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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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)….
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…
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,…
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,…
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….
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…
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…
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…