Center for Human Rights and the Arts

Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Natq: Impossible Speech
2021-10-04 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
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.

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.

Forensic Oceanography: Border Forensics
2021-04-16 12:00 - 14:00
In this presentation, Charles Heller and Lorenzo 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.

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.

Emily Johnson: Land and An Architecture of the Overflow
2021-04-09 12:00 - 14:00
Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was a co-compiler of the document, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and is part of an advisory group, with Reuben Roqueni, Lori Pourier, Ronee Penoi, and Vallejo Gantner – developing a First Nations Performing Arts Network

There is a Baba in Our House
2021-04-08 13:00 - 14:30
World premiere of the first in our annual digital commissions, featuring a Q&A with artist Leil Zahra Mortada and Nubian Geographic hosted by Dr. Hanan Toukan (Bard College Berlin).
في بيتنا بابا
Parting from a personal narrative, and using references from both popular culture and key political events, artist Leil Zahra Mortada uses the performative aspect of nationalism and its propaganda, to contribute to a much-needed debate around Pan-Arabism & its consequences, history and present.
In this political coming-of-age, the video highlights the blurred lines between the Father figure as both the patriarch of the family and the leader of the nation. The author holds their father’s bias accountable despite the latter’s unquestionable commitment to social justice.

Cassils: The Struggle For/ The Struggle Against
2021-04-02 12:00
In a time of lockdown and quarantines, of fascism and propaganda, we need reason and action to be supported by visions of change. Cassils discusses artistic and performative tactics uniquely suited for our time. Reflecting on ten years of practice where they carve out strategies for trans representation, they discuss tactics to educate, engage and agitate while attempting to balance and center love, community and relevant action.

The White Pube: [ideas for a new art world]
2021-03-26 12:00
The ~cultural sector~ has been resistant to change, it has held on to antiquated balances of power like no other area of society, and that rigidity has affected the way we distribute resources amongst ourselves within the creative industry. We have got to radically restructure the way we do things. If we had the chance to terraform the arts landscape we’ve got, and become more expansive in what we do, where would we start? How do you go about making an industry that’s sustainable, accessible, genuinely diverse, fundamentally joyful?

Faustin Linyekula: Of Ruins And Responsibility
2021-03-12 12:00
This lecture will be (again) a dialogue with the ruins I inherited from my fathers, guided by the poet’s voice:
I would come to that country, my country, and I would say to it:
“Kiss me without fear… And if I do not know what to say, it is still for you that I speak. ”
And I would say to it:
“My mouth shall be the mouth of misfortunes which have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those which break down in the prison cell of despair. ”
And, coming, I would say to myself :
“Beware, my body and soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who cries out is not a dancing bear. ”
Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land
(Translated from the French by John Berger and Anna Bostock)
