Queer Lab

Thursday, May 23 at 7:30 at the Hammer Museum

On Thursday May 23, the Hammer Museum at UCLA is hosting a screening of ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion), a collaboration between David Wojnarowicz and Ben Neill. ITSOFOMO was originally staged as a live performance in which Wojnarowicz read his work alongside multi-channel projections of his film while Ben Neill performed an original score for his mutantrumpet, along with live percussion and computer controlled electronics. For this event, the Hammer Museum is hosting a four channel projection accompanied by Neill’s soundtrack (music, noise and Wojnarowicz’s readings). This screening is a rare event – an occasion to remember the multi-disciplinary and collaborative side of Wojnarowicz’s practice as an artist.

Cynthia Carr and Jennifer Doyle will introduce ITSOFOMO with a conversation intended to orient the viewer in relation to this rarely screened work.

Carr is the author of Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz; Doyle is the author of Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Wonderfully, Ben Neill will be on hand as well. The screening will be followed by a book signing and reception – organized to facilitate conversation between Carr, Doyle, Neill and audience members who want to talk over their experience of this work and ask questions.

Cynthia Carr was a columnist and arts reporter for the Village Voice from 1984 to 2003. Writing under the byline C. Carr, she specialized in experimental and cutting-edge art, especially performance art. Some of these pieces are now collected in On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. She is also the author of Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Bookforum, Modern Painters, the Drama Review, and other publications. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. Carr lives in New York.

“[Fire in the Belly is] unimprovable as a biography–thorough, measured, beautifully written, loving but not uncritical — as a concentrated history of his times, and as a memorial, presenting him in his entirety, twenty years dead but his ardor uncooled.”—Luc Sante, Bookforum

Jennifer Doyle is Professor of English at UC Riverside. She is Co-Chair of the Minor in LGBIT Studies and Director of Queer Lab. She is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire, and Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, the last chapter of which is devoted to a reading of Wojnarowicz’s portraits of Peter Hujar.

“Hold It Against Me is forceful and memorable. Jennifer Doyle thinks about difficult art in a way that refreshes its historical impact; she also revitalizes what criticism can do to extend the event that its objects have been to new ethical, political, and aesthetic domains.”—Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism

Ben Neill is a composer, performer, producer, and inventor of the mutantrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument. He has been called “a creative composer and genius performer” (Time Out NY). “the mad scientist of dancefloor jazz” (CMJ Journal), and “a musical powerhouse, a serious and individual talent” (Time Out London). Neill’s music blends influences from electronica, jazz and minimalism, blurring the lines between DJ culture and acoustic instrument performance.

Neill has recorded nine CDs of his music on the Universal/Verve, Thirsty Ear, Astralwerks, Six Degrees, Ramseur, New Tone and Ear-Rational labels. His music has also been featured on numerous compilations including Wired Magazine’s Music Futurists. In 2010 his music theater work Persephone was presented at the BAM Next Wave Festival. The recording Songs for Persephone with Mimi Goese which is made up of the music from the theatrical production was released in 2011 on Ramseur Records to critical acclaim. He has performed extensively in a wide variety of international settings including Lincoln Center, Cite de la Musique France, Moogfest, Berlin Love Parade Germany, Spoleto Festival Italy, Umbria Jazz Italy, Sleepless Night Miami, NIME Conferences Vancouver and Paris, Bang On A Can Festival New York, ICA London, Istanbul Jazz Festival Turkey and the Edinburgh Festival UK to name a few.

3:00pm – 5:00pm INTS 1128

In this lecture – the last of Queer Lab’s events for this year – Muñoz explores contemporary “brownness” not simply as a realist or empirical account of Latino/a or migrant experience, but rather as a way of encountering the entire world. José Esteban Muñoz is Professor of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is the author or editor of defining and foundational works in the field, including Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) and Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999). He is co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996), Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin America (1997) and influential journal issues such as Social Text‘s What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now? (2005) and Queer Transsexions of Race, Nation and Gender (1997). This lecture is from his forthcoming work, The Sense of Brown. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Ethnic Studies and the English Department.

Holo Library 

Alexandro Segade

Thursday, April 11th 7:30pm

The Culver Center for the Arts, Riverside CA

Queer Lab is proud to present Alexandro Segade’s experimental sci-fi drama The Holo Library as a part of the program for the 2013 Eaton Science Fiction Conference in downtown Riverside. Set in a futuristic Los Angeles, in a fascist state, The Holo Library describes a night in the life of a detective who becomes embroiled in a political intrigue when he is seduced in an online chat with a teen-age terrorist boy-band singer. Alexandro Segade, performing as Ace, directs the unfolding action through audience participation and readings enacted by volunteers and special guests as the performance shifts in a darkly humorous discussion of privacy, gender, sexuality, law, media and power. The performance is accompanied by an electronic set mixed by DJ Mateo Segade. The Holo Library is the third part of Segade’s Rep/Sep Series depicting a future world of wars over reproduction, cloning, mutation and mandated gay marriage.

Alexandro Segade is a video and performance artist. His recent solo projects have been presented at LAXart, Redcat (Los Angeles), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia). Segade is a founding member of the collective My Barbarian, whose fantastical, political performances and videos have been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles); The Kitchen, New Museum, Whitney Museum, P.S.1, Joe’s Pub, Studio Museum in Harlem, Participants Inc (New York), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center (San Francisco); and Museum of Contemporary Art (Miami), Museo Experimental El Eco (Mexico City) The Power Plant (Toronto), De Appel (Amsterdam), El Matadero, ARCO (Madrid), Galleria Civica di Arte Contempraneo (Trento, Italy), Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv), and Rawabet Theater / Townhouse Gallery (Cairo), for which the group received an Art Matters grant in 2008. My Barbarian was included in the 2005 and 2007 Performa Biennials, the 2006 and 2008 California Biennials, the 2007 Montreal Biennial, and the 2009 Baltic Triennial. Segade has received grants from the Durfee Foundation (2010), Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (2010), and Art Matters (2008, 2011). Segade received an MFA from UCLA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art in 2009.

The Brown Commons

note postponement!

feb event has been moved to May (date coming soon)

José Esteban Muñoz is Professor of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. His scholarship has consistently posed (and responded to) the defining the questions of queer theory and performance studies. He is the author Cruising Utopia: The Here and Now of Queer Futurity (2009), Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), and the forthcoming The Sense of Brown. His edited and co-edited collections include the volumes Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996), Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, (1997) and special issues of the journals of Social Text (“Queer Transextions of Race, Gender, Nation,” 1997 and “What’s Queer About Queer About Queer Studies Now,” 2005) and Women and Performance (“Queer Acts,” 1996 and “Between Psychoanalysis and Affect: A Public Feelings Project, 2009”).  He co-edits the book series Sexual Cultures for NYU Press.

This lecture is co-sponsored by Queer Lab, the Department of Ethnic Studies and the English Department.

Queer Lab recommends -

UCR’s Dance Department lecture series

Choreographies of War and Conflict

“How to Shoot An Iraqi: 

US Drone Strikes and Wafaa Bilal’s Queer Calculus of Pain”

Ronak K. Kapadia, UC Riverside Ethnic Studies

Tuesday, Feb 5 at 4-5:40pm

UC Riverside ATHD 102

As part of its “Global War on Terror,” the US military has expanded the use of missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicles, or “drones,” in targeted assassinations across Iraq and the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. While these technological advances in aerial weaponry have been celebrated as cost-effective alternatives to traditional forms of military combat, little attention has been paid to the impact of drone strikes in the lives of Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani civilians who comprise the “collateral damage” of US counterinsurgency operations across the region.

By examining the critical and social potential of the performance projects of Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal, this talk illuminates alternatives to the abstractions and rationalities of US imperial violence and the statistical modes through which the collateral damage of war is calculated. It argues that South Asian, Muslim and Arab diasporic expressive cultures challenge the explanatory power of conventional “expert” approaches to terrorism, militarism and war. In the process, these diasporic cultural forms expose another calculus—a queer calculus of bodies in pain and of bodies that imagine alternatives to that pain. By employing the critical tools of critical ethnic studies, queer studies and visual and performance studies this talk gestures at alternative ways of understanding drone weaponry and the effects of this violent practice on the gendered, racialized and sexualized bodies who are its targets. In so doing, it generates an alternative map for analyzing U.S intervention in the Middle East and South Asia and imagining its futures.

Queer Lab presents artists Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, discussing their work

Thursday, January 31 at the Culver Center for the Arts

  7:30–9:30 pm, free & open to the public

Culver Center for the Arts 

 Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst are a Los Angeles-based couple whose individual and collaborative work addresses, respectively, trans-feminine and trans-masculine experience. Drucker and Ernst will present recent films and projects, including their new experimental film collaboration, SHE GONE ROGUE, which premiered at the Hammer Museum’s first Los Angeles Biennial, Made in LA 2012. Ernst will discuss his film, “The Thing,” which premiered during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Ernst positions his filmmaking in a “New Trans Cinema” that complicates gender representation in narrative cinema and places queer and transgendered characters within larger narratives. In addition to Sundance, he has screened work at Oberhausen, Chicago International Film Festival, Chicago MOCA, Brooklyn Academy of Music, REDCAT, LACE and Outfest. Drucker is a multimedia artist working in performance, film/video, photography and spoken language. She performed “The Inability to be Looked at/the Horror of Nothing to See” at a part of “You Belong To Me” – a performance festival held in downtown Riverside in 2009. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at locations including MOMA PS1, Deitch Projects, Leo Koenig Projekte and Invisible Exports in New York; Luis De Jesus in Los Angeles; Moscow’s International Biennale For Young Art; and Les Recontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/ Madrid. Drucker has collaborated with some legendary queens – from Vaginal Davis to Flawless Sabrina – some of the films she’ll screen will include performances by these legends! 

Geo Wyeth at Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home St, Los Angeles CA 90012

January 25-26, with performance event on January 27 featuring Narcissister

(AND COMING UP THIS THURSDAY - A Perfect X: Intersecting Transgender Perspectives in Film, Video & Performance @ the Culver 7:3o)

Geo Wyeth’s I AM SERIOUS MAN is the internal landscape of a real live fictional exhibitionist named Kitchen Steve, articulated through interactive sculpture and song. Kitchen Steve moves through his desires to disclose, confess, and disrobe, repeatedly facing dire and absurd consequences for his behaviors. He is a kind terrorist, a mentally unstable Apple Store customer, a corporation, and a collective. The gallery will be open from 12 to 5pm on Jan 25-26 for visitors to interact with the sculptural element.

The installation will be activated by a performance on Sunday January 27th which will also include a performance by New York based artist Narcissister. Doors at 7pm and performances starting at 8pm. Conceived of and performed by Geo Wyeth. Additional visual consultation by Savannah Knoop. Partially supported by Queer Lab.

Bios:

Geo Wyeth is a New York City based musician and interdisciplinary performer. His work expands on pop music performance and contemporary song structure through experimenting with conceptual ideas of interruption, failure, and representation in performance, often with handmade props and sets. Much of his work is generated from a place of deep despair and irreverent humor for the world around him. He is an out female-to-male transsexual and was born to a white father and African-American mother. His works are darkly humorous and ecstatic meditations on the absurdity of these embodied experiences. Featured performances at: PS1 MoMA, the regular old MoMA, La MaMa ETC, Joe’s Pub, the SoHo Theater (London), Kate Werble Gallery, Le Poisson Rouge, Marianne Bosky Gallery, as well as numerous music, theater, and art performance venues worldwide. He was born in 1984 in New York City.

Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Wearing mask and merkin, she works at the intersection of performance art, burlesque, dance, and visual art. She actively integrates her prior experience as a professional dancer and commercial artist with her current art practices in a range of creative media, including collage, photography, video art, and music. In addition being a featured performer at The Box, she has presented work in New York at The New Museum, The Kitchen, and at Abrons Art Center and at many nightclubs, galleries, and alternative art spaces. Narcissister was a re-performer of Marina Abramovic’s Luminosity piece as part of The Artist is Present retrospective at MoMA. Narcissister has also presented her work internationally at the Music Biennale in Zagreb, Croatia, at Chicks on Speed’s Girl Monster Festival, at The Festival of Women in Ljubljana, Slovania, at Warehouse 09, Copenhagen’s first live art festival, and at the Camp/Anti-Camp festival in Berlin, among many others. Her art videos have also been included in gallery shows and film festivals worldwide. Interested in troubling the divide between popular entertainment and experimental art, Narcissister appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. Narcissister is currently in FORE at The Studio Museum. “Narcissister is You”, her first solo gallery exhibition opens at Envoy Enterprises in New York in Jan 2013, and she will present a new evening-length work at Abrons Art Center in March 2013.