Hallie Ayres speaks to Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts. The conversation was scheduled following the opening of Aliza Shvarts: Purported at Art In General on February 20, 2020.
Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her current work focuses on testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age. She received her BA from Yale University and PhD in Performance Studies from NYU. Shvarts was a 2014 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2014–15 Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2017 Critical Writing Fellow at Recess Art, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015–19). Current and upcoming solo exhibitions include Purported at Art in General, which surveys the last decade of her practice; and Potfuch, a new commission on view later this year at A.I.R.
Emily Apter is Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of Comparative Literature at New York University. Her books include: Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018), Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). She is currently working on a project (What is Just Translation?) which takes up questions of translation and law, sexual safety, and transmediality. Her essays have appeared in October, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Comparative Literature and Art Journal.