Center for Human Rights and the Arts

Kendall Thomas: Taking (A)part: Human Rights, Human Rites, "Human Writes"
2022-02-25 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
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.

Sayak Valencia: The Livestreaming Regime: From Gore Capitalism to Contemporary Snuff Politics
2021-11-15 12:00 - 13:30

Githa Hariharan: The Writer in Search of Citizenship
2021-11-01 12:00 - 13:30
How does a writer find her voice? And how does she locate herself among the power structures that operate in the world around her? Drawing on her own work, Githa Hariharan examines the writer’s struggle to enlarge the small space occupied by an individual life. She describes the project of giving voice to a mosaic of voices and their multiple narratives, mapped onto diverse locations. Using her own journey as a writer, and her social commitments as a citizen, she traces the creative process through several prisms, from politics to cultural locations to strategies of craft.

Only God Can Make Tomato Sauce
2021-10-18 12:00 - 13:30
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Brian Lobel and writer Season Butler, moderated by Jack Ferver (Bard College).
Two friends and food makers share their recipes for healing, their personal histories and food journeys, and wider reflections on medicine versus the medicinal, knowledge versus expertise, the homegrown and the home-y, the wholesome and the holy-cow-get-that-away-from-me.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Natq: Impossible Speech
2021-10-04 12:00 - 13:30
Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents ‘Natq’, a live audiovisual essay on the politics and possibilities of reincarnation. Through listening closely to “xenoglossy” (the impossible speech of reincarnated subjects), this performance explores a collectivity of lives who use reincarnation to negotiate their condition at the threshold of the law—people for whom injustices and violence have escaped the historical record due to colonial subjugation, corruption, rural lawlessness, and legal amnesty. In the piece, reincarnation is not a question of belief but a medium for justice.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan - Natq: Impossible Speech
2021-10-04 12:00 - 13:30

Coco Fusco: The Right to Have Rights: Cuban Artists Confront the State
2021-09-20 12:00 - 13:30
Fusco will discuss the recent efforts by “artivists” in Cuba to advocate for expanded expressive freedoms and civil rights. She will focus primarily on the activities of the 27N group and the San Isidro Movement.

Dwala Lam'
2021-06-14 11:00 - 13:00
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Sethembile Msezane and writer Dr. Portia Malatjie, moderated by Panashe Chigumadzi and hosted by Wits School of Arts.
Praise singing and movement is the celebration of presence. Dwala Lam’ is a praise song that reminds one of the groundedness that is inscribed in their ancestry. These inscriptions, may come by way of being christened by a name that charts out your destiny, creates relief, a warm smile in a quiet moment or even conveys a message to the world.
The names that are often given in African cultures are the hopes and wishes of families that raise the bearer of the name. These names may be passed down through generations, they may be whispered to an expecting mother in her sleep. The names become the accession of ancestry but they are also a reminder to the bearer of the name of their significance, to remember this in good as well as challenging times.
The whispers of the praise songs from one’s ancestors are the protective spells that affirm us in the ebb and flow of life.

Hands to Hold
2021-06-03 11:30 - 13:00
World premiere of our third digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Emilio Rojas and writer Pamela Sneed hosted by Dr. Sanjay Kumar (Central European University).
Hands to Hold is centered around 2 durational performances devised by Emilio Rojas. For a 6.5-hour performance, the artist drank a 1.5 gallons of sap from a 250 year old sugar maple in the Hudson Valley. This action took place in the ancestral homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people where Rojas resides. 1.5 gallons is the amount of blood flowing through our bodies at all times. This durational performance embodies a transfusion of fluids, the blood of the tree, into the artist’s bloodstream. In the second performance, Rojas created casts of his hands, made soap molds, and performed the ritual of ablution for 8 hours.
In this collaboration between Rojas and poet Pamela Sneed, the artists recognize the labor of artists and black and brown people during this past year of pandemic. It is an attempt to send a blessing to all those hands that by holding on, have held us through. Hands to Hold is a journey of gratitude and acknowledgement, a litany to the pandemics (AIDS and Covid-19) and the waves of mourning around us. It is an attempt to memorialize the intersections of our relationships to this land and the systems of oppression that we’ve inherited.

Reflections from Al-Quds Bard on the Current Situation
2021-05-24 11:00 - 12:30
The OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts, the Human Rights Project, and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College are pleased to co-present the following panel:

Ms. Rana Hajjaj, Program Manager for Al-Quds Bard College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Saida Hamad, Head of Media Studies Program, Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences
Professor Munir Nusseibeh, Assistant Professor in Faculty of Law, Al-Quds University

Mise-en-crise
2021-05-18 10:00 - 11:30
World premiere of our second digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Malik Nashad Sharpe (Marikiscrycrycry) and writer Hélène Selam Kleih hosted by Dr. Fintan Walsh (Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre).
Mise-en-Crise is a film that considers choreography as both the site and the scenography of hope, performatively carved from crisis and rebellion. Playing with the theatrical concept mise-en-scène, this work uses dance as a material tool and texture for elemental seduction and strategic unruliness.
From night to sunrise to day to night, Mise-en-Crise relies upon a documentary-style framework to follow and visiblise the formal construction of atmosphere and persona. By materialising an aesthetics that is admittedly not here, unknown, joyous, flamboyant, gestural, defiant and even ritualistic, the work attempts to create conditional desires for an unspoken and untold freedom and fantasy for the marginalised subject. Dancing on top of the vortex of a crafted, apocalyptic visual and subtextural narrative that doesn’t give into its own fatalism, yet ruminates on the question, ‘And what to be thrown into crisis?’ We create the possibility of hope from nothing.

Hamed Sinno: Queerness in/as Metaphor
2021-05-07 12:00 - 14:00
An analysis of several musical and literary texts by Mashrou Leila, as sites for negotiating the discursive boundaries of gender construction in the public sphere, and an attempt to frame the work within ongoing conversations about the limits of representation as a mode of political engagement.

Mark Sealy: Photography, Race, Rights, and Representation
2021-04-30 12:00 - 14:00
The photographers discussed share a forensic dialogue with photography’s past and offer navigational tools for its future possibilities in the making of new identities and histories. We need to keep open cultural portals in which to discuss the application of photography as a vehicle for self-determination, remaking histories, and visual forms of resistance. The aim is a visual voyage through the difficult terrains of racism, social change and the matrix of colonialities that haunt the micro and macro now. We will attend to those who have acted on and engaged with the complexities of human recognition and, through their sense of being responsible human subjects, have produced works that enable us to question the now of our time as an open interpretative space that is both indeterminate, contested, and always in flux.

Ashmina Ranjit: Politics of Being
2021-04-23 12:00 - 14:00
Just because we’re born with a vagina, why accept that our family, society, and state continue treating us as unequal ‘beings’? Why sexual violence, unequal rights, and inequities persist? Why do we need to rethink and re-imagine intersections of gender, caste, class and religion?
I plan to reflect on insights from my journey of resisting and interrogating complex politics of Hindu patriarchy, especially the role of nation-state in sustaining structures of dominance and exploitation. Using art as a tool for investigating and reclaiming my own position as a ‘Being’, I am exploring my multiple identities as a human, citizen, Asian, artist amongst others.

Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani: Border Forensics
2021-04-16 12:00 - 14:00
In this presentation, Heller and Pezzani will discuss the nature of contemporary borders and the ever-shifting modalities of border violence. Drawing on their work within the Forensic Oceanography project since 2011, which has focused on the Mediterranean frontier, they will discuss the strategies they have used to document traces of violent events and seek accountability for them. Reflecting on the effectiveness, but also the ambivalences, limits and blind-spots of this practice, they will point to the directions they are beginning to explore within their new project, Border Forensics.
