Jonas N.T. Becker is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects span photography, video installation, sculpture, and community engagement. His work explores how beliefs form around specific sites and geographies. Becker is interested in these landscapes as an intersection of personal identity, cultural mythologies, and political power. Recent projects, Mountain is a Mountain and Better or Equal Use, focus on systems of value, monetary and otherwise, to question how intersectional operations of oppression are interwoven with the land. His projects link rural communities with urban centers that are geographically distant but socially and economically implicit. Becker’s work was recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Actual Size Gallery, Los Angeles and published in the New Museum/MIT Press anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility and Walls Turned Sideways which addressed the prison industrial complex. Becker is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was born in Morgantown, WV, and lives in Chicago, IL.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, May 8, 5pmat Kresge 1305
1880 Campus Dr
Evanston, IL, 60208
Jennifer Reeder constructs personal fiction films about relationships, trauma and coping. Her award-winning narratives are innovative and borrow from a range of forms including after school specials, amateur music videos and magical realism. These films have shown consistently around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, The Berlin Film Festival, The Rotterdam Film Festival, The London Film Festival, SXSW, The Venice Biennale and The Whitney Biennial. Her awards include several that have qualified her films for Oscar nomination. She won a Creative Capital Grant in Moving Image in 2015, short film funding from Rooftop/Adrienne Shelly Foundation in 2016 and short film funding from the Hamburg Film Fund in 2016. She is a USA Artist nominee for 2008, 2015, 2016, and 2017. She is a 2018 recipient of a SFFILM Rainin Foundation Screenwriting Grant.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, April 10, 5pmat Kresge 1515
1880 Campus Dr
Evanston, IL, 60208
Anna Boghiguian’s (b. 1946, Cairo) raw and expressionistic works combine painting, drawing, writing, collage, and sculpture to contemplate the past and present through intersections of economics, philosophy, literature, and myth. Since the 1970s, Boghiguian has travelled continuously, and her work has charted her impressions and observations of various societies, as well as her experiences of non-belonging as a foreigner and outsider. In Boghiguian’s work, the palimpsest of memory takes physical form as a rough accumulation that thickens the surface of her paintings with encaustic, pigment, steel, collage and non-specific debris.
Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions: Anna Boghiguian, Tate St. Ives, UK (2019); The Loom of History, New Museum, New York, USA (2018); Anna Boghiguian, Bait Al Serkal, Sharjah Arts Square, Sharjah, UAE (2018); Anna Boghiguian, Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, Italy (2017); Cities by the Rivers, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal, Canada (2015); Anna Boghiguian, I heard of myths but I understood I have to free myself from it but how, when, and where, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2014).
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Saturday, June 8, 1pmat Kresge 1515
1880 Campus Dr.
Evanston, IL, 60208
Fia Backström (Sweden) is an artist based in New York, NY. Fia Backström's work focuses on the fabric of co-existence and construction of subjectivity through the social life of images and language. Backström works with structures of political address, ecologics, and pedagogical methods, while destabilizing authorship. She turns social situations into operative displays where method and media shift according to situation, while fluidly reworking the terms of engagement. Backström's work unfolds in a wide range of media, including photography, writing, typography, objects, installation, and performance. Her environments, events, and projects challenge our habitual notions of what constitutes an exhibition–through format, institutional context, and dialogue with the audience, even the works of art presented; frequently works by other artists are incorporated, as well as participation by peers, visitors and institutional staff alike.
Fia Backström ’s work has been part of numerous international exhibitions and projects. Recent solo projects include A Vaudeville on Mankind in Time and Space, Callicoon gallery (2018), Woe men - keep going, Mary Boone gallery (2017), The Shape of Co- to Come at ABF, Stockholm (2016), and ME have to be turned upside down to become WE at Zinc Bar, New York (2014). She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as Greater New York, MoMA PS1 (2015), MoMA (2010), and The Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2008) in New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); and Tranzit, Prague (2008). Backström was the subject of a survey at the Artist’s Institute in 2015 and represented Sweden in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Her writings have been published in magazines such as Artforum, Art on Paper, Pacemaker and North Drive Press.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Tuesday, February 26, 5pmat Kresge Hall 1319
1880 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL, 60208
Mike Cloud is a painter whose work examines the conditions of painting in its contemporary life among countless reproductions, symbols and descriptions. Cloud earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art and a BFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago. A selection of exhibitions include: ‘Special Project: Mike Cloud’ at P.S.1, NY; ‘Agreement and Subjectivity’ at Max Protetch, NY; ‘Jesse Chapman/ Mike Cloud’ at Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY and ‘Bad Faith and Universal Technique’ at Thomas Erben Gallery, NY. His work has been included in group exhibitions such as ‘Frequency’ at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; at Apexart, NY and Honor Fraser Gallery, CA.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, January 17, 5pmat Kresge 1515
1880 Campus Dr
Evanston, IL, 60208
