CONJUNCTURE
Whitney Independent Study Program 2019-20 Studio Program
Artists: Michaela Bathrick, Matt Browning, Mariangela Ciccarello, Vikram Divecha, Philipp Farra, Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter, Fields Harrington, Kevin Kelly, Karlito Miller Espinosa, Eliza Myrie, Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, Andres Villarreal, Charisse Pearlina Weston, William Wiebe.
An interactive PDF is hosted online by the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts’ EFA Project Space from July 17, 2020 - August 7, 2020. After August 7, 2020 the interactive PDF will continue to be available on Library Stack at librarystack.org/conjuncture/. Print editions may be requested via email from whitneyisp@whitney.org at no cost as long as copies remain available.
This exhibition-at-a-distance has become a new and perhaps temporary norm in our world, which feels simultaneously novel and awfully familiar. Many institutions and organizations have been spinning their wheels this year, first to concoct plausible action plans for enduring COVID-19, and subsequently to uplift and engage meaningfully with the Movement for Black Lives. While the Whitney ISP participants won’t assert that Conjuncture sufficiently addresses these events in their concrete immediacy, they would like to acknowledge that their experiences at the ISP have represented a sustained grappling with the role of art and its discourses in global, racial, colonial capitalism, which continuously reproduces a set of social relations of which our present is the most recent, violent expression.
This book, in part, serves as an object of that process of studying together.
The interactive PDF can be viewed by clicking “Read Now” above or accessed directly at this link. You may navigate to an artist’s page by clicking their name in the table of contents. You may return to the table of contents by clicking on “CONJUNCTURE” in the book’s page header.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Michaela Bathrick is an artist interested in the inefficiency of material and form. Bathrick received a BA from University of California, Los Angeles in 2015.
Matt Browning is currently researching the constitutive conditions of art and aesthetics. Exhibitions include the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany, Veronica, Seattle, WA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. He is a PhD student in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Mariangela Ciccarello is an artist working in moving image and performance. Her work has been exhibited at the Locarno Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Microscope Gallery, Harvard Art Museum, Film at Lincoln Center, Torino Film Festival, Mediterranea 18 Biennale and Syros International Film Festival among others. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (US), an MA in Fine Arts from the University of Provence (FR), and a BA in Philosophy from Alma Mater Studiorum, Bologna (IT). Her work has been supported by the Roberto Cimetta Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Valletta 2018 Foundation, and the New York State Council for the Arts.
Vikram Divecha (b. Beirut) was raised in Mumbai and works between New York and Dubai. By means of 'found processes’ Divecha engages areas such as wholesale exporting, architectural consultancy, municipal gardening, and rail transport to bring invisible structures into plain view. Divecha holds an MFA from Columbia University, NY. Exhibitions include: Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; The Jewish Museum, NY; Wallach Art Gallery, NY; 57th Venice Biennale; 13th Sharjah Biennial; Louvre Abu Dhabi; Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. Grants, commissions and scholarships received include: Sharjah Art Foundation; the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture; institut français; the Salama bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation. Residencies attended: Land Art Mongolia; Temporary Art Platform, Lebanon.
Philipp Farra (b 1991 Schoenebeck a.d. Elbe, Germany) is an artist currently based in New York, USA, and Leipzig, Germany. He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts after attending the Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig, Germany, HEAD, Geneva, Switzerland and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. Farra is interested in narrative structures and questions of representation, especially in architecture and photography, through a marxist and materialist lens within the context of art. Recent group shows and publications include HAUNTS at JOAN, L.A., a group show at HUMAN RESOURCES L.A., alien/fremd at Grassimuseum, Leipzig, Germany and the artist book Green Hope.
Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter’s research focuses on language, understood as an activity. Recent solo shows and performances include One against All (Uno contro tutti) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Contradictory Statements at Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg, and Contra Dance at the Emily Harvey Foundation/Swiss Institute. They have been co-organizing the artist-run space Taylor Macklin in Zurich, and recently curated the exhibition Just Another Story about Leaving at Kunsthaus Glarus.
Fields Harrington is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice considers the blurring of boundaries between poetics and science. His work revisits the history of western empiricism and scientific systems, addressing legacies of violence as well as the enmeshment of science, racism, and ideology. By appropriating scientific processes and subverting their grammar, his desire is to relieve the black subjective experience from a legacy of historical violence. The weaving of artistic and scientific languages deployed in his work proposes the formation of a relational knowledge that recodes science through poetics. He received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kevin Kelly is a video artist who pursues the unclichéing of images, sites, narratives and roles. He received an MFA from Hunter College. Kevin has recently screened at Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin and the 34th edition of the Kassel Dokfest. He has also had exhibitions and screenings at New Britain Museum of American Art, Cecilia Jaime Gallery, Ghent, Belgium, KANSAS Gallery, NY, NY and Anthology Film Archives NY, NY. He lives and works in NYC. www.kevinkellyvideo.com
Karlito Miller Espinosa (b. San José, Costa Rica) is a conceptual artist who lives and works along the U.S.- Mexico Border. His work is informed by the direct relationship between capitalism and the structuring role violence plays in its preservation. His work has been exhibited by el Museo del Barrio in Harlem, New York, the United Nations Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, the Street Art Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, EARTH University (School of Agriculture of the Humid Tropical Region) in Costa Rica, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in New York, and the 2018 Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art. He received his MFA from the University of Arizona.
Eliza Myrie is an artist whose conceptual sculpture and print work explore site and labor through generational inheritance, gender, and authorship. Myrie received her MFA from Northwestern University and was a participant at The Skowhegan School. Myrie lectures at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a co-founder of The Black Artists Retreat [B.A.R.]. Myrie’s work has been supported by Artadia, Propeller Fund, and Chicago Artists Coalition. Myrie has contributed to publications with Sming Sming Books and The MIT Press. Exhibitions include Arts Club Chicago; Gallery 400; Vox Populi; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy’s work across moving images, sound, and text has explored common places such as hospitals, parks, streets, temples, mosques, and lakes, as multivalent sites that hold possibilities for collective resistance and care. Her most recent film, The Lake and The Lake, won the Best Documentary award at the 58th Ann Arbor Film Festival. Sindhu received an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She has been a fellow of the Flaherty Film Seminar, a participant of the SOMA Summer program, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2020-21, she will be a Core artist-in-residence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Andres Villarreal is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Andres' practice interrogates how discourses emerge and are cultivated within society; explores the relationship between representation and the production of reality; and deals with questions relating to narration and memory. Their work is often situated in the borderland between fact and fiction. They use a multilayered artistic approach, combining text, photography, poetry, installation and video in order to highlight how digitization and commercialization transform life and desire in contemporary society. They received their MFA from Berlin University of the Arts and previously studied Gender Studies and Sociology. www.andresvillarreal.net
Charisse Pearlina Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose practice is grounded in a deep material investigation of poetics and the autobiographical in the service of black people. Her recent exhibitions include group shows at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Praz-Delavallade Gallery LA, and Abrons Art Center (forthcoming); she has participated in solo exhibitions at Project Row Houses and Recess (forthcoming). Her awards include individual artist grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Santo Foundation, Artadia Fund For the Arts, and the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund. In 2016 she was a Southern Constellation Fellow at the Elsewhere Museum, she was a 2019 Dedalus Foundation Fellow in Painting and Sculpture and will be a 2021 Creative Glass Fellow at the Wheaten Arts Center. She holds a MFA from the University of California-Irvine and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
William Wiebe is studying the influence of technology on attitudes towards property. Wiebe received a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 2018-19, Wiebe was a Fulbright Fellow in Cyprus.
ABOUT THE ISP
The Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) consists of three interrelated parts: Studio Program, Curatorial Program, and Critical Studies Program. The ISP provides a setting within which students pursuing art practice, curatorial work, art historical scholarship, and critical writing engage in ongoing discussions and debates that examine the historical, social, and intellectual conditions of artistic production. The program encourages the theoretical and critical study of the practices, institutions, and discourses that constitute the field of culture.
Each year fifteen students are selected to participate in the Studio Program, four in the Curatorial Program, and six in the Critical Studies Program. Curatorial and critical studies students are designated as Helena Rubinstein Fellows in recognition of the substantial support provided to the program by the Helena Rubinstein Foundation. The program begins in early September and concludes at the end of the following May. Many of the participants are enrolled at universities and art schools and receive academic credit for their participation, while others have recently completed their formal studies.
The online release of Conjuncture marks the fourth partnership between EFA Project Space and the Whitney ISP Studio Program.