On occasion of the exhibition The Storyteller at Parsons, the Vera List Center is pleased to announce a colloquium exploring artists’ participation in–and reconstruction of–documentary processes to illuminate new perspectives on historical events. The colloquium, organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), will be held Saturday, January 30 and includes artists Steve Mumford and Liisa Roberts as well as curators Claire Gilman and Margaret Sundell with moderator Kate Fowle, Executive Director of ICI.

Please note: this event is free and open to the public, though seating is limited. Please RSVP to Chelsea Haines, Public Programs Manager at 212-254-8200.

The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics will also present a number of public programs, including discussions with Pablo Helguera and Aleksandra Wagner on the role of storytelling in their practice, and a series of screenings of featured works. The events are sponsored by the Vera List Center and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design in collaboration with ICI, the organizer of the exhibition.

Posted on December 10, 2009

In celebration of the release of the second issue of Where We Are Now’s online journal, edited by Joseph Grima, Marisa Jahn and Vera List Center director Carin Kuoni, contributors gather to discuss their explorations of this issue’s guiding theme: Speculating on Change.

Explicitly tied to difference, change as such is perhaps most clearly measured in terms of chronological time, comparing a “before” to an established “after.” Speculation on change, however, entails projection, prognosis and risk into the future, and corresponds to the fluid, divergent and simultaneous time space continuum of our contemporary existence.

The launch will feature a presentation by journal contributor Melanie Crean. “The Shape of Change,” her ongoing web project featured in the second issue, investigates how people perceive, measure and represent change over time, in both personal and political contexts, through two distinct approaches. The first component of the project is a public web archive that tracks American and Iraqi citizens’ desire for political change as the two countries attempt to extricate from one another politically and militarily. The second component documents an infant’s early development as it learns to walk and speak, and thus establish itself as an independent social subject. The two approaches serve as counterpoint to one another, creating a portrait of the ephemeral nature of change, independence and identity formation, from a macro and micro perspective.

Other journal contributors include Tom Angotti, Daniel Bozhkov, Celine Condorelli, Bryan Finoki, Beatrice Gibson, Jean Gourley, Carlos Motta, Andrew Ross, Ben Shepard, Mark Tribe and Merve Unsal.

Where We Are Now was founded in November 2007 by an ad hoc group of representatives of many arts organizations in the city, among them The Change You Want to See Gallery, Creative Time, Cooper Union, Parsons the New School of Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. It is a discursive and loosely organized platform with the mission to illuminate, deepen and amplify the discourse around an aesthetic practice with political content in New York City.

More information on Where We Are Now.

This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle, “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on September 20, 2009