2020 Resident Artists in Conversation | Part Two: Pelenakeke Brown and Elissa Moorehead with Jeff Kasper and Tina Campt

July 29, 2020

5-6 PM EDT / 2-3PM PST / 10-11PM GMT

Closed Captioning provided

ASL provided

In January Eyebeam welcomed the 2020 Residents Bassem Saad, Elissa Blount Moorehead, Pelenakeke Brown, and Sofía Córdova to work under the theme Terms of Refusal. Over the course of the last seven months, from various parts of the world, each has considered the impact of this defining moment on their lives and their work. To close out the program, we asked each resident to invite a guest of their choice to reflect on their work and connection to each other.

Part two, taking place July 29th, will take the shape of a one-hour conversation between Pelenakeke Brown and Elissa Moorehead as they reflect on their process through the embodied lenses of place, family, and the quickly shifting uses of digital media in dialogue with artist Jeff Kasper and writer Tina Campt. Join us as we imagine our shared futures together.

This gathering will be closed captioned. For access requests please contact [email protected] two days before the gathering.

About the Residents
Pelenakeke Brown is an interdisciplinary, afakasi Samoan, disabled, immigrant artist from Aotearoa (New Zealand). Her work focuses on movement, especially mark-making, at the points of intersection between disability and Pacific Island indigenous culture. She has been examining the mark-making potential of the computer keyboard and hopes to develop more of her own drawing iconography using the histories of technology, disability, and indigeneity. Among many other achievements, Pelenakeke is an alum of the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the Laundromat Project.

Elissa Blount Moorehead is an artist exploring the poetics of quotidian Black life to emphasize gestural dialectics of quiet domesticity and community making. She is currently a principal partner at TNEG film studio and co-founder of Red Clay Arts in NYC. Elissa used her time at Eyebeam to learn and experiment with translating her work into Augmented and Virtual Reality pieces, telling stories of the erasure and violence inflicted upon Black people and the communities resisting this erasure.
Bassem Saad is an artist/writer from Beirut trained in architecture. His practice deals with future visualization and simulation, and objects or operations that distribute violence, pleasure, care, and waste. He attempts to locate space and time for toying with and maneuvering within complex governance systems, through video, text, spatial installation, and virtual environments. His work was shown in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale and he has been a web resident at Akademie Schloss Solitude and a resident fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program in Beirut.

Sofia Cordova is a Puerto Rican-born, Oakland-based conceptual interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, music, video, photography, sculpture and installation. Her work, which has been exhibited and collected by art institutions such as SFMOMA and the Whitney, considers sci-fi and futurity, dance and music culture(s), the internet, mystical objects, extinction and mutation, migration, marginality, and climate change under the conditions of late capitalism and its technologies. During her residency, she will develop a multimedia performance piece, Guillotina WannaCry, focusing on the lack of Pop cultural language surrounding the idea of historical and future revolution.

Jeff Kasper works in between design, media, and public pedagogy to facilitate participatory experiences, creative curricula, and conceptual social spaces. His current research explores how trauma-informed education and the ethics of nonviolence impact the design process, arts collaborations, and learning—especially for the health and wellbeing of queer and disabled folks.

Over the years, his work has been dedicated to building cultures of support as an artist working in arts management, community health, and social planning. He has presented his work in the United States and internationally. Kasper has received awards and residencies from CUE Art Foundation, Downtown Art, Art Beyond Sight, Social Practice Queens, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and served as a mentor for the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program in Social Practice.

Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art. One of the founding researchers in Black European Studies, her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe, focusing on the role of vernacular photography in processes of historical interpretation. Her books include: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University Michigan Press, 2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012), and Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017). Her forthcoming book, A Black Gaze, will be published by MIT Press in 2021. She has held faculty positions at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke University, and Barnard College. Campt serves as a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. At the Cogut Institute, she leads the Black Visualities Initiative.