Untimely Transgressions

10:00 a.m.

Untimely Transgressions - Raegan Truax & Erin Manning

11:00 a.m.

Tavia Nyong'o & Carlos Motta: Trying to Explain Time to a Seagull
A dialogue about an unfinished collaboration (last year) as part of the Yerevan Biennial that was interrupted by the declaration of martial law in Armenia.

1:00 p.m.

Eleonora Fabião: "Things that must be done"
During this talk, Eleonora Fabião will present two collective actions that she developed in Rio de Janeiro — MOVIMENTO HO (HO MOVEMENT, 2016) and LEVANTE (UPRISE, 2018) — and engage in a conversation about the (im)possibilities of talking about beginnings and ends.

2:00 p.m.

Clare Croft & Jennifer Harge: Body Reading
In this workshop, longtime collaborators Jennifer Harge and Clare Croft will explore methods for reading with our bodies, using Audre Lorde's poignant provocation, "Poetry is Not a Luxury," as our central text.

3:00 p.m.

Verónica Peña: "Water Tank Sessions"
Sound artist Tara Gladden and underwater performance artist Verónica Peña present the audience with THE WATER TANK SESSIONS (III), a unique durational auditory and visual experience that combines enchanting sounds with the vision of the suspended body.
THE WATER TANK SESSIONS, started by Verónica Peña in 2020, wants to foster collaboration among artists in order to promote joy, togetherness, and creativity from our homes. By bringing artists together, and generating distinct audiovisual experiences for the audience, the project wants to help palliate the hard daily circumstances created by the pandemic.

4:30 p.m.

Concluding Roundtable with speakers from throughout the day

Clare Croft

Clare Croft is a dance historian and theorist, and sometimes a dance dramaturg and curator. She is the editor and curator of Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford 2017), and the author of Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford 2015). She is also the founder and curator of Daring Dances, and the founding curator and producer of the EXPLODE queer dance festival. She is Associate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan.

Eleonora Fabião

Eleonora Fabião is a performance artist and theorist. She has been performing, lecturing, teaching and publishing internationally. Her performative actions have been enacted in several contexts – festivals, exhibitions, sociocultural projects and, mainly, in the streets. Things That Must Be Done Series (Wall Street, Performa Biannual 2015) is the title of a work and, also, a way of referring to the practice. Recent works include: MOVIMENTO HO (Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica 2016), blue blue blue and blue (Museu Bispo do Rosário 2016), if the title was a drawing, it would be a rotating square (Curitiba Theater Festival 2018), UPRISE (ArtRio 2018), There is a smell of burning in the air – a sci-fi with no fi (Grace Exhibition Space NY 2020). Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, School of Communication, Fabião holds an MA and a PhD in Performance Studies (NYU), and an MA in Social History of Culture (PUC-Rio). In 2011 she received the FUNARTE Arts in the Streets Award and in 2014 the Rumos Itaú Grant that resulted in the publication of the book AÇÕES/ACTIONS (Tamanduá Arte 2015). Fabião is a Researcher Level-2 of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). She is an invited artist of the 34ª São Paulo Biannual.

Tara Gladden

Tara Gladden is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator. Her artistic practice includes conceptual, multimedia, audiovisual, and performance strategies. Her work has been programmed and exhibited regionally, nationally, and internationally in festivals, private and non-profit galleries, established and DIY performance venues. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College in Performance and Interactive Media Arts, and a BM from Boston University in Voice Performance.

Tara is currently Director and Curator for Kohl Gallery and a Lecturer in Photography and Video/New Media at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. In collaboration with her on-going artistic partner and husband David Gladden, she is co-founder and co-director of John Cage Memorial Park and Chance House Artist Residency in Chance, MD. For more information, visit: www.ctaragladden.org

Jennifer Harge

Jennifer Harge is an interdisciplinary choreographer, performance artist, and educator originally from Saginaw, MI. With deep familial roots in Detroit, she moved there in 2014 after living in various US cities. Her work utilizes movement based performance and community gathering to center Black and queer vernacular movement practices, codes, and rituals. Harge’s most recent creative research is anchored in embodied archives, ancestral knowledge, Black fellowship, and Black churchicality. In 2014 she founded Harge Dance Stories to create a movement and performance platform centering Black subjectivity.

Harge is the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Eva Yaa Asantewaa Grant for Queer Women(+) Dance Artists, as well as the 2019 Dance/USA Fellowships to Artists. Her work has also been supported by: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Yaddo, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, The Philadelphia Thing, Kresge Arts in Detroit, Knight Foundation, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Washington National Cathedral, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, University of Michigan, Duke University, and Wayne State University.

Harge holds a MFA in Dance from University of Iowa as a Dean’s Graduate Fellow and a BFA in Dance from University of Michigan.

Erin Manning

Erin Manning is a research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab, a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement and 3Ecologies Institute collaborator. Artworks tend to explore more-than human participatory ecologies. Exhibitions include the Sydney and Moscow Biennales, Glasshouse (New York), Vancouver Art Museum, McCord Museum (Montreal) and House of World Cultures (Berlin) and Galateca Gallery (Bucarest). Publications include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke UP, 2020), The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP, 2014).

Photo: Cory Rice

Carlos Motta

Carlos Motta’s (b. 1978, Colombia) multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. His work was the subject of the survey exhibitions Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia (2017) that traveled to Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2018); and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015). His solo exhibitions at international museums include Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano the Buenos Aires (MALBA); Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; New Museum, New York; MoMA/PS1, New York; and Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia. Motta participated in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo; Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art; X Gwangju Biennale; and X Lyon Biennale. Carlos Motta’s first 20-year career monograph Carlos Motta: History’s Backrooms was published by SKIRA in 2020. Motta won the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise; the Future Generation Art Prize; and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008). He was appointed tenure-track Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department in 2019.

Photo: Camillo Godoy

Tavia Nyong’o

Tavia Nyong’o is Chair and William Lampson Professor of Theater & Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Professor of African-American Studies at Yale University. The author of two books, The Amalgamation Waltz (2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018), Nyong’o writes frequently about contemporary and historical art and performance with a particular attention to Black and Brown lives lived in sexual and gender dissidence.

Verónica Peña

Verónica Peña is an interdisciplinary performance artist and independent curator from Spain living in the US. Her work explores absence, separation, and the search for harmony through Performance Art. She uses submersion, body confinement, participation, and visual imprint, to address issues of migration, cross-cultural dialogue, peaceful resistance, empathy, liberation, and women’s empowerment. Recent works include participatory performances that create shared moments amongst strangers. Peña has performed in Europe, Asia, and America. In the US: Pioneer Works (*2020-postponed due to Covid-19), Coaxial Arts Foundation (2021), Grace Exhibition Space (2020), BAAD, Smack Mellon, Triskelion Arts, Queens Museum, Hemispheric Institute, SAIC (Visiting Artist), Times Square Alliance, Armory Show, Purdue University, Defibrillator Performance Gallery, Gabarron Foundation, Dumbo Arts Festival, Consulate of Spain in NY, among others. In Europe: Museo La Neomudejar (Madrid), Fundacion BilbaoArte, Friche La Belle De Mai (Marseille), Festival Intramurs (Valencia), La Tabacalera (Madrid), among others. She was selected for Creative Capital NYC Taller 19-20, received a Franklin Furnace Fund 17-18, and a Universidad Complutense de Madrid Fellowship (Juan Genovés Taller). She published “The Presence Of The Absent”, was reviewed by Donald Kuspit, and published on Hyperallergic. She curates “Collective Becoming”, and leads Performance Art Open Call, a 15,000 members FB Community. veronicapena.com @veronica_pena_live_art

Photo: Patrick Morarescu

Raegan Truax

Raegan Truax is a performance artist and scholar working broadly across the disciplines of performance studies, dance, gender and sexuality studies, art history, and visual culture. Her research explores questions about time, memory, territory, affective exchange, and labor—particularly in regard to queer feminist histories of subversive art and protest.

Truax is working on her first book Durational Performance: Temporalities of the Untimely Body which focuses on global women artists who bend, suspend, and manipulate time as a political material. She also continues her durational practice while in residence at Haverford, and has just completed Recitation, a 13-hour performance on collective grief. For more information about Truax’s artistic work visit www.raegantruax.com