brings the artists together with musician/performer Muqata’a. Combining their different practices in a joint performance, using sound, music, and images, the result is an exploration of the collision between returns, erasure, and disruption. 

From the returns of the land and stubborn vegetation that does not die, to artifacts that are reactivated as living matter, figures that return in virtual form, and disruptive bodies that keep reappearing on borders. Both the installation and performance address the intentional erosion of bodies, land, and structures in different forms, but also their re-appearance in and returns to spaces where they “should not be.” These projects invite us to consider the forms of entanglement between the destruction of bodies and the erasure of images, and the conditions under which these same bodies and images might once again reappear.

Mirna Bamieh / Palestine Hosting Society
Menu of Dis/appearance
LAB Commission / World Premiere
November 21-23, 7:30pm
Presented at and in partnership with Murray’s (73 Broadway, Tivoli, NY, 12583)
Tickets: $35, including dinner

In its first dinner performance in the United States, Palestine Hosting Society presents an expanded approach to “Palestinianess” that trespasses borders and geographies. Through a menu that brings together dishes from Palestinian cities and villages, alongside others that were preserved in Palestinian refugee camps outside Palestine, and those that narrate inter-generational food habits and memory of the Palestinian diaspora, especially in the United States. Menu of Dis/appearance narrates stories about time, history, and parts of ourselves that we might have allowed to slip away.

Menu of Dis/appearance is a dinner performance that invites the audience on a journey through a selection of dishes that shares Palestine Hosting Society’s investigation and unearthing of traditional Palestinian cuisine. Some of these dishes have been forgotten, their names rendered mostly abstract to the current generation of Palestinians. Being denied a state of their own, Palestinians use food as a means to express an identity that is constantly undermined. Life under occupation atrophied this connection to food, through imposing restriction policies over food and water resources, inflicting control on wild plant foraging, as well as creating dissonance by showcasing Palestinian dishes as Israeli. Over the years, such measures created a kitchen that is dispossessed, making many Palestinian traditional dishes disappear, or temporarily withdraw.

Ali Chahrour
Night
LAB Commission / US Premiere
November 22, 7:30pm; November 23, 3pm; November 24, 4pm
LUMA Theater, Fisher Center
Tickets: $25

“The Catastrophe is a violent crisis during which the subject, experiencing the amorous situation as a definitive impasse, a trap from which he can never escape, sees himself doomed to total destruction.” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
                                               
Night, from Lebanese choreographer Ali Chahrour, is a dance concert inspired by the dense archive of love and romance in classical Arabic poetry, and from contemporary stories of lovers and their cruel separation. The work references stories from the cultural memory of the Levant and Mesopotamia about the fate of lovers who challenged social and religious systems, and whose bodies were punished and sentenced to suffer the distance of separation as well as the hope of impossible reunions.
                                               
The performance records the vicissitudes of lovers and their resistance, leading up to the moment when they fall and fade away. The exhausted body succumbs, and with it falls every action and instrument/tools that the performers had carried throughout the show. The fall reveals the fragility of the lover/performer, and the frailty of all the methods and tools at his disposal. The stage becomes the battlefield after the battle, where the audience has just witnessed the death, or rather, the birth of its heroes. 

Night is co-commissioned by the Fisher Center, and co-produced by Zoukak Theatre Company, the Arab Arts Focus with the support of Stiftelsen, Studio Emad Eddin and Ford Foundation, Fonds de dotation du Quartz (Brest), and the Zurich Theatre Spektakel, with additional support from Fabrik Potsdam, and Kunstfest Weimar. Night was developed, in part, at the 2018 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in Morocco with continued support through its Post-Lab Support Initiative.

Rudi Goblen
FITO
LAB Commission / World Premiere
November 23, 9pm; November 24, 7:30pm
Sosnoff Stage Right, Fisher Center
Tickets: $15

After 30 years in the United States, it is the day of Fito’s naturalization ceremony.  As he raises his hand for the Oath of Allegiance, he is transported to a composition of musical snapshots that make up his tapestry in this country.  Some jaded, some moot, some filled with bodies of water, some disheartening—but none ever debilitating enough to keep him from chasing his dream to be the first American citizen in his family. FITO is an interactive concert-play incorporating songs, stories, and spoken word poems that meld to paint a soundscape of what it can take to be accepted in your own home, by your own people—or yourself.

Emily Jacir
letter to a friend
LAB Commission / World Premiere
November 21, 6-9pm; November 22, 6-9:30pm; November 23, 1-9:30pm; November 24, 1-8pm
Sosnoff Stage Left, Fisher Center
Free

The artist asks a friend to start an investigation and recounts in minute detail various aspects of her home and street in Bethlehem—a site marked by movement, migrations, survival, and war. 

Tania El Khoury
Cultural Exchange Rate
LAB Commission / US Premiere
November 21-22, 6pm, 7pm, 8pm; November 23, 1:30pm, 2:30pm, 3:30pm, 4:30pm, 7pm, 8pm; November 24, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm, 5:30pm, 6:30pm
Sosnoff Backstage, Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Tickets: $15

The cruelest of borders are invisible to the eye and present in everyday life: the death traps set within a moving body of water and the concealed militarization of faraway border villages. 

Cultural Exchange Rate is an interactive live art project in which artist Tania El Khoury shares her family memoirs of life in a border village between Lebanon and Syria; marked by war survival, valueless currency collections, brief migration to Mexico, and a river that disregards the colonial and national borders. 

The audience is invited to immerse their heads into one family’s secret boxes to explore the sounds, images, and textures of traces of more than a century of border crossings.
 
Cultural Exchange Rate is based on the artist’s recorded interviews with her late grandmother, oral histories collected in her village in Akkar, the discovery of lost relatives in Mexico City, and the family’s attempt to secure dual citizenship.

Jason de León
Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94)
November 21, 6-9pm; November 22, 6-9:30pm; November 23, 1-9:30pm; November 24, 1-8pm
Weis Atrium
Fisher Center
Free

Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) is a prototype of a participatory political art installation organized by the Undocumented Migration Project that will launch in the fall of 2020 in 150 locations around the globe simultaneously. A 20-foot-long map of the Arizona/Mexico border is populated with 3,199 handwritten toe tags that contain information about those who have died while migrating including name (if known), age, sex, cause of death, condition of body, and location. Some tags contain QR and Augmented-Reality codes that link to content related to migrant stories and visuals connected to immigration that can be accessed via cellphone. HT94 is intended to memorialize and bear witness to the thousands who have died as a result of Prevention Through Deterrence. 

The most crucial (and interactive) aspect of the installation are the audience members committing their time and energy to meticulously fill out the death details for all 3,199 toe tags and then being assisted in placing these tags in the exact locations on the map where those individuals were found.

Emilio Rojas
Naturalized Borders (to Gloria)
LAB Commission / World Premiere
m(Other)s: Hudson Valley
Naturalized Borders Bard Farm Walk: November 21-22, 3:30pm; November 23, 1:30pm
Naturalized Borders Return to the Land Farm Ritual: November 24, 2:30-4:30
Naturalized Borders & m(Other)s (Installation): November 21, 6-9pm; November 22, 6-9:30pm; November 23, 1-9:30pm; November 24, 1-8pm
LAB Commission / World Premiere
Weis Atrium, Fisher Center
and Bard Farm
Free

Naturalized Borders (to Gloria):

“The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” — Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987.
 
Naturalized Borders (to Gloria) is the first iteration of multifaceted, interactive land art and community-based project, including a 72-foot long line of indigenous crops (corn, beans and squash, known as “the three sisters”) planted in the shape of the US/Mexican border line on the Bard Farm; the harvesting, sharing, and clearing of the crop and land; a mobile paleta cart-turned-drawing studio upon which persons of any background are invited to memorialize real or imagined borders; and the documentation and archive from various stages of the project. Continuing the legacy of Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldua, the work seeks to unearth histories of immigration, labor rights, borders, land sovereignty and systemic oppression. 

Naturalized Borders (to Gloria) was created in collaboration with the Bard Farm (Rebecca Yoshino, Farm Coordinator) and The Center for the Study of Land, Air and Water, with the participation of students Mary Elizabeth Klein Meghan Mercier, Kaitlyn McClelland, Gabrielle Reyes, Alexi Piirimae, Midori Barandiaran, and Austin Sumlin.

m(Other)s: Hudson Valley:

m(Other)s: Hudson Valley is a series of video portraits of immigrant women, both documented and undocumented, holding their first-generation children. Inspired by the “hidden mother” photographs common from the advent of photography up until the 1920s, a standard practice requiring the mother to hold the child still while being covered and remaining invisible in the interest of foregrounding the child, these portraits seek to connect the political and social situation of women at the turn of the 20th century with the invisibility of the labor of immigrant women today. 

Reading Room

The Where No Wall Remains Reading Room
Organized by Curatorial Fellows Sukanya Baskar CCS ‘20, Thea Spittle CCS ‘19, and Triston Tolentino ‘18
Fridays, September 27 through November 15, 1 pm-4 pm
November 21-24 during Biennial open hours
New Annandale House 
Free and open to the public

The resources from the Biennial syllabus can be accessed at the Reading Room at the New Annandale House on the Bard College Campus. Open to the public, the Reading Room provides a space for individual and communal engagement with the discourse of Where No Wall Remains.

A schedule of special events at the Reading Room, including public talks, readings, and screenings, will be announced and posted here and on the blog.
 
The Reading Room is presented in association with Bard’s Center for Experimental Humanities.
 
New Annandale House, Home of the Center for Experimental Humanities
1399 Annandale Road
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12571

Funding Credits

Where No Wall Remains is supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Thendara Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education, and The Vilcek Foundation. Live Arts Bard is made possible by generous support from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council and Advisory Board of the Fisher Center at Bard.

About Tania El Khoury

Tania El Khoury is a live artist creating installations and performances focused on audience interactivity and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. Her work has been translated and presented in multiple languages in 32 countries across six continents, in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars to the Mediterranean Sea. She is a 2019 Soros Art Fellow and the recipient of the 2017 International Live Art Prize, the 2011 Total Theatre Innovation Award and Arches Brick Award. Tania holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2018, a survey of her work entitled ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury took place in Philadelphia organized by Bryn Mawr College and FringeArts Festival and funded by the Pew Centre for Arts and Heritage. Tania is affiliated with Forest Fringe in the UK and is the co-founder of the urban research and performance collective Dictaphone Group in Lebanon. 

About Gideon Lester

Gideon Lester is Artistic Director for Theater & Dance at the Fisher Center at Bard, where he founded Live Arts Bard, the Fisher Center’s residency and commissioning program for the performing arts.  A Tony Award-winning artistic director, dramaturg, creative producer, and educator, he is also Director of Bard’s undergraduate Theater and Performance Program. From 2010 till 2018 he was co-curator of Crossing the Line, a cross-disciplinary arts festival in New York City. From 1997 to 2009 he worked at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as Acting Artistic Director, Associate Artistic Director, and Resident Dramaturg. He also chaired Harvard University’s MFA program in dramaturgy at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, and has taught at Harvard College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

About the Artists

At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (part 2)

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b.1983) work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice, largely research based, is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality, and investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances. Solo presentations include Kunstverein Hamburg (Hamburg), Krannert Art Museum (Illinois), Alt Bomonti (Istanbul), ICA (Philadelphia), Office for Contemporary Art (Oslo), Carroll/Fletcher (London), Akademie Der Kuenste Der Welt (Cologne), New Art Exchange (Nottingham) and Delfina Foundation (London). Selected group exhibitions include Kunstgebaude Stuttgart (Stuttgart), Portikus (Frankfurt),  The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), SeMa Biennale (Seoul), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Museum Of Modern Art (Warsaw), ICA (London), the 12^th Sharjah Biennale, the 31^st São Paulo Biennial; the 10^th Gwangju Biennale; the 13th Istanbul Biennial; the 6th Jerusalem Show; HomeWorks 5 (Beirut); and Palestine c/o Venice at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They were fellows at Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne in 2013 and artists in residence at the Delfina Foundation, London in 2009. They are recipients of the Sharjah Biennale Prize in 2015 and The Abraaj Prize in 2016. Their most recent publication And Yet My Mask Is Powerful is published by Printed Matter in New York. 
Muqata'a is a musician and MC who creates music from sampled material, field recordings and electronic devices. The results range from hip-hop beats to glitch. His albums include Inkanakuntu (2018), Dubt Al-Ghubar (2017), La Lisana Lah(2017) and Hayawan Nateq (2013). Muqata’a is also the co-founder of the Ramallah Underground collective (2003–2009) and Tashweesh, a sound and image performance group in collaboration with artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.  He has composed several international and local film scores, as well as dance theater performances, and is now working on different collaborative and solo projects. Upcoming and recent performances include Sonar Festival (Barcelona), Boiler Room (Ramallah), CTM Festival (Berlin).  His most recent album Inkanakuntu is out on Discrepant records.
Menu of Dis/appearance
Palestine Hosting Society is a live art project that explores traditional food culture in Palestine, especially those that are on the verge of disappearing. The project brings these dishes back to life over dinner tables, walks, and various interventions. Palestine Hosting Society is founded and run by artist and cook Mirna Bamieh, as an extension of her art practice that often looks at the politics of disappearance, and memory production. Mirna creates artworks that unpack social concerns and limitations in contemporary political dilemmas, and reflect on the conditions that characterize Palestinian communities. To date, Palestine Hosting Society has created several projects, including Family Dinners, Our Nabulsi Table, Our Jerusalem Table, A Wondering in Flavors: The Old City of Jerusalem, a table, a tour and a map, The Wheat Feast, The Edible Wild Plants of Palestine Table, Our Gaza Table, and Food Walks. After an intensive research period for each project, the collective creates a menu that is shared over one long table for 40-60 guests, with dishes carefully selected to create spaces of reflection upon socio-political realities, attitudes, and historical practices, and even the suppressed elements of history.
Night

Ali Chahrour is a choreographer, dancer, and a graduate of the theatre department at The Lebanese University. Influenced by techniques from several European countries, he studies contemporary dance in the Arab world and movement that is related to society’s memory and its local circumstances that contribute to creating a research about  a local quality contemporary dance, whose techniques and problematics are inspired by its surroundings and history. His work examines the relationship between dance and the body, and the religion and the sacred, relying on the Islamic and Shiite religious rituals and practices, especially in his recent trilogy: Fatmeh, Leila’s Death and May he rise and smell the fragrance. 

FITO

Rudi Goblen is a writer, dancer, actor, and music producer. He was commissioned by Miami Light Project to create the solo dance theatre performances Insanity Isn’t, Fair Welling, and PET. He is also known as an acclaimed B-Boy. Alongside his award-winning crew Flipside Kings, he has toured internationally, competing, adjudicating, and teaching. Rudi is a member of Teo Castellanos/D-Projects, a contemporary dance/theater company that fuses world arts and culture while examining social issues through performance. With D-Projects, Rudi toured internationally in Scratch & Burn, a meditation on the war in Iraq; and FAT BOY, a project exposing world hunger amid American consumerism and waste. Rudi is a recipient of the Future Aesthetics Artist Re-grant (FAAR) funded by the Ford Foundation in conjunction with the Future Aesthetics Cohort, the Miami-Dade County’s Choreographers Award (2013, 2018), and a FEAST Miami Grant for his book of poems and artwork A Bag of Halos and Horns. He has trained and worked with DV8 Physical Theater, Cirque Du Soleil, and is a founding member of Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre. He has released five instrumental albums, and is currently attending the Yale School of Drama for an MFA in Playwriting.

letter to a friend

Emily Jacir’s work— as poetic as it is political and biographical—investigates histories of colonization, exchange, translation, transformation, resistance, and movement. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures, and in-depth research. She has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and deeply invested in creating alternative spaces of knowledge production internationally. She is the Founding Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research and was recently the curator the Young Artist of the Year Award 2018 at the A. M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah, We Shall Be Monsters. Jacir is the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2008); the Alpert Award (2011) from the Herb Alpert Foundation; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016-17); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat il Funun, Amman (2014-2015); Beirut Art Center (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009).

Cultural Exchange Rate

Tania El Khoury (See Above)

Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94)

Jason de León is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit research-art-education collective focused on documenting and understanding the violent social process of clandestine movement between Latin America and the United States. He is the co-creator of the exhibition State of Exception/Estado de Excepción that focused on the material traces of undocumented movement across the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. His first book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail was published by the University of California Press in 2015 and was most recently awarded the J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research. De León is currently writing his second book (tentatively titled Soldiers and Kings), a photoethnography about the daily lives of Honduran smugglers crossing Mexico. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow.

Naturalized Borders (to Gloria) & m(Other)s: Hudson Valley

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. He holds an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. Rojas identifies as a NAFTA baby, (born in Mexico City, spent his formative artistic years in Canada, and is currently based in Chicago). As a queer latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia, as well as institutions like The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, and The Botin Foundation. He is represented by Jose de la Fuente in Spain, and Gallleriapiu in Italy.
 

The 2019 LightField Arts exhibit, Photo + Synthesis, features Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse among seven artists selected to make or exhibit work focusing on the Hudson River Valley and climate change. The exhibition will be on view at Hudson Hall in Hudson, New York, October 12 to December 21, 2019.

The show draws a geographic line around the Hudson River Valley. In part this is to prompt a fresh look at the mythology of the Valley’s art, ecology, and history, but through the lens of our Anthropocene era. Works on exhibit include contemporary landscape photography, mid-19th century landscape painting, and data visualization art about tree ring science.

Participating artists contribute newly commissioned and existing work. The roster includes: Sarah Bird, Christopher Griffith, Genevieve Hoffman, Tanya Marcuse, Daniel McCabe, Laura Plageman, and paintings by Hudson River School artists. Alongside these works, LightField exhibits the art produced in its annual Young Photographers Workshop.