Dialogue, Screening

Screenings of 2020-2022 VLC Fellow Adelita Husni Bey’s films Postcards from the Desert Island, Chiron, and Time Under Siege structure a conversation and interventions with 2009-2011 VLC Fellow Robert Sember. The event unfolds in response to the films and questions around loneliness, grief, and touch. Guided by these questions and a shared interest in pedagogical models and collective practices, their conversation touches on the pandemic and its protocols and the current restrictions and possibilities on “gathering.”

This event is part of the Vera List Center Forum 2020, highlighting the center’s fellowship program and featuring presentations by the five 2020-2022 Vera List Center Fellows: Carolina Caycedo (Colombia/U.S.), Etcétera (Argentina), Maria Hupfield (Canada), Adelita Husni Bey (Italy/U.S.), and Rasheedah Phillips (Philadelphia).

Adelita Husni Bey is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theater, and critical legal studies. She organizes workshops, produces publications, broadcasts, and exhibition work using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, students, and teachers, the work consists of making sites to practice in collectively. Her work was part of the Italian pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017), and her most recent solo exhibition was Chiron, at the New Museum, New York (2019). She has presented at the Vera List Center and participated in Being: New Photography 2018, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2018); Dreamlands, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale (2015); Really Useful Knowledge, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, (2014); and Utopia for Sale?, MAXXI Museum, Rome, Italy (2014).

Robert Sember works at the intersection of art and public health. He is a member of the international sound-art collective, Ultra-red, which helped establish Vogue’ology, an initiative by and for members of the African-American and Latino/a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community in New York City. His ethnographic research in the U.S. and South Africa has focused on governmental and non-governmental substance abuse, mental health, and homelessness service sectors with an emphasis on HIV/AIDS prevention, testing, and treatment access. Robert teaches Interdisciplinary Arts at The New School’s Eugene Lang College. From 2010-2019 Robert was on the faculty of the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture, and Society at the University of Amsterdam’s Graduate School of Social Sciences. Robert was a 2009-2011 Vera List Center for Art and Politics Fellow. He is the recipient of the New School’s Distinguished Teaching (2016) and Social Justice (2018) teaching awards.

The Vera List Center Forum 2020 launches the center’s 2020-2022 focus theme, As for Protocols. Curated by Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira, it is organized and convened with the support of Adrienne Umeh, Heran Abate, Joshua van Biema, and Maryna Arabei.

The Vera List Center Forum 2020 is made possible by major support from Jane Lombard and the Kettering Fund, as well as the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and The New School as well as members of the Vera List Center’s board and other individuals.