CONVERSATIONS
PUBLIC FORUMS
Denniston Hill commissions, produces and presents a wide range of public events in New York City and at our campus in Sullivan County that bring together artists, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and cultural leaders to discuss and interrogate the most pressing social issues of our time.
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October 2020
ABOUT THE EVENT:
This event took place virtually on Instagram Live.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
AMERICAN ARTIST (DH ALUMNI 2018) is an artist whose work considers black labor and visibility within networked life. Artist is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and part-time lecturer at The New School. Recent solo exhibitions include My Blue Window, 2019, Queens Museum, NY and I'm Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die), 2019, Koenig & Clinton, NY.
FRED MOTEN teaches black studies, critical theory and poetics in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is the author and co-author of many books, the latest of which is All that Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019).
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January 2020ABOUT THE EVENT:
Curator and scholar Oluremi C. Onabanjo (DH ALUMNI 2019) was in conversation with renowned artist, Marilyn Nance about her photographic archive of FESTAC 77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos in 1977. Nance photographed the month-long festival, creating 1500 images of the historic celebration of Pan-African art and culture.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
Throughout the course of her career, visual artist MARILYN NANCE has produced photographs of unique moments in the cultural history of the U.S. and the African Diaspora and culminating in an archive of images of late 20th century African American life. A two-time finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography for her body of work on African American spiritual culture in America, Nance has photographed the Black Indians of New Orleans, an African village in South Carolina, churches in Brooklyn, and the first Black church in America. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Library of Congress, and has been published in The World History of Photography, History of Women in Photography, and The Black Photographers Annual. Nance is the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Photography (2000 and 1989), Nonfiction Literature (1993), and the New York State Council of the Arts Individual Artists Grant (1987). A graduate of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (Tisch School of the Arts), Nance holds a B.F.A. in Communications Graphic Design from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
OLUREMI C. ONABANJO is a curator and scholar of photography and the arts of Africa. The former Director of Exhibitions and Collections for The Walther Collection, she has organized exhibitions in Europe, North America, and Africa. She co-curated Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography (2017), and edited its accompanying publication (Steidl, 2017), which was shortlisted for an ICP Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research (2018) and named “One of the Best Photo Books of 2017” by The New York Times. Onabanjo lectures internationally on photography and curatorial practice and has contributed to catalogs and photo books published by 10x10 Photobooks, the American Federation of Arts, Aperture, Autograph ABP, The Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Walther Collection amongst others. Onabanjo is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Columbia University and during Spring 2019, was a Visiting Critic in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University and a BA in African Studies from Columbia University.
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December 2019ABOUT THE EVENT:
For this evening organized in partnership with Eyebeam and The Laundromat Project, Pelenakeke Brown (DH ALUMNI 2019) and artist Yo-Yo Lin shared their practices in excavating, gathering, and investigating the archive of their living bodies. From looking at medical histories to daily experience, Pelenakeke and Yo-Yo examined the nuances of their lived and living experience through process-driven, embodied tactics: mixing data-tracking with drawing/journaling, and medical observations with movement scores and poetry. In conversation with each other and the audience, the artists reflected on the similarities and differences of these multidisciplinary modes of art-making–considering their methodologies as crip, intersectional tactics that can be both creative process and tools for survival/being.The evening culminated with two participatory writing and embodiment exercises led by the artists for group reflection.
This event also served as a celebration for the release of two new publications by the artists: Pelenakeke Brown’s Grasp + release, a collection of black-out poems that reveal new narratives within her medical archive that exist as choreographic scores, and Yo-Yo Lin’s Resilience Journal, an analog tracking tool dedicated to visualizing the overlooked, soft data in our lives.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS: Pelenakeke Brown is an interdisciplinary, afakasi Samoan, disabled, immigrant artist from Aotearoa (New Zealand). In 2019, Brown received a Dance/NYC’s Disability. Dance. Artistry. Residency and was selected as curator for the Artists of Color Council Movement Research at the Judson Church Spring season. She is an alum of the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and The Laundromat Project. She has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Denniston Hill, and Ana Pekapeka Studio, as well as exhibited works in San Francisco, New York, London, and Auckland. Brown’s non-fiction work is published in The James Franco Review, the Hawai‘i Review, Apogee Journal, and Movement Research Performance Journal. She has created projects with Movement Research, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.Yo-Yo Lin is a Taiwanese-American, interdisciplinary media artist who explores the possibilities of human connection and embodiment in the context of emerging technologies. She uses intelligent projection/lighting, digital and hand-drawn animation, interactive objects, and lush sound design to create meditative 'memoryscapes.' Her work often examines human perception as a vehicle for self-knowledge and community growth. Most recently an art resident at Eyebeam, Yo-Yo is researching and developing methodologies in reclaiming and processing chronic health trauma. She is currently developing a digital and physical toolkit that seeks to be an expressive resource and self-sustainable living archive of chronically ill and disabled bodyminds. She has shown new media works at international art galleries (Human Resources, Lincoln Center, La Corte Contemporanea), music festivals (Coachella, Panorama), film festivals (New York Film Festival, SXSW), and public art venues. She acts as the art director of THE FAMILY, an independent creative studio based in Brooklyn, NY.
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November 2019
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s (DH ALUMNI 2017) lecture-performance, titled “July 1, 1983,” explored themes of exodus within the context of archiving hyperlocal histories of her hometown, East Palo Alto. With an attention to exodus as both a literal as well as figurative movement and dispersal, Rasheed considered how Black migratory patterns trouble notions of coherent and centralized archives. As she worked toward a larger body of work about the histories (and futures) of her hometown of East Palo Alto, this lecture performance and discussion functioned as a quiet unraveling of her research directions.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED is a Brooklyn-based learner from East Palo Alto, CA. In her work, she inquiries about the deeply intertwined spiritual, socio-political, ecological, and cognitive processes of learning/unlearning. She is interested in how proclamations of certainty, containment, and coherence assert themselves through language, institutional structures, and architecture.Rasheed makes her inquiries visible through an ecosystem of iterative and provisional projects including sprawling, Xerox-based “architecturally-scaled collages” (frieze magazine, winter 2018); interactive publications; large-scale text banner installations; digital archives; lecture-performances; library interventions; poems/poetic gestures; and other forms yet to be determined. Rasheed has exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale, ICA Philadelphia, Pinchuk Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, New Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Kitchen, among others. She is the author of two artist books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, forthcoming 2019).
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September 2019
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagain (DH ALUMNI 2012) are a Berlin-based collaborative visual artists from Argentina, and Aimé Iglesias Lukin, an Argentinian art historian and curator, were in conversation to discuss Zinny Maidagan's most recent work Misky Mayu. In 1990 Juan Maidagan, along with four friends, began a three-month journey along the Misky Mayu (in Quechua), Dulce (in Spanish) River, in one of the least populated areas of Argentina. Almost thirty years later, Juan and Dolores revisited the area and transformed the original hours of footage into a new art project opening at on September 13th, 2019 at Henrique Faria Fine Arts New York gallery.In their large scale, site-specific public art interventions, the artists Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan work across disciplines to analyze the "ideological, physical, and historical conditions of the site, and to promote a reflection on how the conditions of a given site alter the work that is exhibited there, and vice versa." In conversation with art historian and curator Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Zinny Maidagan explored how these themes have evolved over several recent installations and in their current exhibition, Misky Mayu: Zinny Maidagan, at Henrique Faria Fine Art - New York.
This event coincided with the the duo’s first exhibition in New York since "Where The Lion Goes Through,” a solo show at Art in General in 2000, invited at that time by Alfredo Jaar.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
ZINNY MAIDAGAN produces art for the public space: for Graz City Hall in Austria, for the Bibliotheque Royale in Brussels, recently they won two important Public Art Competitions for permanent work in Germany: for the IG Farben Haus Goethe University Frankfurt and for Fulda University of Applied Sciences. In 2017 they were commissioned a long-term work for LACMA façade, as part of Getty Foundation’s PST, in this frame they were awarded in 2015 a full Research Residency at 18th SAC. Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan are former fellows of the Whitney Museum ISP and recipients of the prestigious DAAD Berlin Artist Program Award, John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award and Pollock Krasner Fellowship Award. Their work has been featured internationally, in venues as the 50th Venice Biennial, the 2nd Sevilla Biennial, the 5th Berlin Biennial, the 8th Gwangju Biennial, 1st Cartagena Biennial and in institutions as MIT, The Generali Foundation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, with solo exhibitions at The New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Museo Rufino Tamayo Mexico City, Lund Konsthall, DAAD Galerie-Berlin, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, among others.AIMÉ IGLESIAS LUKIN is an art historian and curator. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, she lives in New York since 2011. She is finishing her Ph.D. in Art History at Rutgers University with a dissertation titled “This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York 1965-1975,” that maps the international networks through which migrant artists from along the Hemisphere created communities in the metropolis, and analyzes topics of travel, exile, and identity in these artists’ artworks. She completed her MA at The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and her undergraduate studies in Art History at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her research received grants by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Terra and Mellon Foundations, and the Peter C. Marzio Award from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Her work was been presented at conferences internationally and published by prestigious museums and academic journals. She curated exhibitions independently in museums and cultural centers, and previously worked at the Modern and Contemporary Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Institute for Studies in Latin American Art and Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires.
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August 2019
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Denniston Hill and ICI co-presented Morehshin Allahyari: Digital Colonialism. This program was the first iteration of ICI's two-part series, New Media Intimacies, which brought together practitioners who engage with new media and technology within the confines of social practice and/or human interaction.Morehshin Allahyari (DH ALUMNI 2019), looked critically at the political and social underpinnings of the everyday, examining human relations through the lens of the digital. Allahyari was specifically interested in what she has coined “digitial colonialism,” the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations. For the first half of this event, Allahyari spoke to the concept of digital colonialism and the way in which it influenced her practice at the time and the latter half of the event was a participatory workshop among the audience.
This presentation continued the shared engagement between Denniston Hill and ICI, partners in the New York region to think together about shared ideas.
This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, writer, and educator. She was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. She thinks about technology as a philosophical toolset to reflect on objects and as a poetic means to document our personal and collective lives and struggles in the 21st century. Morehshin is the co-author of The 3D Additivist Cookbook in collaboration with writer/artist Daniel Rourke. Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world includingVenice Biennale di Archittectura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Tate Modern, Queens Museum, Pori Museum, Powerhouse Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst. She has been an artist in residence at BANFF Centre (2013), Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (2015), Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco (2015), the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research in association with Transmediale, Berlin (2016), Eyebeam’s one year Research Residency (2016-2017) in NYC, Pioneer Works (2018), and Harvest Works (2018). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera, among others.She is the recipient of the leading global thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Her 3D Additivist Manifesto video is in the collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and recently she has been awarded major commissions by Rhizome, New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Liverpool Biennale, and FACT to work on developing different components of her current project She Who Sees The Unknown.
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May 2019
ABOUT THE EVENT:
A workshop with Autumn Knight (DH ALUMNI 2017) and Amy L. Powell in celebration of their recent publication Autumn Knight: In Rehearsal.As artists are increasingly reflecting on modes of institutional knowledge and production to make their work, the role of the curator is shifting. This workshop thought through how these changes have shaped artist-curator dynamics, engagement, and relationship to institutions and community; as well as possibilities for curators and artists to work together to create contexts for performance in museums without dedicated performance departments.
This program was presented by ICI in collaboration with Denniston Hill, and continued ICI’s engagement with organizations and individual partners in the New York region to think together about our shared investments.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
AUTUMN KNIGHT is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including DiverseWorks, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Crystal Bridges Museum, and Krannert Art Museum. Knight has been an artist in residence with Denniston Hill (2017) and most recently Triangle Arts Association (2019).
AMY L. POWELL is curator of modern and contemporary art at Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research engages contemporary art with a commitment to university art museums as sites for knowledge production and experimentation. Her exhibitions at KAM include And yet my mask is powerful with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Autumn Knight: In Rehearsal, Attachment, Time / Image, and Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? Previously Cynthia Woods Mitchell Curatorial Fellow at Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, she organized solo projects with Zineb Sedira, Clarissa Tossin, Anna Campbell, and Antena (poets/translators/interpreters Jen Hofer and John Pluecker). Her work has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she earned a Ph.D. in art history in 2012.
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January 2019
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Tarik Kiswanson (DH ALUMNI 2018), a Paris-based visual artist of Palestinian descent, and Jesi Khadivi, a Berlin-based curator and writer, were in conversation to discuss Tarik's practice within a post-Diasporic context.Jesi Khadivi writes: “The pursuit of closeness, of coming closer, permeates the poetic logic of the artist Tarik Kiswanson’s writing: both in its structure and in its exploration of the human condition. Whether through windows or screens, the world that Kiswanson creates in his poetry is one in thrall to constant paroxysms of expansion and contraction. A world so close that you could carry it within your body, yet so vast that it can only be experienced through connection, in communion with forces that at times seem to be working against you.”
Tarik himself describes his work—which encompasses sculpture, writing, performance, sound, and video—as being “the border, the window between the iris and the world outside.”
The window is less a demarcation between two opposed realms than a portal—a space between. This dynamic interstitial space nurtures his practice and animates his reflections on the human condition. all windows of my rooms let me see and let all others see me used the motifs of the mirror and the window as starting points to mark a new chapter in our ongoing conversation about the themes of rootlessness, regeneration, disintegration, hybridity, and renewal that have persisted through collaborations on multiple exhibition projects, exchanges of writing, and marathon WhatsApp chats.
This talk is presented with support from Dadelus Foundation.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
TARIK KISWANSON has developed a distinctive conceptual language that evokes notions of rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal, all of which are recurring themes in his oeuvre. Born in Halmstad, Sweden, where his family exiled from Palestine in the 1980’s, his multi-faceted practice evinces an engagement with the poetics of métissage: a means of writing and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts. His practice examines questions of displacement and interstitiality that specifically relate to the context of what is lost, and what is gained, in the second generation of migration. His various bodies of work can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual “families,” each exploring variations on themes like refraction, multiplication, disintegration, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language.Kiswanson received his MFA from École National Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris (2014) and BFA from Central Saint Martins - University of the Arts London (2010). He has recently presented his work at Lafayette Anticipations (2018), Fondation Ricard (2018) and the Gwangju Biennial (2018). Upcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a major new commissioned work for Performa 2019, and the Ural Biennial in Ekaterinburg, Russia.
JESI KHADIVI is an independent curator, writer, and editor based in Berlin where she directs PORCINO, an exhibition space founded by the artist David Horvitz. Khadivi curated Tarik Kiswanson’s solo exhibition come, come, come of age at Fondation Ricard in 2018 and in that same year contributed an essay to his first book of poetry As Deep as I Could Remember, As Far as I Could See. She has curated projects at venues such as PS120, Berlin; carlier | gebauer, Berlin; and the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in numerous artist monographs and publications such as Frieze, Fillip, FlashArt, Kaleidoscope, Ibraaz, and The Brooklyn Rail.
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May 2018
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Carlos Motta, Itamar Mann, and Laura Raicovich gathered at Dedalus Foundation for a discussion organized by Denniston Hill to address today’s pressing questions of culture, migration, identity, and authority. They used Carlos Motta’s poignant and powerful recent project at the Stededlijk Museum in the Netherlands, The Crossing, as a case study in the ways art can reframe personal narratives and uncover important social and political complexities. The project comprises eleven video portraits of LGBTQI refugees who tell their stories of departures from their homelands and experiences in the Netherlands. They are tales of displacement, humiliation, xeno-, trans-, and homophobia, as well as pride and self-realization. Mann, as a scholar of international law and human rights, Raicovich, as a writer and former director of the Queens Museum, and Motta as an artist, each brought to bear their own specific perspectives on how art can shift the public discourse on such an urgent global subject.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
CARLOS MOTTA is an artist whose work engages with histories of queer culture to insist that the politics of sex and gender represent an opportunity to articulate definite positions against social and political injustice. In 2017 his exhibitions included: a career survey at Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín; and solo exhibitions at Stedelijk Art Museum, Amsterdam; and Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional, Bogotá. In 2016 he had solo exhibitions at: Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; MALBA—Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires; and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York. Motta participated in the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo in 2016. In 2017 he won The Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise and in 2014 the Future Generation Art Prize of the PinchukArtCentre. He was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2008), and has received grants from Art Matters (2008), NYSCA (2010), and the Creative Capital Foundation (2012).
ITAMAR MANN is an associate professor at the University of Haifa, Faculty of Law, where he teaches and researches in the areas of international law, political theory, human rights, migration and refugee law, and environmental law. His book Humanity at Sea: Maritime Migration and the Foundations of International Law was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. Alongside his academic work, Mann is a human rights practitioner and advocate, with particular experience in refugee and migrant rights, and is a legal advisor for the London-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN). He also co-chairs the interest group on migration law at the American Society of International Law.LAURA RAICOVICH is a writer and art worker based in New York City. Until recently she served as Director of the Queens Museum, and is currently co-curating (with Manon Slome) ‘Mel Chin: All Over the Place’ which opens this spring at various sites across New York City. Raicovich’s recent books include, as author, At the Lightning Field (Coffee House Press, 2017) and as co-editor, Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017).
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January 2018
ABOUT THE EVENT:
On her working relationship with artist Simone Leigh, Andrianna Campbell (DH ALUMNI 2017) said: “Sometimes I think Simone Leigh and I always have been in conversation. Several years ago, I contacted her when I was a Contributing Editor for Collaboration and its (Dis)contents, a book about artist collaborations published by The Courtauld Institute of Art. I decided to interview Leigh and Liz Magic Laser about their 2011 film Breakdown. Because the discussion had been so fluid and we wanted to continue roaming over ideas so key to our lives and to our parallel practices, Leigh then asked me to interview her for the Herb Alpert Award for Visual Art. It was 2016 and Leigh had had a stunning year. She received the Herb Alpert directly on the heels of the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She could have asked anyone to interview her, but she contacted me. Leigh and I share so much, a strong Jamaican heritage, a love of Maine, a deep knowledge of Zora Neale Hurston and yet ‘Years of Seeing Red’ will be our first one-on-one talk. Early last year, I curated the critically acclaimed exhibition Vanishing Points exploring the visibility and invisibility of identity in our proto-digital and digital ages. Included was a wall-size artist manifesto by Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, a collective founded by Leigh. A panel discussion with a few members of the group highlighted not only Leigh’s founding role, but also how she has acted as a mentor for now hundreds of black women artists. This discussion will focus on Leigh’s practice, on her formal and material interrogations as well as the pivotal role of black women in the face of much needed social justice.”This program is part of a collaboration between ICI and Denniston Hill’s Artist Residency program. It was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
SIMONE LEIGH incorporates sculpture, video, and installation, all informed by her ongoing exploration of black female subjectivity and ethnography. Her objects often employ materials and forms traditionally associated with African art; her performance-influenced installations create spaces where historical precedent and self-determination comingle. Through her investigations of visual overlaps between cultures, time periods, and geographies, she confronts and examines ideas of the female body, race, beauty, and community. Leigh is a recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize (2017), John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2016), Herb Alpert Award for Visual Art (2016), and A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art (2016). She has also been the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award (2013), Creative Capital Grant (2012), LMCC Michael Richards Award (2012), and Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Sculpture (2011). Recent projects and exhibitions include Trigger: Gender as a Tool and as a Weapon (2017) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Psychic Friends Network (2016) at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern, London; The Waiting Room (2016) at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Free People’s Medical Clinic (2014) a project commissioned by Creative Time; inHarlem, a public installation presented by The Studio Museum in Harlem at Marcus Garvey Park, New York; and a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.ANDRIANNA CAMPBELL is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specializes in art of the modern and contemporary period. Her doctoral research focuses on Norman Lewis and Abstract Expressionism. Alongside her scholarly research, she is the author of essays and reviews on contemporary art for Artforum, Art in America, Frieze and Mousse. In 2016, Campbell was a co-editor of Shift: A Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture and a special edition of the International Review of African American Art dedicated to Norman Lewis. Campbell is a founding co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal apricota. She has taught at Parsons, the New School for Design and Yale University. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including the Dean K. Harrison Fellowship, the Preservation of American Modernists Award, the Library Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Dia Art Foundation, the Dissertation Writing Fellowship at the New York Public Library, the CASVA Twelve-Month Chester Dale Fellowship from the National Gallery of Art for 2016-2017 and is a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Resident for 2018.
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November 2017
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Denniston Hill and the Dedalus Foundation presented a conversation between Autumn Knight (DH ALUMNI 2017), whose work is interested in Black interiority in relation to coerced public spectacle and Nana Adusei-Poku (DH ALUMNI 2014, 2015, 2019), a Ghanian- German scholar whose current work focuses on cultural shifts and afro-pessimist aesthetics in Black Cultures. The conversation is inspired by Knight’s new participatory performance series called Sanity TV, which is a fictional talk show that investigates the flexible boundaries of identity and psyche. Knight and Adusei-Poku will speak on the evolution of Sanity TV, and the influence of Harlem. Questions of the historical construction of norms in relationship to colonialism and gender as well as the still precarious position of Black subjects and subjectivities will be addressed. This conversation will explore themes of normativity, racialization, and performance as a space to push the boundaries between the ‘normal’ and the ‘insane’, the self and the other, the pessimistic and the hopeful. Sanity TV was presented as four episodes over the course of the Studio Museum Harlem Artists in Residence exhibition We Go as They.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
NANA ADUSEI-POKU (PhD) is an independent scholar, writer and educator as well as Guest Lecturer in Media Arts and Master Fine Arts at the University of the Arts, Zurich. She was Research Professor for Cultural Diversity from 2013-2014 and then for Visual Cultures 2015-2017 at the Hogeschool Rotterdam with affiliation to the Piet Zwart Institute and the Willem de Kooning Academy. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin for her thesis on post-black art as part of the Graduate program called “Gender as a category of Knowledge”, following degrees in African studies and gender studies at Humboldt University, and in media and communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Ghana, Legon; the London School of Economics; and Columbia University, New York.
Nana is immersed in the void, the abyss and sunken places and how those articulate themselves in texts, bodies, images and relations. The question "What are the conditions of our existence", which Stuart Hall asked, remain core to her journey and inspire her to embody and develop a decolonial pedagogical approach and to explore the performativity of nothingness and life"in the hold". Since 2015 she is co-founder of N+.She published the article “Post-Post-Black?” in Nka-Journal for Contemporary African Art and Catch me if you can! which is a critical reflection on the state of Diversity and Decolonisation in the Arts and Art education. In her most recent publication “On Being Present Where You Wish to Disappear,” Adusei-Poku questions the notion of nothingness, universality, and whiteness common in the contemporary art world.
AUTUMN KNIGHT is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, installation and text. Recent solo exhibitions include Karnnert Art Museum (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Art Pace (San Antonio, TX), and Project Row Houses (Houston, TX). She has been awarded an Artadia grant, and residencies at the Galveston Artist Residency, Milay Colony, Yamaguchi Institute of Contemporary Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and In-Situ-In-Place. Her work and performances have been included in group exhibitions at the Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, TX), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Betonville, AK), The New Museum (NY), and The Contemporary Art Museum Houston. She holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University, and a 2017 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. She was in residence fall 2017 at Denniston Hill.
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June 2017
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Denniston Hill and Dedalus Foundation presented a conversation between Adrienne Edwards (DH ALUMNI 2016), whose work focuses on artists of the African Diaspora and Global South, and Bessie-Award-winning Okwui Okpokwasili (DH ALUMNI 2016) a Nigerian-American artist who works across performance disciplines and genres. Exploring themes of memory and invisibility, Edwards and Okpokwasili talked about performance as a form of resistance and the black body as a site of protest. The conversation was inspired by Okpokwasili’s new work, Poor People’s TV Room—a meeting of dance, text, song, video and installation. The piece premiered earlier that year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and New York Live Arts. It was partly developed at Denniston Hill in collaboration with her partner Peter Born and draws on two historic Nigerian women-led resistance movements.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
ADRIENNE EDWARDS is Curator at Performa, Curator at Large at the Walker Art Center, and also a Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at New York University. Her scholarly and curatorial work focuses on artists of the African Diaspora and the Global South, including the Blackness in Abstraction exhibition and catalogue for Pace Gallery and 1:54 PERFORMS for the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair. For Performa, Edwards has curated programs, projects, and productions with a wide range of artists, including Performa Commissions by Edgar Arceneaux, Juliana Huxtable, Rashid Johnson, and Laura Lima, in addition to projects and productions by Jonathas de Andrade, Chimurenga, Benjamin Patterson, Pope.L, Ralph Lemon, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Adam Pendleton, Dave McKenzie, Wangechi Mutu, Will Rawls, and Carrie Mae Weems. Edwards works within the Walker’s visual arts department developing and implementing artist projects and exhibitions and expanding interdisciplinary scholarship and research while making key contributions to the Walker's acquisitions planning. She is a contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues and art publications, including Aperture, Art in America, Artforum.com, Parkett, and Spike Art Quarterly.OKWUI OKPOKWASILI is a New York-based writer, performer and choreographer. In partnership with collaborator Peter Born, Okpokwasili creates multidisciplinary projects. Their first New York production, Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance premiered at Performance Space 122 and received a 2010 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Production; an immersive installation version was featured in the 2008 Prelude Festival. Their second collaboration, Bronx Gothic, won a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Production and toured nationally and internationally. Bronx Gothic: The Oval was a featured performance installation at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s 2014 River to River Festival. When I Return Who Will Receive Me was featured at LMCC’s 2016 River to River Festival. An early iteration of Poor People’s TV Room, was presented by Lincoln Center in the David Rubinstein Atrium in June 2014.
As a performer, Okpokwasili frequently collaborates with award- winning director Ralph Lemon, including How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere?; Come home Charley Patton (for which she also won a New York Performance “Bessie” Award); a duet performed at The Museum of Modern Art as partof On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century; and, most recently, Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room. She has worked with Nora Chipaumire, Julie Taymor, Kristin Marting, Young Jean Lee, Richard Foreman, and Richard Maxwell.
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DATE:
November 2016
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Artist Yoshua Okón (DH ALUMNI 2016) spoke about his multidimensional, politically engaged practice with Renaud Proch and Paul Pfeiffer at Independent Curators International.