2265

Closing Reception

Adelita Husni-Bey & Amanda Parmer in conversation

Thursday, June 1st, 7:00-9:00pm

Please join us for a closing reception and conversation with artist Adelita Husni-Bey and Vera List Center for Art and Politics Curator, Amanda Parmer, on deferred notions of community, radical pedagogy, habitability, the question of origin and a trip to Mars. 

*Tell me about your hands
*Tell me about what happens when you are hungry
*How long ago has the Perpetual War ended? Has it ended?
*Teach me how to say I love you with this technology?
*How does this society ‘know’?
*Where do they keep the things they ‘know’?

These are some of the questions that structured a workshop produced in collaboration with Authoring Action, a group of teen authors headed by writer Nathan Ross Freeman and held at the South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in January 2015. The workshop explored capitalist colonialist futures and the prospect of populating Mars through writing exercises and experimental pedagogical practice. The resulting 2 channel installation displays both the performance crafted by members of Authoring Action in collaboration with the artist and parts of the workshop, both held in an empty theater. A surreal to and fro across deserts and poisonus landscapes, the promise of digital sociality through genetic modification and a ‘perpetual war’ structure the performance, while the workshop screen centers on the ways we understand words such as development vs. imperialism, or uninhabited vs. empty and the socio-historical lineage of these concepts from the ‘outset’ to the year 2265. 

Adelita Husni-Bey (Italy-1985) lives in New York. She stages workshops and produces publications, radio broadcasts, archives and exhibitions focused on using collectivist and non-competitive pedagogical models within the framework of urban studies. In her 10 years practicing as both an artist and a pedagogue Adelita has worked with activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken word poets, students and teachers on unpacking the complexity of collectivity. To make good what can never be made good: what we owe each other. Recent solo exhibitions include: A Wave in the Well, Sursock Museum, Beirut, 2016, Movement Break, Kadist foundation, 2015, Playing Truant, Gasworks, 2012. She has participated in The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 2016, Ennesima, Triennale di Milano, 2015, Undiscovered Worlds, the High Line, 2015, Really Useful Knowledge, Reina Sofia museum, 2014, Utopia for Sale?, MAXXI museum, 2014 and has held workshops and lectures at ESAD Grenoble, 2016, The New School, 2015, Sandberg Institute, 2015, Museo del 900, 2013, Temple University, 2013, Birkbeck University, 2011 amongst other spaces. She is a 2012 Whitney Independent Study Program fellow and will be representing Italy at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Amanda Parmer's writing, archival and curatorial work focuses on developing community through pedagogy and our elected affinities. She was a 2009-10 Whitney Independent Study Program Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellow and is currently the Curator at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and co-curator of Maria Thereza Alves' Seeds of Change: Botany and Colonization. She has presented exhibitions, programs and events in collaboration with e-flux, the New School, The New York Armory and Volta Shows, The Kitchen, and Cleopatra's, Brooklyn and Berlin. She has most recently published "Yoko Ono Shaking the Sign" for the Henie Onstad Kunstcenter's A Pendaflex, "Tunisian-Lampedusian Migrants as Commodities" for The Ocean After Nature organized by Independent Curators International; "Our Human Entanglements with Corporeal and Terrestrial Grounds" for Marie Kølbæk Iversen's If the Earth Were a Body Borders Would be Wounds; and "Interval" for the Dictionary of the Possible. In 2014 she initiated Parmer, a curatorial project looking at matrilineal relations that has taken place at 464 Quincy, Abrons Arts Center and Sunview Luncheonet. 

Image detail: video still, 2265, 2 channel video installation, HD video, color, sound, 2015. Courtesy MILLER, New York and Galleria Laveronica, Modica.