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
Visiting Artist Lecture: Joshua Simon, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia: Communism and the Dividual
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
