From sunrise to sunset, A,T,P is proud to host the Tea Project.
SCHEDULE,
Sunrise (5:16AM): Installation (placing the cups)
10:30AM: Tea Performance
2:30PM: Teach-in
4PM: Tea Performance
5:30PM: Teach-in & Deinstallation (returning the cups)
concluded by Sunset (8:22PM)
The Tea Project is an ongoing dialogue that traverses a variety of landscapes. From the tea sipped at a family gathering, to a cage in Guantanamo Bay, to a motor pool in Iraq, tea is not only a favored drink but a shared moment that transcends cultural divides and systems of oppression. When someone sits, sips, and reflects over a cup of tea there is space to ask questions about one’s relationship to the world: a world that is filled with dehumanization, war, and destruction; a world that is filled with moments of beauty, love, and humanity.
Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes work collaboratively to uncover moments of beauty, poetics, and shared humanity within little known military histories. Taking as its starting point the curious love story of a Guantanamo Bay guard, who fell in love with the drawings carved by detainees on Styrofoam cups, the Tea Project is an ongoing series of installations and performances that offers counter-narratives to disrupt the numbing effects of war and detention. Through the Tea Project, Ginsburg and Hughes create scenarios that allow audiences a role in telling the story of our current involvement in war and torture.
The Tea Project will host a day-long exhibition and performance series that will investigate the connections between Chicago based institutions and the perpetuation of torture and extralegal detention at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. These relationships will be explored through Tea Performances and Teach-ins that highlight the work and personal narratives of veterans, academics, activists, and community members.
Setting the stage for this event will be 779 porcelain cast Styrofoam teacups, one for each individual that has been or is held in extralegal detention in Guantanamo since 2001. The cups are a lasting collection of artifacts reflecting a global conflict while also being individual vessels that easily lift out of display and into your hands for a cup of tea. You are invited.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Saturday, June 4, 5amSouth Lawn
Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Strangers
We are looking for a place that resembles the bar at the beginning of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Murky, anonymous, illicit; a place where strangers conspire to trespass in pursuit of higher rewards. Locations like these are central to certain online practices including hacking and trolling, motivations for which span from ‘doing it for the lulz’ to radical polemic disruption. How can these strategies of ad-hoc organization and intervention be leveraged by practitioners in different fields? Bringing together figures from cultural anthropology, media theory and contemporary art, this symposium will propose methods by which the urge to disrupt corporate, governmental and media narratives might be channeled into productive (or unproductive) forms of arbitration.
Presentations by Erkki Huhtamo, Rob Horning, Devin Kenny, and Beate Geissler.
This symposium is made possible through support by The Myers Foundations and The Graduate School, and is sponsored by the Department of Art Theory and Practice, the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Department of Radio/Television/Film, and the Department of French and Italian.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Saturday, May 30, 1pmArt, Theory, Practice,
640 N Lincoln St
Evanston, IL 60208
Helen Mirra,
2002, 2018
Helen Mirra presently maintains a rhythm of working in a sustained relation to walking. Solo exhibitions include those at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, the Berkeley Art Museum, Kunst-Werke Berlin, and Haus Konstruktiv Zurich, and she participated in the 50th Venice Biennial, the 30th Sao Paulo Bienal, and the 2015 Havana Bienal. Recent music releases are the CD Maps of Parallels 41 N and 49 N with Ernst Karel (Shhpuma, 2014), and the LP Kwangsi-Quail with Fred Frith (Shhpuma, 2015). Mirra has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Driehaus Foundation, and has been a guest of the DAAD Kunstlerprogramm in Berlin, the Laurenz Haus in Basel, IASPIS in Stockholm, and OCA in Oslo, and was artist-in-residence with the Consortium of the Arts at the University of California at Berkeley. She has held teaching positions as Associate Professor in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University and Senior Lecturer in Visual Art and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.
Joseph Grigely,
2002
Joseph Grigely studied at St Anselm’s College, 1978 before being awarded a DPhil from Oxford University in 1984. His work has been exhibited at the Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2016); the Kunstmuseum, Bern, Germany (2011); the Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2011); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2009, 1997); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, USA (2008); the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2001); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2001); De Appel, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (1997) and the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (1996). His work has been included in the Whitney (2014, 2000), Berlin (2001), Sydney (1998), Istanbul (1997) and Venice (1995) Biennials. He is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in the city.
