Looking towards the future of the Vera List Center, the third day of the Vera List Center Forum 2022 introduces the 2022–2024 VLC Fellows: Carmen Amengual (Los Angeles) and Anna Martine Whitehead (Chicago); Boris Lurie Fellow Omar Mismar (Beirut, Lebanon); and Borderlands Fellows Beatriz Cortez (Los Angeles) and Fox Maxy (San Diego). We are also pleased to present two additional fellows: 2022–2023 Sámi Artist Fellow Matti Aikio and ArtsLink International Fellow Aleksei Borisionok. In this first encounter with Vera List Center audiences, the fellows present on their distinct practices as they embark on developing their fellowship projects.

Appointed under the VLC’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction*, each of the fellowship projects—in form and content—explores the perils and potentials of the political, social, and metaphorical implications of “correction.” The fellowship projects, which range from a feature film to an opera, are in different research and production stages. Each project takes speculative, poetic, critical, and activist approaches to correction, reconsidering existing histories, systems, and practices of correction as well as our relationship with it. Through their projects, the fellows contribute to the intellectual foundation of the VLC, now in its 30th year, and to the public’s understanding and engagement with creative practices and pressing issues through the lens of correction.

Carmen Amengual, Los Angeles, 2022–2024 VLC Fellow
Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist from Argentina, whose work examines the interstices between memory, biography, and history. A Non-coincidental Mirror fabricates a memory for a forgotten event: the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algiers, 1973–Buenos Aires, 1974), while exploring a failed documentary project, which the organizers intended as a tool to educate a Latin American audience about anti-colonial struggles in Africa.

Beatriz Cortez, Los Angeles, 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores simultaneity, different temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. Cortez’s VLC Fellowship project considers the Tierra Blanca Joven—white ash deposited in many parts of the world by the immense, fifth century C.E. eruption of the Ilopango volcano—as sacred land with spiritual meaning to people who also migrated (and continue to migrate) from the Central American region to other territories.

Fox Maxy, San Diego, 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow
Fox Maxy is a film director and artist from San Diego. Watertight, her first feature film with an anticipated release date of 2024, is an artwork about mental health and suicide, about what harms and heals. Watertight is a hybrid documentary, where casual group interviews intertwined with narrative scenes serve as surreal commercial breaks.

Omar Mismar, Beirut, 2022–2024 Boris Lurie Fellow
​​Omar Mismar is a Lebanese visual artist whose project-based practice is materially loose and conceptually driven. Revolution is a Frown Gone Mad investigates the rampant culture of Botox in Lebanon as an extension of war and the witnessing of perpetual violence. The project raises fundamental questions about the aesthetics of disaster, reframed as a discourse on the sensuous body and the anesthetization of the body politic.

Anna Martine Whitehead, Chicago, 2022–2024 VLC Fellow
Anna Martine Whitehead is a Virginia-raised Chicago-based performer, artist, and writer interested in Black queer temporalities. FORCE! an opera in three acts, is a world-building and Black femme story of interior lives and shared dreams that examines relationships and sisterhood that can bloom in the shadow of prisons and the prison industrial complex. Whitehead presents an in-progress preview of FORCE! as part of Forum, a celebratory concert with Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty on Saturday evening at 8 pm.

Matti Aikio, Tromsø, 2022–2023 Sámi Fellow 
Matti Aikio is a Sámi visual artist from the Finnish side of the Sápmi. He has a background in Sámi reindeer herding culture. He holds an MA in contemporary art from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. Aikio’s art has been exhibited in various countries in Europe, Asia & Latin America. He works with mixed media, photography, sound, installations, video, sculpture, and text. His main interest as an artist is to try to offer the spectators a possibility to shift perspective on established dominant narratives and marginalized topics. Lately, he’s been focused on topics like the concept, the idea, and the image of nature and how the indigenous cultures seem to get suffocated by the schizophrenic nature relationship of the nation states and capitalism. Aikio is one of TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Fellows 2022 and also performs as a DJ. Aikio is a 2022-2023 Sámi Fellow, a joint initiative between Frame Contemporary Art Finland, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. 

Aleksei Borisionok, Vienna and Minsk, ArtsLink International Fellow 
Aleksei Borisionok is a curator, writer, and organizer currently based in Minsk, Belarus, and Vienna, Austria. He is a member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective and the Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. Alexei focuses on art and politics in Eastern Europe during the socialist and post-socialist periods. His work has been published in various magazines, catalogues, and online platforms including L’Internationale Online, Partisan, Moscow Art Magazine, Springerin, Hjärnstorm, Paletten, and syg.ma, among many others. Aleksei has written and curated exhibitions on education and unlearning, workers’ movements and strikes, the history of artistic practices, museum displays, and social movements. His current research investigates the temporalities of post-socialism. Borisionok is an ArtsLink International Fellow at the Vera List Center.