Eduardo Abaroa

Eduardo Abaroa is a Mexican artist working in the fields of sculpture, installation and live action since 1991. He has shown his work in many major museums in Mexico, LA MoCA, PS1 and ICA Boston in the United States, Reina Sofía Museum in Spain, and Kunstwerke, Germany as well as in important venues in the UK, Canada, France, Korea and other countries. As a writer, he was an art reviewer for the art section of Reforma newspaper, and has written for other important Mexican publications like Curare, Casper, Moho, D.F. and Codigo 06140. He has contributed texts for exhibition catalogues of artists like Francis Alÿs, Melanie Smith, Pablo Vargas Lugo, Tercerunquinto and Dr. Lakra, among others. He is currently course director at Soma, and was a co-founder of the influential Temistocles 44 artist run space in Mexico City(1993-1995).

For more information visit Yvonne’s website: www.yvonnevenegas.com

* Banner Image: Yvonne Venegas, Caballo I, Caballo II, and Sin Titulo V

INOCENTE is an intensely personal and vibrant coming of age documentary about a young artist’s fierce determination to never surrender to the bleakness of her surroundings.

Inocente Trailer from Shine Global on Vimeo.

At 15, Inocente refuses to let her dream of becoming an artist be caged by her life as an undocumented immigrant forced to live homeless for the last nine years. Color is her personal revolution and its extraordinary sweep on her canvases creates a world that looks nothing like her own dark past – – a past punctuated by a father deported for domestic abuse, an alcoholic and defeated mother of four who once took her daughter by the hand to jump off a bridge together, an endless shuffle year after year through the city’s overcrowded homeless shelters and the constant threat of deportation.

Despite this history, Inocente’s eyes envision a world transformed…where buildings drip in yellow and orange, where pink and turquoise planets twinkle with rescued dreams, and one-eyed childlike creatures play amongst loved babies and purple clouds. Inocente’s family history is slowly revealed through her paintings.

Told entirely in her own words, we come to Inocente’s story as she realizes her life is at a turning point, and for the first time, she decides to take control of her own destiny. Irreverent, flawed and funny, she’s now channeling her irrepressible personality into a future she controls. Her talent has finally been noticed, and if she can create a body of work in time, she has an opportunity to put on her first art show. Meanwhile, her family life is at a tense impasse – – if she legally emancipates herself from her mother to strike out on her own, she’ll risk placing her brothers in foster care, but to stay is unbearable.

INOCENTE is both a timeless story about the transformative power of art and a timely snapshot of the new face of homelessness in America, children. Neither sentimental nor sensational, INOCENTE will immerse you in the very real, day-to-day existence of a young girl who is battling a war that we rarely see. The challenges are staggering, but the hope in Inocente’s story proves that the hand she has been dealt does not define her, her dreams do.

Inocente has been with the San Diego nonprofit, A Reason To Survive (ARTS), since she was 12 years old and is currently an Empower student producing new artwork. Visit ARTS for more information www.areasontosurvive.org

For more information on the documentary, visit www.shineglobal.org/index.php/hero-of-the-week/inocente/

Screening Schedule

MARCH 29
Cleveland International Film Festival
www.clevelandfilm.org/festival/films/2012/inocente

APRIL 22
Arizona International Film Festival
www.filmfestivalarizona.com/

APRIL 26
BOOST Conference
www.boostconference.org/film-fest

APRIL 29
Hot Docs Film Festival
www.hotdocs.ca/film/title/inocente

MAY 5
Awareness Film Festival
www.awarenessfestival.healoneworld.com/

MAY 5
Montclaire International Film Festival
www.montclairfilmfest.org/films-and-events/?section=Shorts

JUNE
San Diego Screening
TBD

Television Premiers

JUNE
Epix

AUGUST
MTV

Using colour photography in conjunctions with texts, Allan Sekula focuses on the economy, a theme considered incompatible with the field of art. Cultural critics frequently consider the economy to be a negative issue of little interest, although culture itself is under the unmistakable influence of market forces. For Sekula, it is irrelevant that photography has finally been recognized as an emancipated artistic medium, alongside painting or sculpture; he considers the modesty of the medium, and the possibility it offers of attaining knowledge through keen observation, to be more interesting. In this way, photography has a special ability to describe economic life within the parameters of the visual arts, through what is commonly called ’documentary’, Sekula attempts here to offer a clear alternative to the photography culture consecrated by the contemporary system of museum/galleries, which – according to the artist – in essence prepares an ’antiquarian future’, a future that condemns art to conformity with the museum’s relict of the past.

In this sense Bertolt Brecht is an important relevance for Allan Sekula’s method of working – a reference that helps us to understand his photographs. In a famous remark, Brecht commented that a photograph of the Krupp or the AEG factories ’tells us nothing (…) something must be “constructed”’. At a talk Allan Sekula stated: ’Brecht’s underlying point is often forgotten or dismissed as quaintly irrelevant to postmodernity: the surface, for example, the architectural façade or the interior rendered in a descriptive photograph, reveals nothing of the underlying system of exploitation. Reified social relations are in a sense invisible to ordinary empiricism, and can only be understood through recourse to abstraction or (…) through the movement upwards from the concrete to the abstract, and back down to the concrete.’

In recent years, Sekula has worked on long documentary projects inspired by contemporary political events. These projects have given rise to photography sequences and major series of work that the artist often rounds off with the publication of a book. In these books, the method used to contextualize the photographs is reinforced by the publication of the artist’s texts – always present at his exhibitions –, emphasizing the division of Allan Sekula’s practical work between writing and artistic production. –Jürgen Bock, exhibition curator

April 6 – May 20, 2012

Curator: Jürgen Bock

Partnership: Lumiar Cité, Lisboa, Portugal.

In collaboration with: M HKA, Antwerpen, Belgium / Stills – Scotland’s Centre for Photography, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

For more information, visit www.criee.org

*Banner Image: “Working (Santos)” from “Ship of Fools” series (1999/2010)” © Allan Sekula

ARTS is a San Diego based nonprofit organization that believes that the visual, performing, and literary arts can literally transform lives – especially those of kids. We believe in the therapeutic powers of the arts, but we are not clinical art therapists. We use all art forms as a vehicle to create positive, long-lasting change in children and youth facing major life challenges – giving them not only a reason to survive – but to also thrive. Our unique program framework and model creates a one-stop shop for kids to be exposed to and engage in the arts at many levels depending on their circumstances, skill level, and interest. We believe that even an hour spent participating in the arts can have a tremendous influence and impact on a child. Through the Pat D’Arrigo ARTS Center and various outreach initiatives in the community, it is our goal to bring the ARTS to Heal, Inspire, and Empower children who are suffering throughout San Diego.

Visit ARTS website (www.areasontosurvive.org) for more information.

“We are here not only to heal these young lives through the arts, but to also inspire and empower them to overcome obstacles and thrive in this world – to become compassionate, creative human beings who make a difference not only in themselves, but in the world they live in.” -Matt D’Arrigo, ARTS Founder/CEO.

Heal Program: Creating the Foundation

Our Heal Program focuses on Maslow’s levels of “Safety” and “Love & Belonging”. ARTS creates a safe and nurturing environment for kids in crisis, emergency, or transitional circumstances to create and express themselves. Trust is built with the adult artist mentors and amongst peers in the group. Our inclusive approach ensures that kids will feel loved and a sense of “belonging” while engaged in our programs. Focus is really on process over product in this program. Allowing kids to be themselves, forget about their worries, enjoy the creative process, and feel proud of their finished work of art.

Inspire Program: Building Skills and Esteem

Our Inspire Program focuses on Maslow’s “Esteem” level. This program starts to focus in on those kids facing similar difficult circumstances as HEAL but have opportunity to engage on a more frequent and long-term basis whose intrinsic motivation is the arts. They have been introduced to the arts and want more! We begin building their skills in their medium(s) of choice and build their self esteem and self confidence by recognizing and celebrating their efforts and achievements in various ways. By exposing them to the possibilities in the arts – and in life – we build a sense of “hope and faith”, inspiring them to reach beyond their current circumstances and set goals for the future.

Empower Program: Education and Employment

CreAte youR fuTure is our motto. Our Empower Program is our most in-depth program that focuses on Maslows’s “Self Actualization” level. Through wraparound case services, we provide High School and College aged youth who fall within our population guidelines but have more stability, focus, talent and drive with the skills, tools, and support they need to enter college to study the arts or secure jobs in the creative workforce. We provide one-on-one mentorship’s, portfolio development, scholarships, as well as internships and part time jobs in their field of interest or in ARTS Enterprises©. We truly believe that creativity is an asset all kids should have entering this creative economy. We are dedicated to building the creative capital of our youth through this program to prepare them for a brighter future.

Below is a trailer for the documentary INOCENTE about one of ARTS Empower students who is a talented, rising star in her own right. Inocente has been with ARTS since she was 12 years old and proves how the arts heal, inspire, and empower! INOCENTE will premier on March 29, 2012 at the Cleveland International Film Festival and screen in San Diego in June 2012. Watch the trailer on Vimeo at www.vimeo.com/21989601

History

ARTS was first conceived by artist Matt D’Arrigo in 1992 while his mother and sister both battled cancer. Painting and music were his refuge and gave him “A Reason To Survive” that emotional and tumultuous time – especially after the passing of his mother. Just as the arts helped him during one of the most difficult times of his life, he aspired to provide that same opportunity to other kids facing their own personal crises. In 2001 he founded ARTS on his philosophy that the arts can heal and change lives. He started an outreach program at Ronald McDonald to bring arts projects to the children and families staying there while receiving medical treatment at Rady’s Children’s Hospital. Rady’s Children’s Hospital heard about the program and asked him to start a program there as well. The growth began. Soon, community agencies serving a wide range of children experiencing other challenges began to request ARTS services. The outreach program grew to 15 sites by 2006, facilitated by over 30 trained artists and volunteers.

The vision was always to create an ARTS Center – a safe and nurturing place for kids to escape and create through a variety of art forms – visual, performing, and literary. After much hard work, community support, and dedication, ARTS opened the 7,000 sq ft Pat D’Arrigo ARTS Center in 2007, which includes a music room, media arts lab, performance space, ceramics studio, printmaking and mixed media studio, painting studio, and a gallery to showcase and sell the kids work. Leveraging this incredible new resource, ARTS strategically expanded its programs and mission to now heal, inspire, and empower youth facing life challenges through arts-based programs, education, and employment opportunities. In addition to the Pat D’Arrigo ARTS Center, ARTS created a transportation service “Van Go!” with a fleet of 3 vans, ensuring all kids can participate in the programs at the Pat D’Arrigo ARTS Center and expose them to various arts experiences in the community.

Through our 3 core programs, ARTS annually serves 5,000 San Diego youth ages 3-22 from more than 42 partner organizations that include hospitals, foster care agencies, residential treatment facilities, homeless and domestic violence shelters, schools and other social service agencies. ARTS also serves children in the general community who are facing their own personal struggles. These children are referred to us from doctors, therapists, counselors, and social workers.

It is the goal of ARTS to package what we do and scale it to reach even more children around world who are suffering and don’t have access to the arts. The ARTS Foundation is being created for these efforts.

Values

ARTS Values are the guiding force for our culture: how we act & behave, make decisions, treat one another (staff, volunteers, kid’s, donors, vendors, and stakeholders), and keep ourselves accountable. It’s our internal compass to ensure we are on the right path.

Creativity
Infuse creativity in everything we do; being innovative in our approaches and open to new ideas. Take risks and try new things. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and grow.

Flexibility
Be able to adapt in a changing environment – whether it’s a kids art project and or an organizational growth strategy. Don’t fear change – Embrace it, drive it and be able to capitalize on it.

Positivity and Fun
Work hard, play hard as a close knit family. Whether you are a student, volunteer, staff, vendor, or donor – all of us are working together towards a very positive goal – to transform kids lives through the arts. In doing so, we should have fun along the way and create an environment that is not only positive, safe, nurturing and supportive for kids – but for anyone who comes in touch with the organization.

Strong Relationships Built on Communication
All strong relationships are built on trust. We believe that trust is built on great communication. For us great communication is: Open, honest, clear, direct, respectful, and inclusive. Part of creating this type of communication and trust is to develop emotional connections and meaningful relationships. It’s important to always act with integrity in your relationships, to be compassionate, friendly, loyal, and to make sure that you do the right thing and treat your relationships well. The hardest thing to do is to build trust, but if the trust exists, you can accomplish so much more.

Resource Responsibility
Although we may work in a creative, flexible, fun and positive environment – we are extremely focused and serious when it comes to our operations and resource management. We truly value the financial resources our donors entrust in us and run our organization in the most cost efficient and effective way possible. We are committed to being responsible stewards of both the financial and human resources given to us, and strive to make every individual and dollar count.

Accountability
We believe that a large part of success is brought about by being accountable. Saying what we’ll do, doing what we say and supporting others to do the same. If we fall short, we are humble enough to admit it, learn, and grow. Leadership does not have a title – everyone takes personal responsibility and leadership for themselves and their work. We also strongly believe in recognizing and celebrating everyone’s efforts and achievements. Trying your hardest with passion, commitment, and dedication will always be celebrated!

Athenaeum members may already be familiar with the work of Jay Johnson and Adam Belt. In 2009 Jay exhibited in our Main Gallery in a show entitled “Smoking Room.” The San Diego Union-Tribune named it one of the ten best exhibitions of the year. Adam Belt presented his drawings and installations of cement sculpture and salt in our Main Gallery in 2008.

Tristan Shone fabricates “sound machines” and will incorporate a performance into the opening reception. Alongside making machines and composing sound for performance, Shone works at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research as a mechanical engineer and the University of California, San Diego as a researcher in sound interface design.

Always innovative Rubén Ortiz-Torres creates artwork in the form of paintings, photographs, objects, installations, videos, and films. He is part of the permanent faculty of the University of California in San Diego.

Opening reception on Friday, March 30 at 6:30 PM
On view March 31 – May 5, 2012

For more information about the San Diego Art Prize, please visit their website: www.sdvisualarts.net/sdvan_new/artprize.php

About the Artists

Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Rubén Ortiz-Torres was born in Mexico City in 1964. Educated within the utopian models of republican Spanish anarchism soon confronted the tragedies and cultural clashes of post colonial third world. After giving up the dream of playing baseball in the major leagues he decided to study art. He went first to the oldest and one of the most academic art schools of the Americas (the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City) and later to one of the newest and more experimental (Calarts in Valencia CA). After enduring Mexico City’s earthquake and pollution he moved to LA with a Fullbright grant to survive riots, fires, floods, more earthquakes, and proposition 187. During all this he has been able to produce artwork in the form of paintings, photographs, objects, installations, videos, and films. He is part of the permanent Faculty of the University of California in San Diego. He has participated in several international exhibitions and film festivals. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid Spain and others. RubénOrtiz-Torres received the 2011 Lincoln Innovation Artist Award.
www.rubenortiztorres.org

Tristan Shone

Tristan Shone’s layering of differently guitars, keyboard, and electronic percussion to create the sound that is the justification for the shapes of his sculptures. Just as the music has melody and discordance, the structures he forms have flow and angle. This contrast of mechanical and emotional is confident, intense, and impressive. Alongside fabricating machines and composing sound for performance, Shone works at the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research as a mechanical engineer and the Center for Research and Computing in the Arts at the University of California, San Diego as a researcher in sound interface design. Tristan Shone as Author & Punisher is an industrial doom and drone metal, one man band utilizing primarily custom fabricated machines/controllers and speakers. He has performed and shown these machines in festivals and exhibitions in the United States and abroad extensively, releasing his third album, yet first sculpture/art based album entitled “Drone Machines” in 2010 on Heart & Crossbone Records out of Tel-Aviv. His new record, focused primarily on the newer Dub Machines, will be released in the Summer/Fall of 2011.
www.tristanshone.com

Jay S. Johnson

Jay S. Johnson has worked with several materials, from clay to wood and metals. He has experimented more with paint recently, and has incorporated it beautifully into his wooden sculptures. An expert craftsman, he has worked off and on in construction, refining his wood-working skills. Whether his works are figurative or symbolic, they are most often wry and thought-provoking. Johnson himself says, “Utilizing the neutral background of the wall I attempt to draw the viewer closer to my objects by employing simple yet seductive materials and forms. Familiar images applied to these interior shapes may sometimes be clues to deciphering the content of the work, which typically deals with issues concerning man’s relations to each other and to nature.” Robert L. Pincus, art critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune wrote about Johnson’s solo exhibition at the Athenaeum Music & Art Library, saying: “The two major qualities that make Jay Johnson’s art so persistently compelling come together gracefully in “Smoking Room,”… One of them is his genuine gift for elegance – not easy elegance, but the taut sort of understated beauty that emanates from a keen sense of how to use materials and employ symbolic images. The second quality is his fascination with the relationship between a single form and surrounding objects, which takes a new form in this show.” Johnson work has been widely exhibited, reviewed, and collected in California including the important Museum of Contemporary Art solo show in 1997.Jay Johnson has been a UCSD lecturer for sculpture since 2001.
www.quintgallery.com/341/jay-johnson.htm

Adam Belt

Adam Belt works with physical manifestations of the unseen including the inherent properties of materials such as salt, ice and concrete, our interaction with the landscape and our wonder of the cosmos. Currently he is working with and documenting a small portable phenomenological installation. “A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not” is comprised of two full-length mirrors with a lit wall in between. Experienced and documented outside at various locations during the naturally changing light of afternoon/evening the viewer observes and experiences a heightened sense of time and the presence of the self. Adam Belt received his BFA from the University of San Diego and completed his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 2001 and is now working as an artist and a professor in San Diego. His work is included in many local collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the La Jolla Athenaeum Music and Arts Library. Adam has been published in Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology magazine. His work has been reviewed in The San Diego Union Tribune, Art Week, Riviera and various other publications.
www.adambelt.com

SOMA is the initiative of a group of artists who, building on the experiences of La Panadería and Temistocles 44, have joined forces and created a unique platform within the cultural scene.

As a contemporary art space, its aim is to counterpoint the prevailing dynamics in schools, museums and galleries through four parts: a program for the professional education of artists, a forum for conferences, discussions and weekly events, a residency system for national and international artists and a summer program for visual artists and curators conducted in English.

SOMA has a residency program for artists, critics and curators from all over the world, who are invited to share their work with the Mexican art scene and also to participate as part of our educational program.

Past artists in residence included Bruno Faria (Feb 2012), Patterson Beckwith, Amy Gartrell, and Chris Sharp  (Jan 2012), Søren Thilo Funder (Oct 2011), Julian Hoeber and Natalia Ibáñez Lario (Sept 2011), Andreja Kuluncic (Aug 2011), Adult and Catalina Lozano (June 2011), David Perez Karmadavis (May 2011), Kelly Kaczynski (April 2011), Hazel Hill McCarthy III (March 2011), Angie Waller (Feb 2011), Karmelo Bermejo (2011-2010),

For more information, visit SOMA’s website: www.somamexico.org

For hundreds of years roaming artists traveled the Indian countryside, creating the stories, the mythological backbone that would unite a country. Before radio, film, and television, these artists helped form what we now call the Web of India.

In the 1950s the artists ended their itinerant routes and moved into vacant land beside a jungle in West Delhi. They called their new home the Kathputli Colony. The colony is now a tinsel slum, providing home to some of the world’s greatest street magicians, acrobats, and puppeteers. But last year the government sold the Kathputli land to real estate developers; the slum is to be bulldozed and cleared for development.

Our film, “Tomorrow We Disappear,” will take you into the world of the Kathputli Colony, to experience the last remnants of its unique culture before it’s too late.

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“About a year ago, we found a short blurb online about how the Indian government had sold a magicians’ colony to real estate developers. So we rallied two world-class shooters and flew to India. We landed at the Delhi airport, drove 20 minutes down the road, squeezed between two buildings, and found ourselves in an artists’ labyrinth. We’ve seen a magician stick a knife through his son’s neck, and acrobat pick up needles with her eyes, and a puppeteer’s plans for a brand new colony. We have over 180 hours of footage, and only one case of parasites.” — Adam Weber

Here are some highlights from our recent two months in New Delhi:

– We got a Phantom camera – the winner of the 2012 Technical Academy Awards, the Phantom Flex is maybe the world’s coolest camera. And we acquired the only one in India, at an incredibly discounted rate (thanks, Harish Samtani!) for three stressful, exhausting, but inspiring days of shooting.

– Performances – fire breathers, tall men, jugglers, acrobats, puppeteers, acrobats, and magicians; we shot beautiful footage with all of the top talent in the Kathputli Colony, and this time we were actually able to compensate these struggling but eminently talented performers for their hard work.

– The Wedding – we filmed one of the most incredible weddings imaginable; elephants, candlelight vigils, and more paraded through the colony’s empty streets. It may be been one of the last full-blown celebrations to ever sweep through Kathputli.

– The Stories – we sat down with the colony’s best-traveled performers and heard all the stories from their childhood growing up itinerant. We have myths of ghost children in the woods, elephants on the hills, losing a finger to the snakes in the jungle, and a variety of performances for the Indian aristocracy, everyone from Prime Minster Rajiv Gandhi to celebrated Bollywood stars. Incredible lives captured on film forever.

For more information visit:
www.facebook.com/TomorrowWeDisappear
or www.kickstarter.com/projects/1567618329/tomorrow-we-disappear

Jim Goldblum is a Brooklyn-based producer and interactive director. His projects have won an Emmy for “New Approaches to Documentary,” a Webby, and SXSW and earned coverage from The New York Times, Wired Magazine, USA Today, and CNN.

He is working with Adam Weber, a director and editor who has worked for major film and TV studios in both New York and Los Angeles. Adam is also collaborating with Michel Gondry as the editor on his untitled animated documentary about Noam Chomsky. Adam just wrapped work on Gondry’s “The Green Hornet,” and he previously worked as an editor on Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds.”

Joshua Cogan is our Associate Producer and a Director of Photography. A photographer and anthropologist, Josh’s poetic imagery of Jamaicans living out their lives with HIV won him an Emmy and a Webby in 2009.

Will Basanta is our Director of Photography. His previous film, Jess + Moss, premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews.

**Photo credit on all images: Josh Cogan / Rebel Yell

Ming Wong has been recognized internationally for his ambitious performance and video works that engage with the history of world cinema and popular forms of entertainment. Working through the visual styles and tropes of such iconic film directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai and Ingmar Bergman, Wong’s practice considers the means through which subjectivity and geographic location are constructed by motion pictures.

Wong created a series of videos and scenic backdrops that center around the making of Roman Polanski’s seminal 1974 film Chinatown. Shot on location in the Gallery at REDCAT, Wong’s reinterpretation, Making Chinatown, transformed the exhibition space into a studio backlot and examined the original film’s constructions of language, performance and identity. With the artist cast in the roles originally played by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston and Belinda Palmer, key scenes were reenacted in front of printed backdrops digitally rendered from film stills and kept intact within the video installation.

Making Chinatown is Wong’s first project focused on the American context of filmmaking and draws upon Polanski’s iconic film for its use of Los Angeles as a versatile and malleable character. Wong treats the film as a text through which he is able to inhabit and impersonate the qualities that are particular to the place it represents. Making Chinatown mimics and reduces the techniques of mainstream cinema in order to emphasize the theatrical qualities that underlie cinematic artifice.

For more information about the exhibition, visit REDCAT’s website: www.redcat.org/exhibition/ming-wong-making-chinatown

For more information about Ming Wong’s projects, visit his website: www.mingwong.org

About the Participants

Ming Wong

Ming Wong (b. 1971, Singapore) currently lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museum of Moving Image, Queens, New York, as part of Performa 11; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, China; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Singapore Art Museum. He has been included in such notable exhibitions as based in Berlin at Atelierhaus Monbijoupark in Berlin; the 2010 Gwangju Biennial; and in 2009 at the Singaporean Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale.
www.mingwong.org

Aram Moshayedi

Aram Moshayedi received his BA in art history/theory/criticism from the University of California, San Diego and his MA in art history from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Since October 2010, he has been the assistant curator of the Gallery at REDCAT, where he has organized special projects and exhibitions with A.L. Steiner and A.K. Burns, Geoffrey Farmer, and Ming Wong. He was formerly curator at LAXART (2005-2010), and, in 2008, assistant curator of the California Biennial (CB08) at the Orange County Museum of Art. He has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs and has written for Artforum, Metropolis M, Art in America, Art Lies, Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, and Art Papers. He also serves on the editorial board of X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly and is a contributing editor for Bidoun Magazine.

Click here to read more about the exhibition on the UAG website: www.universityartgallery.ucsd.edu

Click here to read more about the conference

About the Participants

Julian d’Angiolillo

Julian d’Angiolillo is a visual artist, filmaker and playwright whose work explores questions of urbanism, spatial practice, public space and memory. This exhibition features his recent feature-length film Hacerme Feriante [Become a Stallholder], along with documentation of its creation. The film is the product of d’Angiolillo’s intensive research on a massive informal market known as La Salada. Condemned by the European Union for violations of brand copyright laws, La Saladais the largest informal market of its kind in Latin America, attracting migrants from Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay and the Argentine countryside. D’Angiolillo’s film examines the coordinated efforts of stallholders, local bosses or caudillos, and visitors who open the fair in the middle of the night or pre-dawn hours twice weekly. Italso explores the ways in which the market is far more than a site of commerce, and is also a place for celebrations, religious ceremony and popular assemblies and a strategic field where the identity of immigrants and workers is reaffirmed.

www.elnuevomunicipio.com.ar

Eduardo Molinari

Eduardo Molinari is a multidisciplinary artist whose work centers on research through artistic methods and walking as an aesthetic practice. His Archivo Caminante [The Walking Archive] is a meta-work that is both an archival collection he has, maintained since 2001, as well as the manifestation of his ongoing artistic-cum-research practice. This practice draws on varied epistemological frameworks and methodologies, including those associated with militant research, conceptual art, ethnography, post-colonial historiography, travel writing and psychogeography. El Camino Real is a diptych comprised of an installation that features documents drawn from the Archive and the book, El Libro Plateado y Real, appearing in its first English translation. In El Camino Real history unfolds in a non-linear and palimpsestic time that moves between the Southern Cone’s colonial history, Argentina’s hyper-neoliberalization in the 1990s and ensuing economic crash, and the potentiality of popular revolt and armed struggle seen in the country in the early 1970s. This work not only refigures a sense of national identity, but also proposes an especial understanding of the past — one that encompasses the unpredictable landscape of collective memory, fugitive events and experiences that have escaped the archival record, and the untapped potentialities still latent within them.

www.archivocaminante.blogspot.com

Jennifer Flores Sternad

Jennifer Flores Sternad is a scholar and curator whose research focuses on militant and activist art, performance, and artistic practices developed within or in alignment with social movements. Since 2001 her work in these fields has included extensive research in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, as well as on Xicano/a and Latino/a art and theater in the U.S. Her texts have been published in books and academic journals in the US, Europe and Latin America, including Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization (NAi, 2011); Live Art in LA, 1970-1983 (with Suzanne Lacy, Routledge, 2011 forthcoming); Zona de Poesia Árida: Coletivos de Arte (Universidad de São Paulo, 2011 forthcoming), MEX/LA: Mexican Modernisms in Los Angeles (with Ricardo Bracho, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011 forthcoming); Haciendo Tiempo: Arte Radical, 1999-2004 (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de Mexico, 2010); and the journals GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; Contemporary Theatre Review; The Journal of American Drama and Theater and Interreview. She has directed and produced public art events in Argentina, Chile and California and she is co-founder with Fran Ilich of the media art/research project Collective Intelligence Agency. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard, an MA in Art History from UCLA, and she is currently a doctoral candidate and MacCracken Fellow in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU.