Center for Human Rights and the Arts

Putting the Cooker on Low
2022-05-06 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Ama Josephine Budge and writer Dr. Chelsea M. Frazier, moderated by Dr. J.T. Roane (Arizona State University).
Putting the Cooker on Low explores the daily rituals that allow Black women, femmes and non-binary folk to keep creating in the midst of spiritual, emotional, familial, societal and ecological crises. Putting the Cooker on Low intimates that which happens in the simmer and bubble, on the back burner and the top oven, in the side eye and the hot pot. Thinking with an ancestry of Black feminist petitions for self-preservation, this visual essay works to make visible and then unsettle the ways in which Black womxn artists internalize value-(as)-labour-(as)-capital. The cracks, crevasses and slippages these anti-erotic modes of survival engender – as felt by both human and non-human ecologies – remain forced from view until they become black holes, into which we are swallowed and disappear. Often without a trace. It is with the cooker on low, that resistance might reduce into potency. It is with the cooker on low that we never run out of gas.

UNDERCOOKED Works by MA in Human Rights & the Arts
2022-05-04 - 2022-05-11
Undercooked features works-in-progress by the current MA students at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

Developed as part of their practice-based core course with Tania El Khoury this spring (HRA 504: Collaborations and Community-based Art), all of the projects engage in different ways with the politics of food and land. The work includes performance, music, sound, murals, and food. Some performances take place on Wednesday May 4th, others Wednesday May 11th, and others will be ongoing between the two dates.

Wednesday May 4th
Cacao Sanctuary: A Performance by Baitsai Luo
Studio North 2:30 pm
Market Price by Garrett Sager
Studio North 3:00pm
Kitchen Seminar by Ali Hussein Al-Adawy
Studio North 4:00 pm
Queer Kurultai by Pasha Zalevskii
7 Pine Street, Tivoli 6:00 pm
Wednesday May 11th

Fatal Morgana by Adam HajYahia
Bard Community Farm 12:30pm
Skins of Nature by Carol Montealegre
Bard Farm 2:30pm
Alone Time by Nour Annan
Studio North 3:00 pm
Lawn and Order by Isabella Indolfi
Fisher Center Lawn 4:00pm
The Drought by CEREBRO :.
Resnick Studio 6:00pm
Ongoing

Holy Grain by Maid Alrafie
Grafitti Wall, Campus Center
The Patapsco Inn by Hattie Wilder Karlstrom
thepatapscoinn.tumblr.com

Activism in Process: Projects from Afghanistan, Puerto Rico, and Tunisia
2022-04-29 12:00 - 13:30
Join us for a panel discussion with CHRA’s current collaborators in “Activism in Process”.
CHRA collaborates annually with a group of activists and organizers who are leading grassroots efforts in their communities. For our first “Activism in Process”, we are bringing together Badr Baabou from Damj (a LGBTQ++ rights organization based in Tunisia); Ernesto Pujol (a social choreographer based in Puerto Rico); and Elizabeth Rubin and Natasha Matteson from Last Exit Kabul (a global network supporting Afghan refugees).

Elizabeth Rubin and Natasha Matteson from Last Exit Kabul
Last Exit Kabul is a civic initiative made up of journalists and activists who came together to help Afghans, left behind by the U.S. withdrawal, escape and survive. It has become part of a transnational network for direct action that has arisen as a response to the U.S. government’s crime of indifference.
Ernesto Pujol is founder of The Listening School, which teaches deep-listening skills for the creation of conscious culture; The Savage Gardener Studio, which works to decolonize island ecology by designing native & edible gardens of sited memory; and Casa Pujol, an interdisciplinary residency for visiting scholars in San Juan. Ernesto is currently the Master Gardener at Hope Plantation, the Program Coordinator at Save a Sato Foundation animal shelter, and the Residency Director at Casa Pujol.
Badr Baabou from Damj
Damj is the first LGBTQ+ rights organization in Tunisia. Following a wave of arrests in 2008, Damj began its work by creating safe spaces for the LGBTQ+ community in Tunisia and a legal support team to counter the arrests. Damj works towards a vision of a pluralistic, egalitarian and safe Tunisia. It focuses on abolishing law 230 of the penal code, which bans homosexuality. Dialogue and collaboration are at the heart of Damj, seeking to eradicate all forms of discrimination against minorities in Tunisia.
Photo by Yassine Gaidi.

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Activism and Freedom in Egypt
2022-04-27 17:00 - 18:30
CHRA is hosting the launch & discussion of Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s newly published book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated on Wednesday, April 27th, 5:00pm EDT at Weis Cinema, Bard College.
Join us for a conversation with filmmaker and activist Sanaa Seif and scholar Omnia Khalil as they reflect on the ongoing incarceration of activists in Egypt beyond the victimization of the detained, tracing how the singular experience becomes collective under the current Sisi regime.
Co-sponsored by the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Bard.
The event is free and open to the public.

Memory of the Earth: Land Dispossession, Violence, and War in Colombia
2022-04-20 19:45 - 22:15
CHRA will be screening Memory of the Earth: Land Dispossession, Violence, and War in Colombia, a program of three short films made in collaboration between the Colombian Truth Commission and Forensic Architecture on Wednesday, April 20 at 7:45 pm EDT at Upstate Films, Rhinebeck NY. The films center around the issue of land dispossession in Urabá, a region in northwestern Colombia, which has been gripped by political violence since the 1980s. Paramilitary groups and massacres have driven away thousands from their homes and agricultural land. More than 4 million hectares in Colombia are now considered to be stolen from small campesinos as a result of 60 years of war.
Each of the films in this program offers a different insight into the complex dynamics of violence that produce dispossession. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the co-directors, Hannah Meszaros Martin and CHRA’s 2021-22 Fellow, Oscar Pedraza Vargas.
The event is free and open to the public. Reservations can be made through this link.

The following films will be screened during this event:
Coquitos (43 min, 2021)
Coquitos explores the slow violence of dispossession. Sometimes this practice is backed by armed forces and physical threats to community members; other times, it is perpetrated through the slow movement of saltwater that seeps into the roots of plantains after a flood, rotting them from within. The film looks at the spectrum of violence that constitutes dispossession within the everyday lives of the residents of Coquitos. This violence is intimate, concerning the depth and width of the canal which borders their farms, which determines the flow of water that rises up and spills over, entering into the space of the home, their interior lives. The film looks at the future of dispossession as it is driven by the extreme precarity that the residents live with everyday, and embodied by the fragility of the land.
Honduras y La Negra (27 min, 2021)
The massacres of Honduras and La Negra occurred on March 4th, 1988. The victims were banana workers and union members. These massacres are emblematic in the history of the Colombian War, and exemplify the way in which state actors, as well as private and illegal sectors, plan and execute similar acts of violence. Honduras y La Negra uses archival materials, oral testimonies, aerial images, and 3D reconstructions to tell the story of the massacre and its reverberations throughout the country.
California (26 min, 2021)
California materializes the multiplicity of land dispossession. Farms, homes, fields, barracks, massacre sites are all continuously disappearing, erased by agroindustrial monocultures for exports to the U.S and Europe. While bananas visually capture the landscape, forming a uniform skin that wraps around the earth, an invisible web of intimate financial relations forms over this patchwork of fields and canals. This web is also a network of paramilitary control, which, along with and through the bananas, encloses and chokes this small community of campesinos.

Khar va Attar خار وعطار : The Thorn and the Healers
2022-04-15 12:00 - 13:30
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission and a text by Dr. Manijeh Moradian, featuring a Q&A with artist Amitis Motevalli.
For Khar va Attar, the artist takes on the challenge of channeling a conversation between 10th century Persian scholar and doctor, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), her uncle Manoucher Emrani, an agricultural engineer and botanist, and her friend, Soraya Medina, a recently departed food justice advocate. This surrealist séance takes the form of a performative video woven together with other digital media. Khar va Attar explores the various medicinal properties of the different parts of the rose as well as other foods and plants, creating a hybridized recipe for healing.
Moderated by Dr. Angela Harutyunyan (American University of Beirut)

Mirt Sost Shi Amit / Harvest: 3,000 Years (Part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure)
2022-04-05 17:30 - 20:00
CHRA will be screening Mirt Sost Shi Amit / Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976) by Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima on Tuesday, April 5th, 5:30pm EDT at Weis Cinema, Bard College. The event is free and open to the public. The film screening will be followed by post-screening discussions.

Mirt Sost Shi Amit / Harvest: 3,000 Years is Part three of public film screening series Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure organized by CHRA’s 2021-22 Fellow Nadine Fattaleh. Hosted in the Hudson Valley and online, the series considers the politics and poetics of visibility in the Global South and the complex ways in which moving images of agricultural labor, large-scale dams, and rural dispossession constitute a fragmentary audio-visual archive conversant with the circulation of ideas around Third Cinema.
A network of Ciné-Clubs in Syria, convened by Omar Amiralay (1944-2011) and other veteran filmmakers, were unique spaces for the circulation of politicized images in the age of celluloid. They brought together artists, intellectuals, and enthusiasts interested in watching and debating the relationship between cinema and radical politics. In this light, the program will feature the film by Haile Gerima, which follows Omar Amiralay’s shorts (March 18), screened at Upstate Films at Rhinebeck, NY, and contemporaneous works by Ateyyat El Abnoudy (1939-2018) (April 5), screened online. The series develops a conversation about innovative aesthetics from the moment of the 1970s that mediate narratives of marginalized and exploited communities. The film program seeks to recreate an intimate space for dialogue around the transformative possibilities of cinema, then and now, in global struggles around land, labor and infrastructure. The series will culminate in a roundtable discussion later in the Spring. All events are free and open to the public.

Layli Long Soldier: My Art is a Being: Building a Relationship to Art through Agreement, Ethics, and Pleasure
2022-04-01 12:00 - 13:30
By understanding our art as a being with whom we create a relationship, Layli Long Soldier explores the ways in which we can make commitments and agreements with our writing and art; uphold expectations and enact reciprocity, as one would do with a relative; and nourish our relationship through pleasure, playfulness, or enjoyment. These agreements with our art, in turn, lay a foundation of ethics that can protect us from capitalism and the dangers of becoming human art-machines! This will primarily be an artist talk in which Long Soldier will share images/videos of projects that have helped her build a practice based on relationship and reciprocity rather than productivity, alone.

Films by Ateyyat El Abnoudy (Part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure)
2022-03-29 12:00 - 14:00
CHRA will be screening four short films by Egyptian filmmaker Ateyyat El Abnoudy on Tuesday, March 29th, 12pm EDT on Zoom (link). The event is free and open to the public. Four films will be shown on Zoom and followed by post-screening discussion with audiovisual archivist Yasmin Desouki (Chicago Film Archives, formerly Cimatheque – Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, Egypt).

حصان الطين Mud House (1970), 12 min
أغنية توحة الحزينة Sad Song of Touha (1972), 12 min
الساندوتش The Sandwich (1975), 12 min
بحار العطش Seas of Thirst (1981), 44 min

Films by Ateyyat El Abnoudy are part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure, a series of public film screenings organized by CHRA’s 2021-22 Fellow Nadine Fattaleh. Hosted in the Hudson Valley and online, the series considers the politics and poetics of visibility in the Global South and the complex ways in which moving images of agricultural labor, large-scale dams, and rural dispossession constitute a fragmentary audio-visual archive conversant with the circulation of ideas around Third Cinema.

A network of Ciné-Clubs in Syria, convened by Omar Amiralay (1944-2011) and other veteran filmmakers, were unique spaces for the circulation of politicized images in the age of celluloid. They brought together artists, intellectuals, and enthusiasts interested in watching and debating the relationship between cinema and radical politics. In this light, the program will feature short films by Ateyyat El Abnoudy, which follows Omar Amiralay’s shorts (March 18), and will be followed by a film by Haile Gerima (1946-), screened at Bard College on April 5. The series develops a conversation about innovative aesthetics from the moment of the 1970s that mediate narratives of marginalized and exploited communities. The film program seeks to recreate an intimate space for dialogue around the transformative possibilities of cinema, then and now, in global struggles around land, labor and infrastructure. The series will culminate in a roundtable discussion later in the Spring. All events are free and open to the public.

Films by Omar Amiralay (Part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure)
2022-03-17 19:45 - 21:30
CHRA will be screening three short films by Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay on Thursday, March 17th, 7:45pm EDT at Upstate Films, Rhinebeck NY. The event is free and open to the public. Reservations can be made through this link. The films will be followed by post-screening discussions:

محاولة عن سد الفرات Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970), 13 min
الدجاج The Chickens (1977), 41 min
طوفان في بلاد البعث A Flood in Ba‘ath Country (2003), 49 min

This screening of films by Omar Amiralay are part of Imaging Land, Labor, and Infrastructure, a series of public film screenings organized by CHRA’s 2021-22 Fellow Nadine Fattaleh. Hosted in the Hudson Valley and online, the series considers the politics and poetics of visibility in the Global South and the complex ways in which moving images of agricultural labor, large-scale dams, and rural dispossession constitute a fragmentary audio-visual archive conversant with the circulation of ideas around Third Cinema.
A network of Ciné-Clubs in Syria, convened by Omar Amiralay (1944-2011) and other veteran filmmakers, were unique spaces for the circulation of politicized images in the age of celluloid. They brought together artists, intellectuals, and enthusiasts interested in watching and debating the relationship between cinema and radical politics. In this light, the program will first feature Omar Amiralay’s shorts (March 18), followed by contemporaneous works by Ateyyat El Abnoudy (1939-2018), screened online on March 29th, and film by Haile Gerima (1946-), screened at Bard College on April 5. The series develops a conversation about innovative aesthetics from the moment of the 1970s that mediate narratives of marginalized and exploited communities. The film program seeks to recreate an intimate space for dialogue around the transformative possibilities of cinema, then and now, in global struggles around land, labor and infrastructure. The series will culminate in a roundtable discussion later in the Spring. All events are free and open to the public.

Hunt & Gather: Work in Progress by MA students
2022-03-09 - 2022-03-16
The inaugural cohort of eleven MA students developed work-in-progress as a part of “Collaborations & Community,” a course taught by the Center’s director Dr. Tania El Khoury. The collaborative creative projects span various formats and artistic mediums, from dinner performance, live art, digital work, party, and posters.
Wednesday 9 March
Howls in the Mountains by Carol Montealegre 2:30pm (Resnick Studio, Bard College)
Bai Tsai’s Tsai Fan by Baitsai (Yiqun) Luo 6pm (7351 S Broadway, Red Hook)
Between the Railroad & the River by Isabella Indolfi (Digital)
Thursday 10 March
Sound Bounds by Hattie Wilder Karlstrom 5:30pm (Behind Manor, Bard College)
Wednesday 16 March
Unpopular Opinions by Majd Al Rafie (Ongoing: Campus Center, Bard College)
Cocktail Party by Nour Annan 2:30pm (Studio North, Bard College)
Naked Sword by Paul Zalevskii 4:00pm (Studio North, Bard College)
Capitalism Doesn’t Exist by Ali Hussein Al-Adawy & Tâm Liêu Âm 5:00pm (Montgomery Place, Bard College)
Little Lamb by Garrett Sager 6:30pm (Bard Hall, Bard College)
Janzeer by Adam HajYahya 7:30pm (Resnick Studio, Bard College)

Mohammed El-Kurd: “Bombs, women, children, etc”: Humanization, Victimhood, and the Politics of Appeal
2022-03-08 17:30 - 19:00 | Bard College, Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 12504, United States
For decades, well-meaning journalists and cultural workers used a humanizing framework in their representation of oppressed people, in hopes of countering the traditional portrayal of the Palestinian as a “terrorist.” Within this framework, a perfect victimhood emerged as an ethnocentric prerequisite for sympathy and solidarity, often over-emphasizing oppressed people’s nonviolence, humane professions, and disabilities. In “Bombs, women, children, etc.”: Humanization, Victimhood, and the Politics of Appeal, El-Kurd unpacks the impact such practices of “defanging,” which reproduce the mainstream cultural order in which Palestinians are robbed of their agency, right to self-determination, and, ultimately, their humanity.

Co-presented by the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Bard College. Location: RKC 103, Bard College

Moderated by Ziad Abu-Rish (Center for Human Rights and the Arts, Bard College)

Mohammed El-Kurd: “Bombs, women, children, etc”: Humanization, Victimhood, and the Politics of Appeal
2022-03-08 17:30 - 19:00 | Bard College, Campus Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 12504, United States
For decades, well-meaning journalists and cultural workers used a humanizing framework in their representation of oppressed people, in hopes of countering the traditional portrayal of the Palestinian as a “terrorist.” Within this framework, a perfect victimhood emerged as an ethnocentric prerequisite for sympathy and solidarity, often over-emphasizing oppressed people’s nonviolence, humane professions, and disabilities. In “Bombs, women, children, etc.”: Humanization, Victimhood, and the Politics of Appeal, El-Kurd unpacks the impact such practices of “defanging,” which reproduce the mainstream cultural order in which Palestinians are robbed of their agency, right to self-determination, and, ultimately, their humanity.

Co-presented by the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Bard College.
Location: RKC 103, Bard College

Kendall Thomas: Taking (A)part: Human Rights, Human Rites, "Human Writes"
2022-02-25 12:00 - 13:30
In Taking (A)part: Human Rights, Human Rites and “Human Writes,” Kendall Thomas revisits “Human Writes,” a 2005 performance-installation about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on which he collaborated with the choreographer William Forsythe and The Forsythe Company. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall once argued that in the arts “things get said in ways in which they can’t get said in any other domain.” In his talk, Thomas takes the triangulated homonymic relationship between “rights,” “rites,” and “writes” as a point of departure for exploring the uses and limits of “participation” as an aesthetic politics and practice for building a culture of human rights.

Bhenji Ra: Everything at Once: Permaculture, abolition, and trans love
2022-02-11 16:00 - 17:30
How do we exist in complexity and contradiction? Can we mourn and celebrate all at once? In a world focused on binaries, where do we find power on the edges? In this talk, Bhenji speaks to the beauty of everything at once, of finding meaning between practices, bridging bodies and islands of knowledge together in order to expand our potential of living. With a body centred practice, she approaches community with the principles of permaculture, prison abolition and of course, ignited with radical trans love.

Tastes of Loss
2021-12-06 12:00 - 13:30
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Alexandre Paulikevitch and writer Romy Lynn Attieh, moderated by curator Amanda Abi Khalil and co-presented by CEC ArtsLink.
Tastes of Loss tells the story of a dancer’s intimate relationship to food cooking and preservation. It is a visual essay on survival, womanhood, and joy. It is filmed in the artist’s family kitchen where he learned from his late mother the techniques of dehydrating, canning, and fermenting food for the winter or for the next war. Tastes of Loss marks the dancer’s return home. The body finds its way back to stuffed vine leaves, tree branches, and vast rural landscapes.

Sayak Valencia: The Livestreaming Regime: From Gore Capitalism to Contemporary Snuff Politics
2021-11-15 12:00 - 13:30
What is “gore capitalism” and how does it turn into “snuff politics” in the borderlands between Tijuana and San Diego? In answering those questions, Sayak Valencia discusses examples of audiovisual devices and virtual social networks that challenge the regime of truth through what she calls “the livestreaming regime.” Her talk considers how the contemporary body has become a platform for a new media-disseminated common sense that produces bio-hyper-mediated subjectivities. She analyzes viral trends, fashion, and acts of cultural as well as corporeal appropriation that crystallize in diverse bodies and demonstrate the influence of virtual networks in the construction of the material world.
