5 Questions with Carin Kuoni of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics

For six years, Carin Kuoni has been director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School in New York City. I wanted to pose my five questions to Kuoni because I see her as someone truly in the middle of a discourse about how art may affect the public sphere as that discourse continues to take shape and evolve.

The Vera List Center (VLC) has consistently presented programs that have brought culture workers together across disciplines to discuss a broad range of topics and problems related to cultural politics and aesthetics. Two of the events that I have attended at the VLC, which I found overwhelmingly thoughtful and compelling, were a conversation in the Fall of 2009 between Galit Eilat, a curator for the Center for Digital Arts in Holon, Israel; Chen Tamir, director of the Queens-based Flux Factory; and Reem Fadda, a Palestinian art historian currently employed by the Guggenheim. During this event, Eilat and co-presenters discussed the Center for Digital Art’s project for a Mobile Archive, a traveling archive of DVDs showcasing work by artists in the Middle-East intended to travel across cultural, national, and symbolic boundaries. The event made me think in crucial ways about how archives may intervene in the Middle-Eastern conflict, and how art may play a role in promoting cultural understanding and dialogue faced with impasse.