This lecture will be (again) a dialogue with the ruins I inherited from my fathers, guided by the poet’s voice:
I would come to that country, my country, and I would say to it:
"Kiss me without fear… And if I do not know what to say, it is still for you that I speak. "
The ~cultural sector~ has been resistant to change, it has held on to antiquated balances of power like no other area of society, and that rigidity has affected the way we distribute resources amongst ourselves within the creative industry. We have got to radically restructure the way we do things. If we had the chance to terraform the arts landscape...
In a time of lockdown and quarantines, of fascism and propaganda, we need reason and action to be supported by visions of change. Cassils discusses artistic and performative tactics uniquely suited for our time. Reflecting on ten years of practice where they carve out strategies for trans representation, they discuss tactics to educate, engage and agitate while attempting to balance...
World premiere of the first in our annual digital commissions, featuring a Q&A with artist Leil Zahra Mortada and Nubian Geographic hosted by Dr. Hanan Toukan (Bard College Berlin). في بيتنا بابا Parting from a personal narrative, and using references from both popular culture and key political events, artist Leil Zahra Mortada uses the performative aspect of nationalism and its...
Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was a co-compiler of the document, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and is part of an advisory group, with Reuben Roqueni, Lori Pourier, Ronee Penoi, and Vallejo Gantner - developing a First Nations Performing Arts Network
In this presentation, Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani will discuss the nature of contemporary borders and the ever-shifting modalities of border violence. Drawing on their work within the Forensic Oceanography project since 2011, which has focused on the Mediterranean frontier, they will discuss the strategies they have used to document traces of violent events and seek accountability for them. Reflecting...
Just because we’re born with a vagina, why accept that our family, society, and state continue treating us as unequal ‘beings’? Why sexual violence, unequal rights, and inequities persist? Why do we need to rethink and re-imagine intersections of gender, caste, class and religion? I plan to reflect on insights from my journey of resisting and interrogating complex politics of...
The photographers discussed share a forensic dialogue with photography’s past and offer navigational tools for its future possibilities in the making of new identities and histories. We need to keep open cultural portals in which to discuss the application of photography as a vehicle for self-determination, remaking histories, and visual forms of resistance. The aim is a visual voyage through the...
An analysis of several musical and literary texts by Mashrou Leila, as sites for negotiating the discursive boundaries of gender construction in the public sphere, and an attempt to frame the work within ongoing conversations about the limits of representation as a mode of political engagement.
World premiere of our second digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Malik Nashad Sharpe (Marikiscrycrycry) and writer Hélène Selam Kleih hosted by Dr. Fintan Walsh (Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre). Mise-en-Crise is a film that considers choreography as both the site and the scenography of hope, performatively carved from crisis and rebellion. Playing with the theatrical concept mise-en-scène, this...
The OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts, the Human Rights Project, and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College are pleased to co-present the following panel: Ms. Rana Hajjaj, Program Manager for Al-Quds Bard College of Arts and Sciences Professor Saida Hamad, Head of Media Studies Program, Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences Professor Munir Nusseibeh, Assistant Professor...
World premiere of our third digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Emilio Rojas and writer Pamela Sneed hosted by Dr. Sanjay Kumar (Central European University). Hands to Hold is centered around 2 durational performances devised by Emilio Rojas. For a 6.5-hour performance, the artist drank a 1.5 gallons of sap from a 250 year old sugar maple in the...
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Sethembile Msezane and writer Dr. Portia Malatjie, moderated by Panashe Chigumadzi and hosted by Wits School of Arts. Praise singing and movement is the celebration of presence. Dwala Lam’ is a praise song that reminds one of the groundedness that is inscribed in their ancestry. These inscriptions, may come by way of being...
Fusco will discuss the recent efforts by "artivists" in Cuba to advocate for expanded expressive freedoms and civil rights. She will focus primarily on the activities of the 27N group and the San Isidro Movement.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents 'Natq', a live audiovisual essay on the politics and possibilities of reincarnation. Through listening closely to "xenoglossy" (the impossible speech of reincarnated subjects), this performance explores a collectivity of lives who use reincarnation to negotiate their condition at the threshold of the law—people for whom injustices and violence have escaped the historical record due to colonial...
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Brian Lobel and writer Season Butler, moderated by Jack Ferver (Bard College). Two friends and food makers share their recipes for healing, their personal histories and food journeys, and wider reflections on medicine versus the medicinal, knowledge versus expertise, the homegrown and the home-y, the wholesome and the...
How does a writer find her voice? And how does she locate herself among the power structures that operate in the world around her? Drawing on her own work, Githa Hariharan examines the writer’s struggle to enlarge the small space occupied by an individual life. She describes the project of giving voice to a mosaic of voices and their multiple...
What is “gore capitalism” and how does it turn into “snuff politics” in the borderlands between Tijuana and San Diego? In answering those questions, Sayak Valencia discusses examples of audiovisual devices and virtual social networks that challenge the regime of truth through what she calls “the livestreaming regime.” Her talk considers how the contemporary body has become a platform for...
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Alexandre Paulikevitch and writer Romy Lynn Attieh, moderated by curator Amanda Abi Khalil and co-presented by CEC ArtsLink. Tastes of Loss tells the story of a dancer's intimate relationship to food cooking and preservation. It is a visual essay on survival, womanhood, and joy. It is filmed in...
How do we exist in complexity and contradiction? Can we mourn and celebrate all at once? In a world focused on binaries, where do we find power on the edges? In this talk, Bhenji speaks to the beauty of everything at once, of finding meaning between practices, bridging bodies and islands of knowledge together in order to expand our potential...
In Taking (A)part: Human Rights, Human Rites and “Human Writes,” Kendall Thomas revisits “Human Writes,” a 2005 performance-installation about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on which he collaborated with the choreographer William Forsythe and The Forsythe Company. The cultural theorist Stuart Hall once argued that in the arts “things get said in ways in which they can't get said...
For decades, well-meaning journalists and cultural workers used a humanizing framework in their representation of oppressed people, in hopes of countering the traditional portrayal of the Palestinian as a "terrorist." Within this framework, a perfect victimhood emerged as an ethnocentric prerequisite for sympathy and solidarity, often over-emphasizing oppressed people’s nonviolence, humane professions, and disabilities. In “Bombs, women, children, etc.”: Humanization,...
The inaugural cohort of eleven MA students developed work-in-progress as a part of "Collaborations & Community," a course taught by the Center's director Dr. Tania El Khoury. The collaborative creative projects span various formats and artistic mediums, from dinner performance, live art, digital work, party, and posters. Wednesday 9 March Howls in the Mountains by Carol Montealegre 2:30pm (Resnick Studio,...
CHRA will be screening three short films by Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay on Thursday, March 17th, 7:45pm EDT at Upstate Films, Rhinebeck NY. The event is free and open to the public. Reservations can be made through this link. The films will be followed by post-screening discussions: محاولة عن سد الفرات Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam (1970), 13 min الدجاج The Chickens...
CHRA will be screening four short films by Egyptian filmmaker Ateyyat El Abnoudy on Tuesday, March 29th, 12pm EDT on Zoom (link). The event is free and open to the public. Four films will be shown on Zoom and followed by post-screening discussion with audiovisual archivist Yasmin Desouki (Chicago Film Archives, formerly Cimatheque - Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, Egypt)....
By understanding our art as a being with whom we create a relationship, Layli Long Soldier explores the ways in which we can make commitments and agreements with our writing and art; uphold expectations and enact reciprocity, as one would do with a relative; and nourish our relationship through pleasure, playfulness, or enjoyment. These agreements with our art, in turn,...
CHRA will be screening Mirt Sost Shi Amit / Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976) by Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima on Tuesday, April 5th, 5:30pm EDT at Weis Cinema, Bard College. The event is free and open to the public. The film screening will be followed by post-screening discussions. Mirt Sost Shi Amit / Harvest: 3,000 Years is Part three of public film...
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission and a text by Dr. Manijeh Moradian, featuring a Q&A with artist Amitis Motevalli. For Khar va Attar, the artist takes on the challenge of channeling a conversation between 10th century Persian scholar and doctor, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), her uncle Manoucher Emrani, an agricultural engineer and botanist, and her friend, Soraya Medina, a...
CHRA will be screening Memory of the Earth: Land Dispossession, Violence, and War in Colombia, a program of three short films made in collaboration between the Colombian Truth Commission and Forensic Architecture on Wednesday, April 20 at 7:45 pm EDT at Upstate Films, Rhinebeck NY. The films center around the issue of land dispossession in Urabá, a region in northwestern...
CHRA is hosting the launch & discussion of Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s newly published book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated on Wednesday, April 27th, 5:00pm EDT at Weis Cinema, Bard College. Join us for a conversation with filmmaker and activist Sanaa Seif and scholar Omnia Khalil as they reflect on the ongoing incarceration of activists in Egypt beyond the...
Join us for a panel discussion with CHRA's current collaborators in "Activism in Process". CHRA collaborates annually with a group of activists and organizers who are leading grassroots efforts in their communities. For our first “Activism in Process”, we are bringing together Badr Baabou from Damj (a LGBTQ++ rights organization based in Tunisia); Ernesto Pujol (a social choreographer based in...
Undercooked features works-in-progress by the current MA students at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts. Developed as part of their practice-based core course with Tania El Khoury this spring (HRA 504: Collaborations and Community-based Art), all of the projects engage in different ways with the politics of food and land. The work includes performance, music, sound, murals, and...
World premiere of a CHRA digital commission, featuring a Q&A with artist Ama Josephine Budge and writer Dr. Chelsea M. Frazier, moderated by Dr. J.T. Roane (Arizona State University). Putting the Cooker on Low explores the daily rituals that allow Black women, femmes and non-binary folk to keep creating in the midst of spiritual, emotional, familial, societal and ecological crises....
This event on Tuesday, September 6 at 5:30pm ET at Weis Cinema, Bard College, brings together in person three esteemed writers—Nuruddin Farah, Ilija Trojanow, and Aleksandar Hemon—to read from and discuss their work. As suggested by the titles North of Dawn (Farah) and Nowhere Man (Hemon), all three writers are concerned in their work with questions of place and displacement, of...
This event will take place on Wednesday, 7 September, 5:30pm ET at Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation (RKC) 103 at Bard College. "Each day we are sold different versions of yesterday, but rarely offered a different tomorrow. The apocalypse streams into every household at a flat rate. In an era of dystopian forebodings, the future can no...
CHRA will be screening Erased, ___Ascent of the Invisible (1976) by Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Halwani at 4pm on Thursday, 29 September at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck. The event is free and open to the public. The film screening is organized by CHRA's 2022-2023 Fellow Sabine El Chamaa. A Q&A between Ghassan and Sabine will follow. "Thirty-five years ago, I witnessed...
Governments in South Africa and beyond are working to ratify new laws that limit and criminalize seed access and use. In response, a local and global resistance movement is working to keep seeds free and accessible. The idea of freedom is inherent to a seed, its very purpose is to share itself as widely as possible to ensure the continuity...
This talk will focus on the work of Ecotone: Chagras, Payaos, Camellones, a program curated by Juliana Steiner as part of the as part of Common Ground, an international festival on the politics of land and food. By investigating and honoring food sovereignty and distinct foodways, Ecotone explores some examples of restorative and regenerative agricultural technologies in Colombia. The commissioned...
A talk about hosts, ghosts, hospitality, hostility, and the complicated nature of a good time. In this lecture, Rakowitz will discuss (g)hosting, a term he uses to explore the intersection of hospitality and hostility in his work, as well as the recuperation of disappeared objects, smells, tastes, customs, and relationships through reactivations and substitutes.
In her talk, Jumana Manna will speak about her dual practice as a sculptor and a filmmaker, and her ongoing inquiries into the contradictions of preservation and ruination. Manna will focus on her recent film, Foragers, which depicts the criminalization of Palestinian plant foraging traditions. The film challenges the logic of extinction debates under settler-colonial and neoliberal regimes, namely the...
Culture is rooted in connection to land; like land, culture cannot be contained. I am inspired by generations of Lingít & Unangax̂ creative production and knowledge connected to the land I belong to. From this perspective I engage across cultures with contemporary conditions. My process of creation is a constant pursuit of freedom and vision for the present and future....
Tender Edges is a microfestival of live art projects created by the first year M.A. students in Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College. These works-in-progress are part of The Politics of Interactive Live Art course taught by Tania El Khoury. The microfestival takes place at various times and locations on campus on Saturday 10 December and Monday 12...
This talk examines how the contemporary timber industry reproduces plantation power. It explores the “remote control” of land — such as absentee land ownership, Black family land grabs, new markets for energy, and legal regimes designed to “devalue” common property in favor of individual ownership and profit. Multi-generation Black homeplaces and communities, rooted in alternative modes of land relations, sustain...
Olive trees have been a major part of Baha's practice as an educator and community organizer. His talk will focus on the significance, history, and place of olive trees in Palestine, as well as the different methods used by the state of Israel to destroy this ancestral staple and tradition. Baha will share his project Preserve, which is curated by...
CHRA will be screening Miguel's War (2021, 128 min) at Upstate Films, with director Eliane Raheb in person. The film will be introduced and discussed by CHRA Fellow and filmmaker Sabine El Chamaa. Eliane Raheb’s hybrid documentary follows Miguel, a gay man exiled in Spain who returns to Lebanon after 37 years to reflect on his experience growing up during...
As the destruction continues to unfold, please join us on Tuesday, March 14th, 3:30–4:30pm in Olin 102 for a teach-in to take stock of the earthquake(s) and their devastation in various parts of Turkey and Syria. Panelists will include Ziad Abu-Rish (CHRA & Middle Eastern Studies), Lara Fresko Madra (CHRA), and Pinar Kemerli (Political Studies). The teach-in topics will include:...
CHRA is hosting a screening and discussion on Monday, March 27, 5pm, at Weis Cinema, as part of Archival Collective Counter–Imagination, a two-part program curated by art historian and current CHRA Fellow Lara Fresko Madra. The event will include a screening of The Lonely Trees by the Rojava Film Commune , with an introduction and discussion with Lara Fresko Madra and...
CHRA is co-sponsoring a screening of the film Boycott (2021), with director Julia Bacha in-person on Tuesday, March 28, at Weis Cinema, 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm. Over the past six years, unbeknownst to most Americans, 34 states passed laws intending to silence boycott and other nonviolent measures aimed at pressuring Israel on its human rights record. These dangerous bills...
CHRA is co-sponsoring a reading of Our Red Book, a collection of essays, oral histories, and artworks about periods across all stages of life, gathered by the New York Times best-selling author Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. The event is co-presented by CHRA, Fisher Center, Bard Theater and Performance Department and Written Arts. Our Red Book takes us through stories of first...
CHRA is hosting a screening and discussion on Monday, April 3, 5pm, at Weis Cinema, as part of Archival Collective Counter–Imagination, a two-part program curated by art historian and current CHRA Fellow Lara Fresko Madra. The event will include a screening of Set Off by Mustafa Emin Büyükcoşkun of The Material Aesthetic Research Collective , with a discussion with director...
After capturing the city of Mosul in December 2014, the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) burned the university library destroying hundreds of thousands of books and manuscripts. The collections included Qur’ans, one of which was from the ninth century. Like other episodes of our times, this performance reflects a certain engagement with the Qur’an that revives historically...
A film script is an unfinished work, a ghost that seeks to inhabit a form. Where do the characters that are conceived for years, but that fail to find their bodies in an image, reside? In December 1999, a recent film school graduate moves from Los Angeles to New York City. With a fiction film script in hand, she is...
The MA Program at the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts is pleased to announce its inaugural MA thesis exhibition, featuring the capstone projects of the Class of 2023. Tracing Apparitions is taking place from April 27 through May 7 across the Bard College campus as well as off-campus sites in Tivoli and Barrytown. The exhibition features installations, live performances,...
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...
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...
Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to undocumented and cancer communities....
New Red Order (NRO) is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Jackson Polys, Adam Khalil, and Zack Khalil. Polys is a multi-disciplinary artist who examines negotiations toward the limits and viability of desires for Indigenous growth. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and was the recipient of a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Mentor...
Brian Lobel is a performer, teacher and curator who is interested in creating work about bodies and how they are watched, policed, poked, prodded and loved by others. His performance work has shown work internationally in a range of contexts from Harvard Medical School, to Sydney Opera House, to the National Theatre (London) and Lagos Theatre Festival, blending provocative humor with...
Co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, Fehras Publishing Practices’s Sami Rustom and Kenan Darwich share their research into the history and presence of publishing and its entanglement in the sociopolitical and cultural sphere in the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora. Engaging different methods and ways of production, the collective focuses on the relationship...
Juliana Steiner is an independent curator and researcher from Bogotá interested in interdisciplinary practices in contemporary art that incorporate social sciences, pedagogy, architecture and long-term projects with communities. Her research focuses on more-than-human species, environmental justice and the transformations of landscapes. She curated Ecotone: Chagras, Payasos and Camellones, as part of Common Ground in 2022–23. Juliana is the co-founder and...
Each semester, CHRA presents 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 throughout the campus and surrounding area, and includes multidisciplinary works, installations, performances, live art, interactive work, and film. These works in progress are part of a course taught this semester by...
Each semester, CHRA presents 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 throughout the campus and surrounding area, and includes multidisciplinary works, installations, performances, live art, interactive work, and film. These works in progress are part of a course taught this semester by...