April 21, 2018, 2pm
55 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor
New York NY
An Index to Art & Politics: 25 Years of Vera List Center Fellowships hosts a series of intimate conversations with and among our fellows whose work and ideas have been threaded through the Vera List Center, informing and informed by the Center over the past quarter of a century. The public dialogues evolve from private exchanges between the fellows that happened throughout the spring where they considered the interrelatedness of their individual fellowship projects with their current practice. The live event is complemented by a reader, an index that records and accounts for the generative engagements that undergird this symposium. Collectively they conjure the meaning, importance, and necessity of the interdisciplinary nature of our fellowship projects today.
The index always comes at a juncture; it points to a thing but is not the thing itself; it is a tool and instrument of activation. As we celebrate the 25th Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellowship Anniversary on April 21, 2018, we consider the ways in which the Vera List Center Fellowship program is, in itself, an index—an initiative activated by the fellows who use local and hyperspecific instances of contemporary culture to speak to larger aesthetic, cultural, economic, and socio-political concerns. These indices yield specific questions such as those on resistance to and use of institutions, how to not speak the language of power, being a fugitive in a safe space, and protocols that sidestep decisions of power that culminate in a “manual of existence.”
The Vera List Center Fellows participating in this afternoon of public conversations, include: Wendy Ewald, Casey Gollan, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Bouchra Khalili, Lorraine O’Grady, Alexander Provan, Robert Sember, Victoria Sobel, and Jonathan Weinberg.
Related Fellowship Events
Wendy Ewald: Works, Projects, Collaborations 1975-1996: April 19
Steven Kasher Gallery, 515 West 26 Street, New York
Wendy Ewald has traveled the globe as part of a sustained and evolving artistic and educational project, addressing the conceptual, formal, and narrative aspects of photography with her students, as well as making portraits of them. Wendy Ewald: Works, Projects, Collaborations 1975-1996 begins with her first extended collaboration in Kentucky in 1975 and includes projects from Mexico (1991), India (1989-1991), the Netherlands (1996), Colombia (1982-1985), South Africa (1992) and Morocco (1995) extending into the work that was developed, during her Vera List Center Fellowship in 2000.
His Master’s Vox: Maria Chavez, Alexander Provan, Josh Tonsfeldt: April 19
Triple Canopy, 264 Canal Street, 3W, New York
Alexander Provan’s Measuring Device with Organs, is a sound work developed by Provan during his Vera List Center Fellowship (2013-2015) and published by Triple Canopy as an LP. The recording narrates a listening test and reveals how we are subjected to the edicts of anonymous experts: each time we open an MP3 or MOV, play a record or CD, we effectively universalize their tastes—and suppress the sensory experiences of millions of others. This event includes performative responses from Maria Chavez, a sound artist and DJ, and Josh Tonsfeldt, marking the publication of Alexander Provan’s LP Measuring Device with Organs.
Jill Magid: The Proposal: April 22–25
Tribeca Film Festival
During Jill Magid’s Vera List Center Fellowship (2013-2015) she developed The Proposal which focuses on bringing together the personal and private archives of the legacy of Mexican architect and Pritzker Prize-winner Luis Barragán (1902–1988). The project has taken the form of an exhibition, publication and now is premieres as a film at Tribeca Film Festival. This spellbinding documentary recounts her unlikely journey into a legal quagmire and her attempt to question the inaccessibility of Barragán’s work.
