What Knots Knot Knots

Transart Institute is excited to present “What Knots Knot Knots”—a creative research symposium.

“What Knots Knot Knots” is an invitation to think about the ways in which knotting and unknotting are active practices that build and shape creative research, revealing attachments between/with materiality, epistemologies, ecologies and socio-political affinities and tensions. Thinking about Andean khipus (lengths of knotted fibre) as a record keeping device and a form of writing, we will consider knots as keepers of memory, points of contact and entanglement, and sites for the thickening of attachments towards world-building. Through talks, reading, performance, video, discussion and sound contibutions, participants will consider Haraway’s entreaty that “it matters…what knots knot knots.”

Participating artists:
Zachary Fabri is an interdisciplinary artist engaged in lens-based media, language systems, and public space, often complicating the boundaries of studio research, and social practice. This context specificity often yields work that includes design, drawing, photography, video, and installation. He is the recipient of awards that include The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize.

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), Notes on Mother Tongues (UDP, 2019), and more recently, The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, LitHub, and Guernica, among others.

Coleman Collins is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who explores the ways that gradual, iterative processes can have outsized effects over time. His work often identifies migration patterns, technological developments, and relationships of debt and obligation as the modes through which these processes are enacted.

Jesse Harrod is an artist whose practice explores embodiment, gender, and sexual identity. Working with multiple media forms and materials, Harrod’s work builds on herstories of 1970s feminist art to offer queer imaginations of the body, from the abject and the grotesque to the humorous. Her practice most centrally contributes to a broader collective effort to redefine the meaning of queer aesthetic form.

The Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO) is a collaborative organism that works to imagine and realize an equitable multispecies future. IQECO builds on the theoretical framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationality. Guided by queer and feminist theory and decolonial thinking, we work to undo dangerously destructive human-centric hierarchies—or even flip them—to look at the critical importance of things happening invisibly; underground and out of sight. Nicolas Baird co-directs the Institute of Queer Ecology and is an artist, evolutionary biologist, and dancer based in New York City. His work focuses on the relationships between bodies and their landscapes, coevolution, mutability, and multispecies empathy. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in evolutionary biology.

Zeerak Ahmed / SLOWSPIN is a multidisciplinary artist. Through sound sculptures, installations, and performance works, she interrogates notions of identity, memory, migration, and longing. Ahmed composes uniquely fragile sound collages, by combining Eastern Classical traditions with ambient soundscapes and experimental music. She is presently archiving the sonic and intellectual histories of female folk music traditions from South Asia, drawing new visual forms from the poetic and melodic content of her ancestral body of sound. Exploring new ways of listening, composing, and performing the sounding body, her work addresses critical immaterial art.

Dr. Allison Geremia is a professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts and a practicing jeweler. Allison works in a jewelry format in order to construct and deconstruct social narrative. Her work interrogates the ways in which jewelry delineates social behaviors, with a particular focus on the notion of projection and the exchanges that happen between the maker, wearer, viewer, and object.

Susie Quillinan is the curator for What Knots Knot Knots. She is the Head of Masters Studies at Transart Institute, as well as a learner and curatorial researcher based in Lima, Peru. She develops publications, residencies, encuentros, exhibitions and study programming interdependently with artists, curators, researchers, collectives, places, institutions and other learners. Her current research focuses on practices of collective reading and study, weaving as methodology and a curatorial ethics of accompaniment.

Contact: susie [at] transart.org. What Knots Knot Knots symposium.

Final call for MFA/PhD Pre-flight Scholarships deadline: November 15. More info.