Join The New School’s stellar faculty for another edition of “A New School Moment” as they unravel some of the complexities of a particularly pressing political, cultural or social issue. On March 5, the focus is energy.

Energy comes to us from the earth’s deepest crevices to the furthest reaches of the solar system – often through substantial technological advances, sometimes at equally substantial costs to humans. This increasingly complex system of human agency and infrastructures is the topic of this exchange, organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In brief, succinct presentations, the speakers examine the potential consequences if energy were to be considered a “partner” in the endeavor of producing and consuming energy. Reflecting recent developments in philosophy, sometimes grouped under the heading of “speculative materialism,” the panelists propose that energy is not dead matter but an active agent that needs to be recognized as such in order to make human life sustainable on this planet.

Faculty members from across The New School analyze various notions of energy, drawing from their expertise in the political and sciences, media studies, environmentalism and design, as well as art. Each will speak for seven minutes and analyze energy from his or her particular professional domain. Jamie Kruse, whose artwork Thingness of Energy is currently on view the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, opens the forum.

Moderator
Edward Keller, designer, musician, Associate Dean of Distributed Learning and Technology, Associate Professor, School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design

Participants
Jonathan Bach, Associate Professor, International Affairs, New School for Public Engagement
Liz Barry, Director, Urban Environment, The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, part-time faculty, Parsons The New School for Design (SCE, SDS)
Jacalyn Brookner, artist,  Fine Arts Program, Parsons The New School for Design
Georgina Drew, anthropologist, Post-Doctorate Fellow, India China Institute, The New School
Jamie Kruse, artist and independent scholar
Alan H. McGowan, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Science, Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Eugene Lang College
Arthur Ou, artist, Director, BFA Photography, and Assistant Professor, School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design
David White, Assistant Professor, Environmental Technology & Material Sciences, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School of Design
Rafi Youatt, Assistant Professor, Politics, The New School for Social Research

* Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in conjunction with the 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness,” and with the support of the Office of Sustainability and The Green Fund.

Posted on February 21, 2012

Writer, curator and 2011-2013 Vera List Center Fellow Joshua Simon facilitates an open discussion on Neomaterialism, as part of his research on the expanded notions of “Thingness.” Re-introducing different notions of materialism into the already established conversation on the subjectivity of things, Neomaterialism expands on earlier research in this field to include considerations of labor, debt, credit, life-taxes and social organization.

How come symbols behave like materials (“fake” and “real” brands)? Why have commodities become the historical subject (we furnish our world with IKEA or rather we dwell in its world)? Are humans reduced to simply absorbing surpluses (baby diapers are a form of child labor)? How labor has shifted from production to consumption and why is everything we do is work (even when we are not employed)?

With a subtitle inspired by the events of Occupy the Ports (December 12, 2011), the open discussion touches on animism and alienation, the overqualified generation, and the promise of the “dividual.” It does so by following Joshua Simon’s recent texts on Neomaterialism, published with e-flux journal, and the 1898 essay ”The Beginning of Ownership” by sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen, one of the founders of The New School.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on February 9, 2012

Using various non-traditional materials—from jet engines to bovine parts to chemical nitrates and salt—Roger Hiorns’ sculptures, performances, and installations broadly investigate the possibility of transformation in objects, social encounters, and urban situations. Hiorns is well-known for his 2009 ArtAngel commission, Seizure, in which the artist pumped 75,000 liters of copper sulfate solution into an abandoned South London council flat to create a crystalline growth on the walls, floor, and ceiling. Transformation, by way of such chemical and organic processes, is central to much of his work and is often connected to considerations of meaning and rhetoric. For his talk, Hiorns considers this subject in relation to new works.

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Born in 1975 in Birmingham, England, Roger Hiorns lives and works in London. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; The Art Institute of Chicago; Tate Britain; Camden Arts Centre, London; and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2009, Hiorns was nominated for the Turner Prize for his installation Seizure.

Public Art Fund Talks at The New School are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on January 26, 2012

Thingness of Energy is a mixed media art installation by Jamie Kruse, presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in the lobby of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, a glass-enclosed gallery opening onto Fifth Avenue. It serves as the physical and virtual hub for long-term discussions as well as temporary interactions, events and happenings on The New School’s energy use and its economic, environmental, ethical, urban and artistic implications.

With unprecedented access to the university’s infrastructure and support staff, Kruse has spent six months investigating the flow of energy through various New School buildings. The outcome of her research is a complex, intricate and fragile assemblage of the physical components of energy. The installation is made up of the material conduits of energy – the pipes, wires, switch boxes and tubes through which it flows – as well as samples of some of the energy sources themselves (fossil fuels and coal) in addition to maps and photographs. Mounted on the building’s membrane, i.e. its windows, the installation is visible from both the street and the building’s interior underscoring the correlation between producer of energy – the outside – to consumer of energy – the people in the building.

Energy materials and flows are often hidden in basements or invisibly channeled through pipes and wires. Thingness of Energy is a provocation to consider and directly experience the material realities of energy. Taking The New School’s Climate Action Plan as its point of departure, the project reveals the deep geologic nature and effects of the materials we use to generate and transmit energy. And it underscores the power of deep time – both past and future – as a generator of energy forms and effects.

At its core, Thingness of Energy poses the question: what if “anticipating geologic scales of force, change, and effect” became a common design specification for energy production and distribution, policy-making, and infrastructure design?

The presentation is accompanied by several public programs, among them an installation walkthrough and facilities tour on Thursday, February 23, 12:30 p.m. (RSVP required: vlc@newschool.edu) and an energy-driven exchange among New School faculty members from different programs, on Monday, March 5, 6:30 p.m.

The opening reception coincides with other openings at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Where Do We Migrate To?, curated by Niels Van Tomme.

For further information, visit
www.veralistcenter.org/kruse
http://smudgestudio.org/smudge/Thingness.html

For inquiries regarding artist-led tours or public classes, please contact vlc@newschool.edu.

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Jamie Kruse is an artist, designer and independent scholar. In 2006 she co-founded (with Elizabeth Ellsworth) smudge studio, based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Recent projects include Geologic City: A Field Guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York. Exhibitions have been presented at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Incident Report, Hudson, New York. She has been granted residencies with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT; Sundance Preserve; the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Kruse is the author of the Friends of the Pleistocene blog.

*   *   *

Thingness of Energy is an art project by Jamie Kruse, developed and produced in collaboration with The New School’s Office for Sustainability, the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The project is supported, in part, by The New School’s Green Fund and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on January 18, 2012

This fall, Public Art Fund Talks at The New School examine the transformative potential of sculpture and its ability to reach beyond the material presence of an object’s physical form. Inspired by the influence of an earlier conceptual art legacy on contemporary sculptural practice, this series examines how the limits of an object might be redefined both literally and metaphorically in the public realm.

History is a part of every single action, every single thing that we do. We don’t choose it; it kind of chooses us… In being who we are, we are constantly sending these signals out to the world, and when you start to get a signal back—that is the thing that’s acknowledging our presence, our vision. And at that moment, that’s the point when you’ve chosen it. We’ve sent the signal out, the signal comes back to us, and at that moment we embody history and as we send these signals out its just showing that we’re aware of doing so.

-Matthew Day Jackson, The Brooklyn Rail, July-August 2011

Matthew Day Jackson explores the relationship between materials, myths, and recent history to create works that grapple with the nature of human experience, both personal and collective.  Jackson’s work utilizes an everyday iconography juxtaposed with an unknown archaeology of form to create “brave new worlds” of encounter in his works, whether he is working in sculpture, collage, video or photography.

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Born in 1974 in Panorama City, California, Matthew Day Jackson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Walker Art Center; Princeton University Art Museum; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Hayward Gallery ; Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Barbican Gallery, London; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; 1st Athens Biennale; 2nd Moscow Biennale; 3rd Beijing Biennale; Herning Kunstmuseum; Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on October 20, 2011

Organized as forum for people and things, the presentations are set in a theatrical arena arranged around a number of disputed objects. Introductions by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman.

Roundtable I
Forensic Architecture
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Buildings are both sensors and agents. They materialize political and economical forces, and also the events that befall them. Buildings undergo constant formal transformations in response to forces. They expand and contract with temperature and with the slow degeneration of their component materials, registering transformation in humidity, air quality, CO2 levels, salinity, seismic movements – and sometimes also the abrupt or violent events that target them or simply happen next to them. Some of these processes can be reconstructed through structural calculations, blast analyses, and the determination of the failure points of structures, details, and forms.

Participants:
Nikolaus Hirsch, Städelschule, Frankfurt a.M., Germany, moderator
Eve Hinman, Hinman Consulting Engineers, New York/San Francisco
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University
Norman Weiss, GSAPP, Columbia University

Lunch Break 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.

Roundtable II
Constructed Evidence: The Thing Makes Its Forum
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.

What if the object is not a “witness” but an entity constructed for the express purpose of creating, or activating, the forum? Such an object might map the diffused networks of informal or illegal labor, or be called upon to narrate historical events in the absence of evidentiary materials. In fact, the object may be the very thing that produces a forum where none previously existed. An artwork likewise produces its constituency; it gathers, rather than simply assumes an already extant audience. If the object, conceptualized as such, is not that which registers the events that came before it in the manner of the classical witness, then it might be said the object itself becomes the event to which the forum as witness will address itself.

Participants:
Susan Schuppli, Goldsmiths, University of London, moderator
Amber Horning, John Jay College, New York
Sara Jordeno, artist, New York
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design
Arne Svenson, artist, New York

Roundtable III
Animism
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.

In the habituated scheme of modernity, objects are conceived as the passive stuff on which human action leaves its imprint or trace. Whenever this passive/active nexus between objects and subject, humans and the non-human is disturbed or even reversed – as in the coming-to-life of seemingly dead matter, the becoming autonomous of inert things – we inevitably step into the territory of animism: that non-modern worldview that conceives of things as animated and possessing agency. With regards to Forensic Aesthetics, the historical discourse of animism provides a foil for a reflection on the boundaries at stake. This session examines a series of objects and liminal cases in which those borders are being destabilized or transgressed, from the crystal ball to educational objects from the 1920s, via the forensics of hair, to rocks.

Participants:
Anselm Franke, moderator
Brigid Doherty, Princeton University
Spyros Papapetros, Princeton University
Hugh Raffles, The New School for Social Research

Closing Remarks
5:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Srdjan Jovanovich Weiss, Tyler School of Art, Architecture Department, Temple University

Follow the links to detailed event description and DAY ONE schedule.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with Cabinet Magazine, The Forensic Architecture ERC Project at The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on October 19, 2011

“Grave diggers” have, since the middle of the 1980s, been unearthing bones and turning burial sites into an epistemic resource from which the details of war crimes can be reconstructed and brought into the pale of the law. Forensic teams, including archaeologists, anthropologists, pathologists, radiologists, dental experts, bio-data technicians, DNA specialists and statisticians of all sorts, are working in international teams organized by NGOs or sponsored by the United Nations or international tribunals. Their practices mark a shift in emphasis from the living to the dead, from memory and trauma to empirical science, and from subjects to objects in accounting for atrocities.

Introduction:
Thomas Keenan, Bard College
Eyal Weizman, Goldsmiths, University of London

Presentations:
Eric Stover, writer and faculty director, The Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley
Grupa Spomenik / Monument Group: Damir Arsenijevic, Branimir Stojanovic, and Milica Tomić, Belgrade, Serbia

Follow the links to detailed event description and DAY TWO schedule.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with Cabinet Magazine, The Forensic Architecture ERC Project at The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on October 19, 2011

While legal and cultural scholars have labeled the third part of the 20th century – with its particular attention to testimony – as the “era of the witness,” the emergence of forensics in legal forums and popular entertainment signifies a new attention to the communicative capacity, agency, and power of things. This material approach is evident in the ubiquitous role that science and technologies now play in shaping contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and communicating. Today’s legal and political decisions are often based upon the capacity to display and read DNA samples, 3D laser scans, nanotechnology, and the enhanced vision of electromagnetic microscopes and satellite surveillance. From mass graves to retinal scans, the topography of the seabed to the remnants of destroyed buildings, forensics is not only about the diagnostics, but also about the rhetoric of persuasion. The aesthetic dimension of forensics includes its means of presentation, the theatrics of its delivery, the forms of image and gesture. The forensic aesthetics of the present carries with it grave political and ethical implications, spreading its impact across socioeconomic, environmental, scientific, and cultural domains.

Etymologically, forensics refers to the “forum,” and to the practice and skill of making an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering. Forensics has always been part of rhetoric, but its domain includes not only human speech but also that of objects. In forensic rhetoric, objects can address the forum. Because objects do not speak for themselves, there is a need for “translation” or “interpretation” – forensic rhetoric requires a person or a set of technologies to mediate between the object and the forum, to present the object, interpret it and place it within a larger net of relations.

The lectures and roundtable discussions by the participating artists, scholars and curators investigate these issues in a series of “forums” organized around a number of disputed objects.

Follow the links to detailed event schedules: DAY ONE and DAY TWO.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with Cabinet Magazine, The Forensic Architecture ERC Project at The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on October 19, 2011

This fall, the Public Art Fund Talks at The New School series examines the transformative potential of sculpture and its ability to reach beyond the material presence of an object’s physical form. Inspired by the influence of conceptual art on contemporary sculptural practice, this series examines how the limits of an object might be redefined both literally and metaphorically in the public realm.

The second speaker of the series is Alaska-based, Italian artist Paola Pivi. Her installations, sculpture, performances, and photographs create astonishing and enigmatic associations and visual relationships that expand our understanding of the experience of contemporary art. Bringing together surprising references from our everyday world, Pivi has orchestrated such unexpected scenarios as a gallery petting zoo, a transport truck flipped on the side of a road, 100 Chinese people gathered in a gallery, and a leopard traversing a gallery filled with cups of cappuccino. Likened to an “experiential playground”, her work ultimately subverts expectation with the unanticipated. Pivi’s artistic practice challenges our mode of engagement by presenting the inconceivable as real.

*  *  *

Born in Milan, Paola Pivi has exhibited widely across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the United States. She was the recipient of the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennial. Her work has been presented at Manifesta, and the Berlin Biennial. Pivi has also exhibited at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MACRO, Rome; Hayward Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Portikus, Frankfurt; Palazzo Grassi, Venice; Tate Modern, London; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Massachusset College of Art, Boston; Brown University, Providence; Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; P.S.1 MoMA, and White Columns, New York. She is represented by Massimo De Carlo, Milan and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on September 28, 2011

On occasion of the exhibition And Another Thing at The James Gallery at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, the Vera List Center and the James Gallery presents a panel discussion featuring artists, scholars and writers on the subject of “thingness.”

What are the political and ethical implications of considering all objects—whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, even whether animate or inanimate– equivalent and thereby interchangeable? Moderated by the exhibition’s co-curator Katherine Behar, sociologist Noortje Marres, media scholar Shannon Mattern and urban designer David Turnbull discuss how this kind of perspective changes the conversation around sustainability as well as human interaction. What happens when technology reaches the scale of cities? Can an object bear responsibility that has previously been reserved for humans? Beginning with the artist’s sometimes contentious relationship to material presence as a platform for the examination of these questions, this panel considers the constellation of disciplines including architecture, ecology, global geography, urban studies, and anthropology that are tackling these questions.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on September 26, 2011

The Vera List New School Art Collection Writing Awards are awarded annually to New School students to honor the best critical and creative essays inspired by works in the university’s art collection. The awards were established in 1996 by the late Vera List, a life trustee of The New School, and are directed by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2011-2012, in conjunction with the center’s focus theme, submissions for the writing awards should engage works that relate to “thingness“, a multi-faceted inquiry into the nature of our material world.

The writing award celebrates nonfiction and fiction, prose and poetry. All students enrolled in The New School are eligible to submit either a critical or creative text, with a first-place award of $400 and a second-place award of $200 in both categories. Winners are selected by prominent jury members from three New School divisions.

The prize-winning pieces are edited by professional art critics in collaboration with the writers and are published in the annual award poster, designed in collaboration with Parsons Illustration Department. This year, 2000 award posters have been produced and distributed throughout the university campus. They are also available at the center’s office located at 66 West 12th Street, Rm 918.

Winning entries will be featured in a joint celebratory and public reading in April 2012.

THE NEW SCHOOL ART COLLECTION SCAVENGER HUNT
Works related to thingness may or may not be (or depict) objects themselves; they might comment on the material conditions of our lives and environments, or employ methods or media that highlight the depth of our connection to stuff. This year the call for entries is accompanied by a curator’s intervention in the collection, a hunt for thingness in artworks around the university’s campus. Download this map as your guide, or trust your instincts and go alone. Thingness can be broadly interpreted.

What is meant by “critical” and “creative” essays?
A critical text on a work in the collection treats the art as a site of knowledge and research (as opposed to inspiring thoughts distinct from the artwork itself). It relies on close examination of the work to articulate an argument, which could elucidate a formal, iconographic, or contextual analysis of the work itself or the position of the work within the context of the artist’s oeuvre or the New School collection.

In a creative response, the judges will be looking for a lively and compelling poem or short story that engages, explicitly or obliquely, a specific work of art in the New School collection. Authors should think of the tradition of the New York School poets such as Edwin Denby, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, whose work was inspired by art movements.

Here are the winning entries by 2010-2011 award recipients Edwin Rivera, Lenea Grace, and Tikva Hecht based on noir.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• Any student currently enrolled in a New School division is eligible.
• Entries should not exceed 2,500 words and must be submitted as an email attachment to vlc@newschool.edu.
• Include a cover page with your name, mailing and email addresses, phone number, university program in which you are enrolled, and your New School Student ID number.
• The artwork that inspired the text must be clearly identified on the entry’s first page by the artist’s name, the work’s title and date, and its location on campus.
• Entries must be received by Tuesday, February 21, 2012.

Posted on August 17, 2011

How do objects sometimes act as vibrant things, with an effectivity of their own, a degree of independence from the words, images, and feelings they provoke in humans? Political theorist Jane Bennett delivers the inaugural lecture as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of the material world. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center will focus on the material conditions of our lives and examine “thingness,” the nature of matter.

Renowned for her work on nature and ethics, Bennett investigates the power of things, which sometimes manifests as the strange allure that even useless, ugly, or meaningless items can have for us. Her latest book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010) asks how our political world would approach public problems were we to seriously consider not just our human experience of things, but the capacity of things themselves. How is it that things can elide their status as possessions, tools, or aesthetic objects to manifest traces of independence and vitality?  Following the tangled threads linking vibrant materialities, human selves, and the agentic assemblages they form, Bennett examines what hoarders – people preternaturally attuned to things – might have to teach us about the workings of agency, causality, and artistry in a world overflowing with stuff.

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Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches political theory and American political thought. She is a founding member of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently working on a project on over-consumption, new ecologies, and Walt Whitman’s materialism.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on August 10, 2011

This fall, the Public Art Fund Talks at The New School examine the transformative potential of sculpture and its ability to reach beyond the material presence of an object’s physical form. Inspired by the influence of an earlier conceptual art legacy on contemporary sculptural practice, this series examines how the limits of an object might be redefined both literally and metaphorically in the public realm.

Kicking off the series, artist Michael Sailstorfer explores the topic in relation to past works as well as his new large-scale sculpture Tornado. Opening on September 20, Tornado physically transforms some 200 truck inner tube tires into dark “clouds” that swirl above visitors passing through Doris C. Freedman Plaza. The sculpture also mines themes that permeate Sailstorfer’s practice, primarily the use of found materials to create “transformation machines” that expand the space and presence of an object beyond what meets the eye.

*  *  *

Through the artistic transformation of everyday objects and situations, Michael Sailstorfer creates artworks dealing with the states of euphoria to disintegration. Absurdity and comedy play as important a part in his work as does the question of the space a sculpture can occupy. He works with an enormous range of different functional objects and materials — from lampposts to helicopters, cars and caravans, to the forest floor — transforming them into engrossingly disparate sculptures characterized by charm and wit.

Born in 1979 in Velden/Vils, Germany, Sailstorfer lives and works in Berlin. He received his MFA from Goldsmiths College, London, and has studied in residencies in Oslo and Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited in Berlin, Oxford, Sao Paulo, Paris, Milan and Rochester, New York, among other cities.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on August 9, 2011

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School is pleased to announce the appointment of Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili and Israeli curator Joshua Simon as 2011-2013 Vera List Center Fellows.

Vera List Center Fellowships
The Vera List Center Fellowships honor individuals whose work advances the discourse on art and politics. The appointments provide the opportunity to further develop such work drawing from the academic resources of The New School, to expand on the work in collaboration with students and classes, and to bring it to the public through the Vera List Center’s interdisciplinary programs, seminars and occasional publications and exhibitions. Past fellows include Maurice Berger, Wendy T. Ewald, Andrea Geyer, Susan Hapgood, Sharon Hayes, Danny Hoch, Ashley Hunt, Lin + Lam, Kobena Mercer, Lorraine O’Grady, Walid Raad and Robert Sember. Their fellowship projects resulted in performances, concerts, exhibitions, lectures, online artworks, archives, and publications. Chosen from an international pool of over two hundred applications from twenty-two countries, Bouchra Khalili’s and Joshua Simon’s proposals are notable for their artistic excellence, political focus, and ties to New School and Vera List Center scholarship.

The 2011-2013 Vera List Center Fellows
Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-French visual artist, born in Casablanca, Morocco, and based in Paris. For her fellowship project, Paper Tracks, Khalili will investigate New York’s population of over half a million undocumented immigrant laborers, and will examine everyday objects that accompany their clandestine, largely invisible existences.

Khalili studied film at the Sorbonne nouvelle and visual arts at the Ecole nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. She is professor of new media and video at the Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts in Marseille, and a founding member and film curator at the Cinémathèque de Tanger, a non-for-profit based in Tangiers, Morocco.

Khalili’s work in video, mixed media installations, and prints combines a conceptual approach with a documentary practice to explore issues of nomadism, clandestine existences, and the “émigré experience.” In her work, she articulates language, subjectivity, minority discourse and speech, investigating the interrelationships between contemporary migrations and colonial history, physical and imaginary geography.

Khalili’s work has been shown extensively around the world, including recently at the 10^th Sharjah Biennial (2011); the Liverpool Biennial (2010); The Studio Museum in Harlem (2010); INIVA, London (2010); the Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid (2009); and the Guangzhou Triennial (2008).

Joshua Simon is a curator, filmmaker and writer based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. During his fellowship term, Simon will investigate the object through various “stagings” – the auction, the experiment, the tag, the classified advertisement, the forwarded message – in order to examine historical and contemporary notions of the object as commodity.

Simon is the founding co-editor of Maayan Magazine for Poetry and Literature and The New & Bad Art Magazine, and editor of Maarvon – New Film Magazine, all based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Among his publications are Red: Poems of the Working Class and Out! – Poets Against the Attack in Gaza (2008) both anthologies in Hebrew and Arabic (co-editor, May Day, 2007). He is also the co-editor of The Aesthetics of Terror (Charta, 2009), and the editor of United States of Palestine-Israel, published in the Solution series by Sternberg Press (2011).

Recent curatorial projects include ReCoCo – Life Under Representational Regimes (co-curated with Siri Peyer, White Space, Zurich and Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2011), The Unreadymade (FormContent, London, 2010),  Internazionale! (Left Bank, Israeli Communist Party Culture Club, Tel Aviv, 2008), and Come to Israel, It’s Hot and Wet and We Have The Humus! (Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, 2008).

A graduate of the School of History at Tel Aviv University, Simon is currently in the Curatorial Knowledge PhD program in the Visual Cultures Department at Goldsmiths College, London. He teaches at Minshar College of Art and is head of theory studies, postgraduate program, at Hamidrasha College of Art, Tel Aviv.

“Thingness”
The Vera List Center’s various initiatives evolve around focus themes of particular urgency and broad resonance. In the face of general enthusiasm for social media and online activism on the one hand and sustained and international attacks on environmentalism and civic liberties on the other hand, in 2011-2013, the center will examine “thingness,” the nature of our material world. Khalili’s and Simon’s fellowship projects will sustain and inform these conversations. The cycle of programs on thingness will focus on the material conditions of our lives, and call for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between objects and people that may provoke more responsible, ethical and ecologically sound politics. Over the course of four semesters, thingness will be dissected and thematic program clusters will be formed around topics such as forensics, ecology, speculative materialism, and biology. The Vera List Center Fellows contribute to the intellectual foundation of the center, and through their fellowship projects advance the understanding of the focus theme.

Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Founded in 1992 and named in honor of the late philanthropist Vera List, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School examines the role of the arts in society and their relationship to the socio-political climate in which they are created. Positioned where scholarship develops into resource and policy, the center organizes public programs, workshops, seminars, occasional exhibitions and publications that respond to pressing social and political issues of our time as articulated by the academic community and visual and performing artists. The center complements the university’s educational mission and brings together scholars and students, the people of New York, and national and international audiences to explore new modes and possibilities for civic engagement.

Posted on June 13, 2011

The Vera List Center invites applications for 2011-2013 fellowships. Two fellowships will be awarded, each spanning ten months and tied to the Vera List Center’s focus theme for 2011-2013.

The center’s programs evolve around focus themes of particular urgency and broad resonance. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center in 2011-2013 will examine the nature of our material world under the heading of “thingness.”  It will focus on the material conditions of our lives, and call for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between objects and people that may provoke more responsible, ethical and ecologically sound politics. The Vera List Center Fellows contribute to the intellectual foundation of the center, and through their fellowship projects advance the exploration of the focus theme.

The fellowship is part-time, non-residential, and carries a $10,000 stipend, disbursed monthly. The fellows have access to the libraries of The New School and New York University as well as to a wide range of activities throughout the university. Meetings and informal gatherings with New School faculty and other constituencies are organized throughout the year.

Eligibility

Journalists, historians, visual and performing artists, critics, curators, and cultural practitioners working in any field where they engage art and politics. The New School is an equal opportunity, affirmative action institution and encourages applications from minority candidates as well as from individuals without institutional affiliation.

Application Material

A SASE, application form (download pdf), letter of application, resume, support material (CDs, texts, etc.), names and addresses (email and regular mail) of two references, and a 300-to-500 word fellowship project proposal that is either an element of a larger and ongoing project, or contained within the applicant’s anticipated stay at The New School.

Considerations

• Artistic and/or scholarly excellence of fellowship proposal project.
• Significance of project to the candidate’s long-term practice.
• Does the proposal relate to the focus theme in explicit and creative ways?
• Does the fellowship project reflect or benefit from the proximity to The New School?

Timeline

• April 11, 2011 — Initial application due, followed by reviews by members of the VLC staff, the VLC Advisory Committee, past fellows and New School faculty.
• Mid-April to early May — Finalists are invited to expand on their proposals.
• Late May — Decision and announcement of fellowship appointments.
• Fellowship terms: ten months between fall 2011 and spring 2013.

Past Fellows

Maurice Berger, Wendy T. Ewald, Andrea Geyer, Margarita Gutman, Susan Hapgood, Sharon Hayes, Danny Hoch, Ashley Hunt, Lin + Lam, Kobena Mercer, Lorraine O’Grady, Olu Oguibe, Silvana Paternostro, Wendy Perron, Marjetica Potrc, Leslie Prosterman, Walid Raad, Sarah Rothenberg, Edward Rothstein, Katya Sander, Robert Sember, Elisabeth Sussman, David Thorne, Jonathan Weinberg

Posted on February 15, 2011