ATP welcomes curator Karsten Lund as part of our visiting artist series.
Karsten Lund (b. 1981) is Curator at the Renaissance Society, a contemporary art institution located at the University of Chicago. At the Ren he organizes exhibitions and performances, works closely with artists on new commissions, edits publications, and oversees public programs. He has recently curated or co-curated exhibitions by Haig Aivazian, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jill Magid, Matthew Metzger, and Lydia Ourahmane & Alex Ayed, as well as a number of speculative group exhibitions including Fear of Property (2022), Nine Lives (2020), and Unthought Environments (2018). In 2017, he launched Intermissionsat the Ren, an ongoing performance series staged in the gallery space in between exhibitions, featuring new or site-responsive projects. In addition to contributing to publications at the Ren, he has also been the editor of other books including Irena Haiduk's "Spells" (Sternberg Press, 2011) and "deposition" by Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, and David Rueter (Mousse Publishing, 2023). Karsten previously worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College (MoCP).
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 8, 5:00pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
The Otolith Group Screening and Conversation
Founded in 2002 by the artists and theorists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, the Otolith Group engages with the cultural and political legacies and potentialities of non-aligned movements, new media, Black Study, Afrofuturism, and Indofuturism while thinking speculatively with science fictions of the present. Their methodologies incorporate post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the anti-human. It has played a crucial intergenerational role in Black and Asian diasporic film and media art in the UK, and has been closely tied to CCRU/Warwick philosophy since its inception.
In their 2019 film, INFINITY minus infinity, the celebrated multi-disciplinary artist collective contests the toxic sociopolitical histories that inform Black life in contemporary England. The film interrogates the “hostile environment policy” enacted by Theresa May’s Conservative government in 2012, which was framed as an effort to combat “illegal immigration” in the UK. But the policy, which harshly denied access to services and employment for undocumented migrants, reflected a broader, suffocating atmosphere of anti-blackness in Britain—one tied to centuries-long histories of discrimination, extraction, and environmental devastation. Collaborating with a range of poets, performers, and scholars, core group members Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun craft what Artforum critic Ed Halter described as “a constantly moving flux of bodies, histories, and theories.” An expressive and incisive visual essay, INFINITY minus infinity combines deftly-layered strata of imagery and sound to survey the pasts and presents of racial capitalism and the Anthropocene—while gesturing toward alternative futures informed by Black radical feminist traditions.
Following the screening, Otolith Group members Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun will appear to discuss the film with Antawan Byrd (College Fellow, Department of Art History, Northwestern University).
This screening and conversation is hosted by Block Cinema at the Block Museum of Art.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Friday, May 5, 6:00pmat BLOCK CINEMA
40 ARTS CIRCLE DR
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Visiting Artist Talk: Athi-Patra Ruga
Join us for a lunchtime talk with Visiting Artist Athi-Patra Ruga.
Athi-Patra Ruga is one of the few artists working in South Africa today whose work has adopted the trope of myth as a contemporary response to the post-apartheid era. Ruga creates alternative identities and uses these avatars as a way to parody and critique the existing political and social status quo. Ruga’s artistic approach of creating myths and alternate realities is in some way an attempt to view the traumas of the last 200 years of colonial history from a place of detachment – at a farsighted distance where wounds can be contemplated outside of personalized grief and subjective defensiveness.
The philosophical allure and allegorical value of utopia has been central to Ruga’s practice. His construction of a mythical metaverse populated by characters which he has created and depicted in his work have allowed Ruga to create an interesting space of self reflexivity in which political, cultural and social systems can be critiqued and parodied. Ruga has used his utopia as a lens to process the fraught history of a colonial past, to critique the present and propose a possible humanist vision for the future.
Significant exhibitions and performances include: Kiss My Genders, Haywood Gallery, London; Ravelled Threads, Sean Kelly Gallery, Seattle; Art Afrique, Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Over the Rainbow, Performa 17, New York; An Age of Our Own Making, Holbaek, Denmark; Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community, Boston Centre for the Arts, Boston; AFRICA: Architecture, Culture and Identity at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Imaginary Fact at the South African Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale; African Odysseys at The Brass Artscape in Brussels; Public Intimacy at the SFMOMA, San Francisco; The Film Will Always Be You: South African Artists on Screen at the Tate Modern in London; and Making Africa at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.
Recent projects include Ruga’s collaboration with Dior on designing two handbags for the fourth edition of the Lady Dior Art Bag. Ruga is also the co-founder of Victory of the Word, a fundraising and development project in support of the historic Lovedale Printing Press in Alice, Eastern Cape, as well as the Artistic Director of BODYLAND, an incubator residency for artists held in the Amathole Village, Hogsback.
His works form part of Private, Public and Museum Collections in South Africa and abroad, namely: the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington DC; the Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva; The Zeitz MOCCA, Cape Town; Museion – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bolzano Italy; CAAC – Pigozzi Collection; The Wedge Collection; and the IZIKO South African National Gallery.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Monday, April 10, 12:00pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Jadine Collingwood, Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago, where she completed her dissertation, 'A Tragic Suburban Mentality’: Managerial Lyricism in Contemporary Art. At the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she has curated projects including Chicago Works: Caroline Kent (2021), Martine Syms: She Mad Season One (2022), and Gary Simmons: Public Enemy (with René Morales, 2023). Previously, she worked at the Walker Art Center where she was part of the curatorial team for several exhibitions, including the major retrospective Siah Armajani: Follow This Line (with Victoria Sung, 2018), the group exhibition The Body Electric (with Pavel Pyś, 2019), and the multidisciplinary exhibition The Paradox of Stillness (with Vincenzo de Bellis, 2021). Prior to the Walker, Collingwood was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she assisted with the exhibitions Design Episodes: The Modern Chair (2016) and Helena Almeida: Work Is Never Finished (2017).
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, February 9, 5:00pmat FORUM ROOM
KRESGE HALL 1515
1880 CAMPUS DR
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Visiting Artist Talk: Iman Issa
Iman Issa is an artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna . Solo and group exhibitions include Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, MoMA, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 21er Haus, Vienna, MACBA, Barcelona, the Perez Art Museum, Miami, the Whitney Biennial 2019, the 12th Sharjah biennial, the 8th Berlin Biennial, MuHKA, Antwerp, Tensta Konsthall, Spånga, New Museum, New York, and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin. Books include Book of Facts: A Proposition (2017), Common Elements (2015) and Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011). She has been named a 2017 DAAD artist in residence, and is a recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise (2017), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2015), HNF-MACBA Award (2012), and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2013).
Issa uses a variety of forms and strategies to investigate the political and personal associations of history, language and the object. She creates ambiguous, poetic displays through the juxtaposition of text and object. Heritage Studies, the artist’s most recent series, draws its name from a field of academic and applied inquiry that relates to the understanding and use of history. Rather than proposing a stable reading of history, Heritage Studies examine dynamic sets of relationships — between cultures, sites, and artifacts — to articulate their relevance today. They are neither formal abstractions, nor “pared-down citations of reality,“ but attempts to communicate the act of perceiving the original objects and the relevance that they might hold for the present. “What do these new elements share with their sources if it is not the material, color, appearance, or shape?“ Issa asks “...they share a speech act. They are addressing or saying something similar to each other, and it is perhaps through doing that that they become the same.“
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Friday, January 13, 6:00pmat BLOCK MUSEUM
40 ARTS CIRCLE DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
