Chen’s [Remote]
Series Editors Howie Chen, Alex Ito
Contributors E.T. Chong, Renée Green, Maia Ruth Lee, Ying Liu, Miko Revereza, Guadalupe Rosales, Suneil Sanzgiri, Tiffany Sia, SITU Research, Bora Erden, Alice Sparkly Kat, A.L. Steiner, Noura Wedell
Contributors E.T. Chong, Renée Green, Maia Ruth Lee, Ying Liu, Miko Revereza, Guadalupe Rosales, Suneil Sanzgiri, Tiffany Sia, SITU Research, Bora Erden, Alice Sparkly Kat, A.L. Steiner, Noura Wedell
A series of nine remote screenings, events, and discussions in lieu of IRL gallery programming at Chen's, a Brooklyn-based gallery directed by Howie Chen and Alex Ito.
With this Summer 2020 series, we focus on issues of hegemony, representation, solidarity, and new futures. With the ongoing uprising and the relentless news cycle, we hope to create a space that is communal and restorative by spending time with people whose individual efforts find ways to connect art to the pressing matters of life. We are interested in how Art — as a field of images, abstractions, gestures, and symbols — can simultaneously deal with the concreteness of our lived reality.
Series Titles
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A conversation with Maia Ruth Lee and Guadalupe Rosales about making reparative and discursive space for others and the importance (and tensions) of cultural representation. Maia Ruth Lee Maia Ruth Lee is a New York based artist and educator born in Busan, South Korea. Lee’s first solo exhibition in New York was at Eli Ping Frances Perkins in 2016, followed by her solo exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery two years later. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including at CANADA gallery (New York), Salon 94 (New York), Roberts & Tilton Gallery (Los Angeles), and Parisian Laundry Gallery (Montreal). Lee participated in ... -
Screening of “Never Rest/Unrest”, a new film by artist Tiffany Sia, followed by a discussion on the imaging the real material surround of political protest in Hong Kong, followed by a discussion on the temporal, counter-spectacular, and embodied experiences of our current global uprisings. “Never Rest/Unrest” is a hand-held short film by Tiffany Sia about the relentless political actions in Hong Kong, spanning early summer to late 2019. The experimental short is an adaptation of the artist’s practice of scaling oral history, of showing political crisis in Hong Kong as ephemeral stories on Instagram for the past year. “Never Rest/Unrest” takes ... -
Screening of “Distancing” (2019) and “DROGA!” (2014), by artist Miko Revereza, followed by a discussion on the entanglement of cinema, migration, and the fugitive agency of ‘stateless’ cinema in the ruins of psychological and geographical chasms. Distancing (16mm, 10min, Color, 2019) Shot on 16mm colour film, Distancing documents the logistics and poetics of Miko Revereza’s decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines. ‘My ticket is one way’, the filmmaker explains to his grandmother as she suddenly realizes he isn’t coming back. Distancing is a film about this personal realization; to leave and thus become exiled from the country ... -
A presentation by artist E.T. Chong followed by a discussion focusing on interrogating dominant ideas of “position” in terms of sexuality, race, and power, including the history of Asian subjects and bodies in relation to White supremacy. The presentation will include projects such as his recent “Asian Tops White Bottoms” performance at Recess, social deconditioning hypnosis treatments, and research into the troubled figure of Black Panther Richard Aoki. E.T. Chong E.T. Chong is an activist, artist, and community builder focused on creating platforms for marginalized communities. His current practice creates safe spaces for queer and non-gender binary minorities within the Asian Pacific Islander ... -
Counter-Narrative/Counter-Surveillance: Documenting the Repression of Public Assembly Chen’s [Remote]Screenings with researcher Bora Erden of SITU Research followed by a discussion focusing on liberatory applications of forensic spatial technology to counter the repression of public assembly. Drawing from three recent projects, the screenings include research on the death of a protestor (‘Euromaidan Event Reconstruction – I.F. Dmytriv case’, Ukraine 2014), dangers and police abuse of tear gas weapons (‘Choking Dissent’ commissioned by Amnesty International), and reconstruction of police violence against BLM protestors at Barclays Center in June. Bora Erden Bora Erden is a spatial researcher with a background in computer vision. At SITU Research, he applies architectural, geospatial and computational techniques to ... -
Screening with filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri followed by a conversation on the relationship between diasporic agency and filmmaking as an unenclosed practice of solidarity and revolt. The program includes Sanzgiri’s film ‘At Home But Not At Home’ (2019), featuring interviews with his father growing up under Portugese colonialism in India, utilizes modes of seeing at a distance to question the construction of memory, identity, and anti-colonial solidarity across continents. It will be followed by a trailer for his upcoming ‘Letter From Your Far-off Country’. Suneil Sanzgiri Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and ... -
A reading event with artist A.L. Steiner and collaborator/translator Noura Wedell with a discussion on the legacy of Françoise d’Eaubonne’s activist work and original ecofeminist writing as part of an inquiry into its current-day viability as a call to action, and a recourse to mutation. During the development of French second-wave Eurocentric feminism arose the writings of Françoise d’Eaubonne, who coined the term ‘ecofeminism’ in 1974 as part of her 274-page tract Le Féminisme ou la mort. (Feminism or death.). Unsurprisingly, although regretfully, this critical text – along with the breadth of her prolific writings – has yet to receive English ... -
“Between Sky and Belief: Cosmological Uprisings”, a conversation between Alice Sparkly Kat and Ying Liu. The program consists of individual presentations on practices and research that take a critical approach to astrology, divination and other frameworks that decode futurity. The conversation dissects the historical and contemporary applications of astrology to narrate our current sociopolitical reality and to fathom our universe. Alice Sparkly Kat Alice Sparkly Kat is a queer, PoC astrologer. They use astrology to re-chart a history of the subconscious, redefine the body in world, and reimagine history as collective memory. Their astrological work has inhabited MoMA, Philadelphia Museum of Art, ... -
A screening and conversation with artist, writer, and filmmaker Renée Green. This program highlights Renée Green’s two recent short films, “Americas : Veritas (2018)”, and “Commemorative Toile: Mise-en-scène (2020)”. “Americas : Veritas” features Le Corbusier’s only two structures built in the American continent–Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Casa Curutchet, in La Plata, Argentina–while “Commemorative Toile: Mise-en-scène” revisits a homonymous wallpaper and textile installation made by Green in 1991/1993, which focused on the history of a pervasive textile and its motifs, as well as the artist’s interpretation of them. Tracing an arch that connects a European ...
