festival
Art talk @ Valby Kulturhus
Here and Now into the Not-Yet: Artists and Future-(Home)Making
28 October 2023
Time:12.15-13.15
This panel engages how artists reimagine official territorial formations such as “the nation,” questioning challenging and offering alternative paths and methods to future making. This conversation decenters official speculations that insist on security to foreground other values committed to possibilities.
Panelists of the forum:
Anida Yoeu Ali
Dalida Benfield
Christopher Bratton
Yong Sun Gullach
Moderator:
Lucy MSP Burns
Anida Yoeu Ali is a performance artist, educator and global agitator born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity often drawing upon her Malay, Cham, Khmer and Thai ancestries. Ali’s works have been acquired into public and private collections and globally exhibited including at the Haus der Kunst, Palais de Tokyo, Shangri-La Museum, The Smithsonian and the QAGOMA. She received her MFA from School of the Art Institute Chicago. Ali serves as a Senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington Bothell and travels between the Asia-Pacific region and the U.S.
Dalida María Benfield & Christopher Bratton
are artists and researchers who divide their time between Helsinki and Boston. In 2017, they co-founded the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR), a poly-centric laboratory for research and practice focused on emancipatory and decolonial pedagogies. In collaboration with partners in Brazil, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, and the UK, and the Senior Researchers and Research Fellows of CAD+SR, they organize international and intercultural research fellowships, projects, residencies, workshops, exhibitions, and publications. Most recently, they co-organized Technologies of Critical Conscientization (Con/Crit/Tec) at the Casa do Povo, São Paulo, Brazil and were the Guest Editors of Urgent Pedagogies, Issue #5: Pluriversality, IASPIS, Stockholm. Their collective writing on CAD+SR appears in the books Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change, Routledge (2022), Sensing Earth, Valiz (2023) and The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art, Crafts, and Visual Culture Education (2023). They are co-editors, with Lucrezia Cipitelli and Luigi Coppola, of Ex-Situ – Compatible with Life – Plants for a world waiting to germinate, Kunstverein Milano (2023).
Benfield (Panamá/US/Finland) is a filmmaker, artist, and writer who works on decolonial feminisms and aesthetics. Her films, video installations, performances, curatorial and pedagogical interventions, and writing (in Spanish and English) are shared internationally across diverse platforms and archives. She has an MFA in Film/Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; a Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies with Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality, University of California-Berkeley; and was a Fellow of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. Bratton (US/Finland) is an installation artist, filmmaker, and education activist. He is formerly Professor of Film, Video, and New Media and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; President of both the School of the Museum of Fine Arts-Boston and the San Francisco Art Institute; and most recently, Professor of Practice at Aalto University.
Yong Sun Gullach is a Korean-Danish artist living in Copenhagen, Denmark. She works feministic interdisciplinary with performance, text, sculptures, film, sound and activism – investigating the endless reconstruction transnational adoptees are forced to endure in the neo-colonial global North, the body in diaspora being an archive and a vessel for trauma and pain.
Her works have been curated in Europe, North and South America and Korea. She has in 2019 and 2020 received funding from the Danish Arts Foundation for Visual Arts.
Yong Sun Gullach: (Denmark/Korea)
Moderator
Lucy MSP Burns is working on a book tentatively titled Asian American Elsewheres: Placeness, Confrontations, and Continuations/Continuities. In this work, Burns pursues an interdisciplinary inquiry into the cartographic contours of Asian American creative imaginaries. It also engages the tension between Asian American artists as diasporic, immigrant artists-subjects, and global-thinking, global-facing artists-subjects who claim a stake in political, moral, and ethical debates consuming the world and our times. Burns is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles and is the author of Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (2012) and co-editor of California Dreaming: Place and Movement in Asian American Imaginaries.
Dalida María Benfield
Intan Rafiza
Pavana Reid
Annie Jael Kwan
