Alluvial is a microfestival of artwork created by the first year M.A. students in the Human Rights & the Arts program at Bard College. The microfestival takes place at various times and locations on campus and in Tivoli on Tuesday, May 9 and Friday, May 12, and includes multidisciplinary works, installations, performances, live art, interactive work, and film. These works in progress are part of the final submission for the Collaborations and Community-based Art course taught by Sabine El Chamaa.
Full schedule and map below.
Friday, May 12
Body Politics by Mariia Pankova
May 12, 12:00 pm – 12:30 pm @ Red Room, Campus Center
Body Politics invites the audience to a lecture performance situated in a fictitious museum where borders between concepts become blurred. What does it mean to have a body in an intermingled net of political effects? How do our immediate bodily experiences, such as pain and pleasure, get enmeshed in power relations and exploited in different practices. This project explores the corporeality of being and reflects on the historical developments around both the protection and violation of bodies.
Cranes and Ships: A Poetry-Film for the Friends in Russia by K.
May 12, 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm @ Bard Chapel, basement
Cranes and Ships is a poetry film that takes its name after a children’s poem by Daniil Kharms, a repressed Soviet writer. The film ponders the silences and small acts of resistance by anti-war Russians at a time when mass protest fails, when the state introduces military censorship, and the full-scale war is not experienced directly. The film seeks to approach the variety of ways in which the war uproots people – even when they are not displaced physically.
من على كرسي سيدي اثور – From My Grandfather’s Chair I Rage by Mayss Al Alami
May 12, 2:00 pm – 2:45 pm @ Resnick Studio, Fisher Center
From My Grandfather’s Chair I Rage is a live performance about the violence of watching an occupied home from afar, from the outside. The performance takes off from the artist’s childhood home in Amman, Jordan, where she grew up watching her grandfather relentlessly monitor news broadcasts to keep up with updates on his home in Palestine. The artist takes the audience on a journey of pilgrimage and puts in motion the inherited rage and helpless monitoring of an intergenerational, exiled Palestinian woman.
Home Is A Fever by Guzal Alimova
May 12, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm @ Resnick Studio, Fisher Center
Home Is A Fever is a live and immersive artwork that invites its audience to reflect on the notion of home. It explores the acts of memory and concept of time. Home being an associative and intimate concept, Home Is A Fever engages with associative notions of home and the house of its viewers while reconstructing the conventional meaning of home through storytelling, language, text, and architectural outline of the artist’s home in Khujand, Tajikistan. Based on a personal story of a home of abuse and absence, the project reflects on the intimate experience of private spaces, being exiled either by choice or necessity, and the inability of a physical return.
Please note: The audience is requested to bring in their phone and headphones. The audio piece to the artwork is accessible only through QR code.
Dispatch from Exile by Anastasia Dzutstsati
May 12, 4:30 pm – 5:00 pm @ The Suminski Innski, 8 Friendship Street, Tivoli
Dispatch from Exile is an immersive video installation that blends drawing, creative writing, and filmmaking. After being exiled from Russia in the summer of 2021, I turned to extensive diary writing to cope with my new reality. I found myself mourning my pre-war self and revisiting my past through my diaries. Grief is a universal experience, extending beyond losing a loved one to the loss of a homeland, freedom, or ideal. Freud argued that it’s not a pathological condition but a natural process that passes with time. Interrupting grief can lead to unhealthy melancholia. Dispatch from Exile invites the audience into my journey of coming to terms with exile and rediscovering a part of myself that I had started to forget.
Tracing The (In)visible by Laila Sharif
May 12, 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm @ The Suminski Innski, 8 Friendship Street, Tivoli
Mozart said, “The music is not in the notes, it is the space between the notes.” So what exactly goes on in between the notes? It’s not always a literal silence, is it? Each note is usually still ringing out before the next one is played, right? But yes, something is happening that relates to silence. We are listening to the sound of Silence. The space between notes allows them to resonate, reverberate, and reach their full measure of expression. The invisible yet visible silence of the symphony of melting ice. The urgency of the slow violence of the sounds of the cracking ice can be another way of communicating knowledge to the audience, a different way to experience nature through music and visuals.
Baby Luka Has Finally Realized by Luka Gotsiridze
May 12, 6:45 pm – 7:45 pm @ The Suminski Innski, 8 Friendship Street, Tivoli
Experience the taste of Georgia and immerse yourself in a cultural feast with Baby Luka Has Finally Realized. This interactive performance is a journey through traditional Georgian cuisine and customs, where you’ll be seated at a Supra [სუფრა] table as a guest of honor. Our Tamada [თამადა], or toastmaster, will guide you through an evening of storytelling, infused with humor, wit, and SUPRAnatural magic. As you enjoy an abundance of food and drink, you will become part of the Supra’s forging of a social bond that resists the influence of external powers on Georgia and its people.