Anna Biller,
2009
Anna Biller is an independent American filmmaker. She is known for her visual style, and for her use of period genres and satire. Her 2007 sexploitation feature film Viva premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and won the Best of Fest Award at the Boston Underground Film Festival. The film was also entered into the main competition at the 29th Moscow International Film Festival. Biller's work follows in the tradition of the few women to work in the sexploitation genre, along with Doris Wishman and Stephanie Rothman. Her latest film, The Love Witch, is a twist on classic serial killer films, featuring a female killer who kills through calculated sexuality, causing her male victims to fall too much in love. Richard Brody of The New Yorker said of The Love Witch, "Biller puts genre to the test of do-it-yourself artistry, and puts feminist ideology itself to the test of style. The film pulsates with furious creative energy throughout, sparking excitement and giddy amazement that it even exists." In May 2016, The Love Witch was acquired for distribution by Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Dani (Leventhal) ReStack,
2009
Dani Leventhal is an assistant professor of drawing at The Ohio State University. In 2009 she received an MFA in film/video from Bard College. In 2003 she received an MFA in studio arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has screened her single-channel videos at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Gene Siskel Film Center, PS1, Cine Cycle, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Union Docs, and VIEWS of the Avant Guard and Anthology Film Archives. Leventhal is a recipient of the Kuzuko Trust, Wexner Center Film/Video Residency, the Milton Avery Fine Arts Award and the Astraea Visual Arts Grant. Her drawings and videos are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Vassar, UIC, Earlham College, and Yale University.
Yoshua Okon,
2009
Yoshua Okón was born in Mexico City in 1970 where he currently lives. His work, like a series of near-sociological experiments executed for the camera, blends staged situations, documentation and improvisation and questions habitual perceptions of reality and truth, selfhood and morality. In 2002 he received an MFA from UCLA with a Fulbright scholarship. His solo shows exhibitions include: Salò Island, UC Irvine, Irvine; Piovra, Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; Poulpe, Mor Charpentier, Paris; Octopus, Cornerhouse, Manchester and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and SUBTITLE, Städtische Kunsthalle, Munich. His group exhibitions include: Manifesta 11, Zurich; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Antes de la resaca, MUAC, Mexico City; Incongruous, Musèe Cantonal des Beux-Arts, Lausanne; The Mole´s Horizon, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Mercosur Biennial, Porto Alegre; Amateurs, CCA Wattis; San Francisco; Laughing in a Foreign Language, Hayward Gallery, London; Adaptive Behavior, New Museum, NY and Mexico City: an exhibition about the exchange rates between bodies and values, PS1, MoMA, NY, and Kunstwerke, Berlin. His work is included in the collections of Tate Modern, Hammer Museum, LACMA, Colección Jumex and MUAC, among others.
yoshuaokon.com,
Joshua Simon presents The Kids Want Communism (also a blog: tkwc.tumblr.com), a yearlong program of exhibitions marking 99 years to the October revolution, which he initiated in collaboration with State of Concept Athens, The Free/Slow University of Warsaw, Tranzit Prague, Skuc gallery Ljubljana, the Visual Culture Research Center in Kiev, and MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam. This lecture will outline how the communist horizon and real existing socialism can inform our understanding of the current social and cultural, political and economic realities we are facing with the implosion of the neoliberal order. In recent years, Simon's research has been focused on notions of materiality and subjectivity, therefore, also this talk will move between animism and productivism, commodity fetish and debt economy, double negation and metabolism, shock work and the dividual.
Joshua Simon is director and chief curator at MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam. Co-founding editor of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa based Maayan publishing. Vera List Center for Art and Politics fellow (2011-2013). Author of Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013), and editor of Ruti Sela: For The Record (Archive Books, 2015). Recent curatorial projects include: Factory Fetish (Westspace, Melbourne, co-curated with Liang Luscombe) 2015, Roee Rosen: Group Exhibition (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, co-curated with Gilad Melzer) 2016, and The Kids Want Communism (yearlong project at MoBY) 2016.
This Visiting Artist Program is made possible by support from the Myers Foundations and the Jerrold Loebl Fund for the Arts and presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, October 20, 6pmGraham Foundation
Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, IL 60610
Laura Marks,
2010
Laura U. Marks is a scholar, theorist, and curator of independent and experimental media arts. Her current research interests are the media arts of the Arab and Muslim world, intercultural perspectives on new media art, and philosophical approaches to materiality and information culture. She is the author of !e Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press, 2000), Touch: Sensuous !eory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002), Enfoldment and In"nity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art ( MIT Press, 2010), and many essays. She has curated programs of experimental media for festivals and art spaces worldwide. Dr. Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor of Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
John Marriott,
2010
John Marriot is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Toronto, Canada. His work has been seen internationally in venues such as Th Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), The Impakt Festival (Utrecht), 25HRS (Barcelona), The Rotterdam International Festival of Film and Video (Rotterdam), The 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto), The ZKM (Karlsruhe) and the Toronto Sculpture Garden (Toronto). His writing has been published in catalogues including A Better Place, and Diane Borsato: The Chinatown Foray, books such as Suggestive Poses: Artists and Critics Respond to Censorship, and magazines including Canadian Art, C Magazine, Mix Magazine, and Prefix Photo.
Wayne Koestenbaum,
2010
Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, is a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and also a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev,
2010
Christov-Bakargiev is a curator, author and researcher interested in historical avant-garde and contemporary art. Named 2012’s most powerful person in the art world by Art Review’s Power 100 listings, Christov-Bakargiev was artistic director of dOCUMENTA(13) from 2008-20012, which took place in Kassel, Germany, and held workshops, seminars and exhibitions in Alexandria, Egypt; Kabul, Afghanistan; and Banff, Canada. Her stewardship of dOCUMENTA(13), considered to be one of the most intellectual and significant exhibitions in the art world, renewed one of the exhibition’s primal intentions to enlist culture as an agent of reconstruction, healing and dialogue. She is currently the curator for the 14th Istanbul Biennial titled Saltwater: A Theory of Forms (2015).
Starting in 2016, she is the new director of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art and the Galleria Civica D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin. Previously she has served as Artistic Director of the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008) and Chief Curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art (2002-08). Christov-Bakargiev was also a Senior Curator at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center—a MoMa affiliate in New York from 1991-2001. Her books include William Kentridge (1998), Arte Povera (1999), and for dOCUMENTA(13) the 100 Notes–100 Thoughts series as well as The Book of Books (2011–12). Previous group exhibitions include The Moderns, Turin (2003), Faces in the Crowd, London and Turin (2004), Citta' Natura (1997), and Molteplici Culture (1992).
Matthew Rich,
2010
Matthew Rich lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. He has had solo exhibitions at Project Row Houses in Houston, devening projects + editions in Chicago, the Suburban in Oak Park, IL and samsøn in Boston, MA. In 2010 and 2009, Rich had group shows at Galerie oqbo in Berlin, BravinLee Programs in New York, Baer Ridgway in San Francisco, Park Life in San Francisco, White Flag Projects in St. Louis, and Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City. He is a finalist for the 2010 James and Audrey Foster Prize at the ICA, Boston (announced in Dec. 2010) and his work is on exhibit at the ICA through Jan. 2011. Matthew Rich has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Terra Foundation for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is also represented by samsøn in Boston, MA.
Nancy Shaver,
2010
Nacy Shaver was born in Appleton, New York. Her art career began in Chicago with Feature Inc. in 1987. She currently shows with them. Nancy received a Guggenheim Grant in 2010, an Anonymous was a Woman Grant in 2009, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1993. She has operated her own shop for the past 12 years in Hudson NY and has been teaching at the Bard MFA program for the last 13 years.
