Taking our annual research theme What is Distance? as inspiration, this festival is a twenty-four hour meditation in which a group of artists will respond to the question in the title, mounting a conversation across time that considers multiple voices and narratives to create a kaleidoscopic view of history. Featuring a dance piece by Catherine Galasso, a performance lecture by artist collective Research Service, and a keynote by visual artist Fred Wilson.
Friday, January 19
6:30–8 pm
Keynote Address
Fred Wilson
Artist Fred Wilson will explore the prompt What is Distance? as it relates to his own work, creative practice, and lived experience. His talk will be followed by a conversation.
Saturday, January 20
2 pm: Dance Performance
Catherine Galasso
notes on de groat
In December 2015, Catherine Galasso presented an evening of early works by choreographer Andy de Groat, engaging with a living history of the artist that was both personal and part of a lineage of downtown performance. The evening culminated with a new work created by Galasso titled notes on de groat, a poetic meditation on the ways in which her own process, as a choreographer and visual artist, intersects and deviates from de Groat’s aesthetic, which she has been steeped in since a young age through her father, composer Michael Galasso, de Groat’s longtime collaborator. In a rare restaging for the Bard Graduate Center seminar room, notes on de groat locates personal and historical distance though the ways in which these dialogues live and breathe across time, legacy, and artistic tradition. The piece was originally commissioned by Danspace Project, and will be performed by Doug LeCours, Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal, and Meg Weeks.
“an
illuminating, heartfelt program of old and new work […] time seemed to loop
back on itself”
THE NEW YORK TIMES — Siobhan Burke
4–5 pm: Performance Lecture
Research ServiceResearch Service is a collective of three multidisciplinary thinkers: Avi Alpert, Mashinka Firunts, and Danny Snelson. This site-responsive lecture-performance considers the relationship between distance, pedagogy, and embodiment. Distance learning and situated knowledge will be crossed as we ask how geospatial coordinates inflect the pedagogical encounter.
Fred Wilson is an artist based in New York. His works
include installations that consider and investigate museological, cultural, and
historical issues, which museums neglect to discuss, in works such as Mining
the Museum (The Contemporary,Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, 1992).
Other installations have been created for the Southeastern Center for
Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem (1994); the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the
University of Melbourne, Australia (1998); the Museum of Modern Art in New York
(1999); the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden (2004); the Hood
Museum of Art at Dartmouth (2005); Institute of Jamaica Gallery (2007–8); the
Allen Memorial Museum of Art, Oberlin College (2016), Neuberger Museum of Art,
New York (2017), and the Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2017), among many others.
Wilson has received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award (1999), the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2003), and is currently a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow. He is a Whitney Museum trustee and has served as the Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Object, Exhibition, and Knowledge at Skidmore College (2003–6). He represented the United States at the Cairo Biennale (1992) and Venice Biennale (2003).
In 2001, he was the subject of a retrospective, Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2000, organized by Maurice Berger for the Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland which traveled to eight venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Chicago Cultural Center in 2001.
His work is in many museum collections including in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Ohio), Long Museum (Shanghai), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate (London), Whitney Museum (New York), and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston). Wilson is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York.
Catherine Galasso creates live performance at the intersection of theater, dance, and installation. Since 2006 she has created eight evening-length, cross-disciplinary, cast-specific works and numerous shorter performances for dance venues, galleries, and museums. Galasso’s work has been presented by Danspace Project, La MaMa, the River To River Festival, Joyce SoHo, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, Harvard University’s Carpenter Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and the International Theater Festival in Pristina, Kosovo. Galasso has been awarded mentorships with Monica Bill Barnes, Wally Cardona, and Ralph Lemon, and residencies at The Watermill Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, Chez Bushwick, ODC Theater (San Francisco), and ZonaD Studio (Bucharest). Galasso is currently a Resident Artist with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Dance Development Program (2015–17), as well as a 2016–18 BAX Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Born in New York and raised in Italy, she is the daughter of internationally acclaimed composer Michael Galasso. She received a painting degree from the Art Institute in Venice, Italy, and holds a BA in Film from Cornell University.
Research Service is the collaborative endeavor of Avi Alpert, Mashinka Firunts, and Danny Snelson. Their projects propose that scholarship is as much a question of aesthetic inquiry as abstract thought. To these ends, they craft unique research initiatives around discrete subjects, on assignment. This practice stresses the communal nature of knowledge production, positioning audiences as nodes within events and creating a heightened affective situation for shared conceptual labor. Recent projects have been presented at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Lisa Cooley Gallery (New York), the Drawing Center (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), and in the New Museum VOICE Registers Series.
Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist. His online editorial work can be found at PennSound, UbuWeb, Eclipse and Jacket2 Reissues. He is the co-author of Inventory Arousal (Bedford Press, 2011) and publisher of Edit Publications.
Avi Alpert is a writer based in New York. His writings are published or forthcoming in diacritics, Postcolonial Studies, Third Text, Shifter and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum, and is currently a postdoctoral associate at Rutgers University.
Mashinka Firunts is a writer and artist. She currently resides in Philadelphia, where she is a student in the University of Pennsylvania’s History of Art PhD program.
