This Spring at the Vera List Center

We are pleased to announce our spring 2022 programs and the final chapter of our 2020–2022 focus theme: As for Protocols.

This spring we feature new commissions and projects produced by and in collaboration with our 2020–2022 Fellows: Etcétera, Adelita Husni Bey, and Rasheedah Phillips, along with the VLC Borderlands Fellows Carolina Caycedo and Maria Hupfield. Developed over the past two years, the Fellows’ culminating projects offer distinctive investigations into the protocols that govern our relationship to the environment, to each other, to capitalist frameworks, to time, to performance, and to historical precedent while enacting new systems for engagement.

With the exhibition These Conditions, Adelita Husni Bey examines the current pandemic from a pedagogical perspective, focusing on participatory work, performance, and possibilities for societal transformation. Rasheedah Phillips of the collective Black Quantum Futurism presents the exhibition Time Zone Protocols and the accompanying program Prime Meridian Unconference to explore the exclusionary nature of Western time constructs and delve into their historical and ongoing implications on Black communities in the US.

Maria Hupfield brings together fellow performers, artists, and activists in solidarity and recognition of the National Day of Awareness and Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Gender Diverse People. Carolina Caycedo builds on a ceremony and vigil hosted last fall in a solidarity action to honor those who have been killed on the frontlines of environmental activism. And the artist collective Etcétera presents the third and final chapter of their Fellowship project, bringing visibility and support for the collaborative, ongoing actions against ecocide, extractives, and environmental justice.

Join us for more live performances, exhibitions, installations, and online programs this spring.

EXHIBITION
These Conditions
February 8–April 8, 2022
Open to the public Saturdays and Sundays, 12–6 pm
Annex, Brooklyn Army Terminal
As the culmination of Adelita Husni Bey’s research as a 2020–2022 Vera List Center Fellow into the current pandemic and its aftermath within a larger historical and artistic framework, the Vera List Center presents These Conditions, an exhibition and pedagogical platform at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Through weekly workshops, the exhibition hosts a group of individuals who have worked in person during the pandemic to reflect on their experience and develop characters, scenes, and performative sketches that express the relationship between pandemics and social change. Two works developed last year will also be on view: On Necessary Work (2021) and Cronaca del Tempo Ripetuto (A chronicle of histories repeating, 2021).

SYMPOSIUM
Remote Control: Surveying Drones and Culture Today
February 9–11, 2022
Online and In-person
We are pleased to partner with High Line Art and writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel present Remote Control: Surveying Drones and Culture Today, a three-day symposium examining contemporary intersections of drones and drone warfare, arts, and culture. Featuring performances, speaker presentations, panel discussions, and film screenings with leading experts, artists, activists, academics, and practitioners across diverse disciplines, the symposium is the second of its kind hosted in concert with Sam Durant’s High Line Plinth commission Untitled (drone). Join us at The Clemente for Soundscapes of Conflict for a special perofmance of Guillermo Galindo‘s Remote Control followed by a conversation with Galindo, Raven Chacon, moderated by Christoph Cox. Register here.

AS FOR PROTOCOLS SEMINAR SERIES
Seminar 10: School of Tomorrow: From the Open Plan to the Tele-classroom
Monday, March 21, 2022, 6–7:30 pm EDT
Brooklyn Army Terminal/Online hybrid
Convened with Video School, a roving pedagogical platform facilitated by Gabo Camnitzer, Joseph Lubitz, and Candice Strongwater, School of Tomorrow is held within Adelita Husni-Bey’s installation These Conditions at Brooklyn Army Terminal. This seminar brings together a series of live readings and video transmissions by educational theorists, artists, and sociologists that consider the social and spatial dimensions of educational architectures.

Seminar 11: Forces of Art: Protocols of Evaluation
Monday, April 4, 2022, 6–7:30 pm EDT
Online
In this VLC Seminar, we look for an expanded notion of resources—that takes into account infrastructures, history, ground, staff, the public—in order to address urgent demands for more equitable organizations and to develop the protocols and tools to support them. The speakers are critics, writers, and scholars who contributed to Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World, a critical anthology on broadly diverse evaluation practices today.

Seminar 12: Moving Protocols
Wednesday, May 9, 2022, 6–7:30 pm EDT
Co-convened with Eugene Lang College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Joshua Lubin-Levy, this seminar on protocols for assembly, of coming, being, and moving together concludes the VLC’s As for Protocols Seminar Series, a two-year open curriculum. The seminar takes place in-person, off-site, and in partnership with Movement Research Performance Journal.

EXHIBITION
Black Quantum Futurism: Time Zone Protocols
April 4–18, 2022
Open daily 12–6 pm EDT, Thursdays late until 8 pm
Parsons School of Design, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, 66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street
Developed out of Rasheedah Phillips’s ongoing practice as a member of Black Quantum Futurism and their 2020–2022 Vera List Center Fellowship project, the exhibition Time Zone Protocols explores the written “Protocol Proceedings” developed at the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference. The exhibition and accompanying Unconference traces the creation of written and unwritten political agendas, social agreements, and rules underlying Westernized time constructs with the aim of illuminating the impacts that oppressive time protocols and policies have on marginalized Black communities in the US in particular.

CONFERENCE
Prime Meridian Unconference
Friday, April 15 through Sunday, April 17, 2022
Parsons School of Design, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, 66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street, New York
The three-day Unconference brings together artists, architects, musicians, and scholars of physics, geography, technology, and African American studies for interactive talks, workshops, panels, performances, and plenary sessions. From their various disciplinary backgrounds, the participants consider new ways of understanding our relationship to space-time, utilizing specific Black social, geographical, and cultural frameworks that seek to remap or shift the very time zones that leave Black people locked out of narratives of the past and future, and stuck in a narrow temporal present. Preceding the exhibition and Unconference is the launch of www.timezoneprotocols.space and Time Zone Protocols Surveyors, a group convened by Phillips leading up to and who will attend and contribute to the Unconference, collectively developing protocols, resolutions, temporal tools, time zones, and markers. Apply by February 6.

PERFORMANCE
Massive Jingle: Solidarity Action—The Day After Awareness
Friday, May 6, 2022, 7–8 pm EDT
Location to be announced
A multiformat performance event involving Indigenous design and song, this program is convened by 2020–2022 Borderlands Fellow Maria Hupfield as part of her ongoing research into Indigenous performance practices and protocols. It brings together powerful Indigenous women and gender diverse performers, artists, and activists in a demonstration of sovereignty and cultural strength the day after the National Day of Awareness and Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Gender Diverse People with inspiring results. Hupfield’s forthcoming publication with the VLC expands on her collaborative work, bringing together a cross-disciplinary group of Indigenous performance artists to examine Indigenous protocols and supplant traditional notions of the archive in making space for collaborative work.

ACTION & ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
La Siembra
Saturday, May 7, 2022, 2–4 pm EDT
Union Settlement, 237 East 104th Street, New York
VLC Borderlands Fellow Carolina Caycedo returns for a follow up to her September 2021 vigil and “pagamento,” a performance and solidarity action event hosted in the context of her installation Genealogy of Struggle* in El Museo del Barrio’s Estamos Bien – La Trienal 20/21. Compostable items from the vigil have been nurturing the soil in the community garden at Union Settlement, where Caycedo will plant a memorial tree and install a sonic marker for murdered environmental activists. Speakers include Southern Arizona border and water protector activists, and Tatiana Roa Avendaño, an environmentalist, educator, and researcher of Censat Agua Viva. The discussion is moderated by 2021–2022 Borderlands Curatorial Fellow Regan de Loggans (Mississippi Choctaw/Ki’Che Maya).

EXHIBITION
Etcétera: NEO-EXTRA-ACTIVISM–Protocols for Buen Vivir
May 20–June 10, 2022
The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center
107 Suffolk St, New York
Co-presented by the Vera List Center and The Clemente, this exhibition is the last chapter in Etcétera’s two-year 2020–2022 Boris Lurie Fellowship. NEO-EXTRA-ACTIVISM–Protocols for Buen Vivir brings together artistic research on the neo-liberal extraction of natural resources that produces socio-environmental disasters and violations of human rights and those of other species, and connects international artists, environmental activists, and local communities across Latin America and New York. The exhibition showcases their research findings and documentation from the first two chapters of their project, Buen Vivir and Ecocide, alongside posters, installations, video, and performances from the collective’s 25-year archive.