Join us on Saturday, October 24th, at 6pm for a closing reception, catalog launch & performances by Levan Mindiashvili and Anna Parisi via Zoom. Presented in conjunction with EFA Open Studios 2020.
Anna Parisi
Caught in the act, 2020, 30 mins
Director: Gabriel Torres
Collaborators: Alexandria Deters
Camera: Natalia Almonte & Gabriel Torres
Editing: Anna Parisi
“Caught in the act” is a 30-minute performance that portrays the relationship between two girls from different racial backgrounds. It evidences their dependency on one another and how this relationship has been tarnished by ideas of colonialism, white supremacy, white fragility, and inequity. Image: Caught in the act, photo Gabriel Torres.
Levan Mindiashvili
A reading by Lucas de Lima in response to Levan Mindiashvili's work Levani's Room: AMERICA at TIAB: Here, Together! 20 mins
For the Immigrant Artist Biennial's closing performance, Levan Mindiashvili invited Brazilian-born, New York-based poet Lucas de Lima to read excerpts from Cosmic Bottom. Featuring text by James Baldwin, Levan Mindiashvili's installation comments on the representation of race, colonialism, identity, and queer love and desire in American culture. Lucas de Lima's manuscript expands on bottoming as an act of heightened receptiveness that collapses the sexual, the racial, the affective, and the ecological. Penetrable and permeable, the bottom opens a portal to life-worlds that are unintelligible to the gaze of phallic mastery, from Ariel the mermaid in the depths of the sea to the hole left by a mining dam's collapse in Brazil.
Camera: Levan Mindiashvili
ASL Interpreting and Closed Captioning will be made available. Please contact us with any accessibility needs – projectspace@efanyc.org.
About the Artists
Levan Mindiashvili is a Georgian born Brooklyn based visual artist who creates immersive modular installations that deal with fluidity as a current state of being. He questions canonical truths regarding identity, language, and history, and explores expanding fields of contemporary cultural production, including queer underground rave culture and social sculpture. He holds his BFA from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts and MFA from The National University of Arts ofBuenos Aires, Argentina. Among his awards are CreativeTime X Summit grant for creative dinners, AIM Fellowship of The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and Commission for Public Art Projects from The National Endowments for Arts. His works have been included in recent group exhibitions at the SchauFenster, Berlin; SculptureCenter, New York; BRIC Biennial Vol.3, Brooklyn; Recent solo presentations include “89.19” at Berlin Art Fair; “Now is Always Someone Else”NARS Foundation, Brooklyn; “I Should Have Kissed You Longer” TAF, Tbilisi; “In Search of The Miraculous,” NADA Miami. His works have been mentioned in OSMOS Magazine, The Art Newspaper, The Observer, ArtAsia Pacific, Hyperallergic, Art Margins, etc. His works are in public collections of Georgian National Museum, State Silk Museum (Tbilisi) and National Art Museum of China (Beijing).
Anna Parisi is a Brooklyn-based Brazilian artist working predominantly with sculpture and performance. She works across the boundaries of areas and materials with a committed focus on investigating questions that address the traumatic violence against black, female-coded, and historically oppressed bodies by insisting on creating art that opposes structural violence and questions patriarchal, heteronormative, and racial hegemonies. Her works are critically attuned to the current political and socio-cultural contexts. Through both her artistic practice and curatorial work, Anna is interested in addressing issues of racial disparity, gender, human and civil rights from an intersectional perspective. She is utterly interested in promoting dialogue within African Diasporas and among people of different backgrounds and ethnicities. Anna holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons, The New School of Design in New York, a BFA in Communications with a minor in Filmmaking from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), and an MA in Strategic Design from the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM-Rio). She has exhibited or performed at The Hunter East Harlem Art Gallery, La Galleria La Mama, UrbanGlass, The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division and The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, Smack Mellon, Wesbeth Gallery, Queens Museum, Artigo Rio, Musée D’Elysee in Lausanne, among others.
About TIAB
*The Immigrant Artist Biennial (TIAB) 2020: Here Together! 2020 is an inaugural multi-site project presenting works by 60+ US-based immigrant artists in September–December 2020. TIAB is Fiscally sponsored by NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts). EFA Project Space is presenter of TIAB’s central exhibition, made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by LMCC (the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council). Project Space programming is made possible through the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Performance events are supported by the women & performance: a journal of feminist theory public programs fund. www.theimmigrantartistbiennial.com