Join us on Sunday, November 15th 2020, 6-8pm ET for Mother Tongue: Performances Part One virtual evening with works by Georgia Lale, Marcela Casals and Silkworm Pupas (Jiaoyang Li & JinJin Xu).
Register on ZOOM: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIocuCsqjItH90BZV91G1i75pNAkODB_hhp
Georgia Lale , “3”, 2020, 2 hours
Georgia Lale
“3”
The action 3 is a durational performance that portrays the three different ways the artist’s last name has been pronounced and spelled during the course of the last hundred years. Lale’s grandfather’s family were refugees who migrated from Turkey to Greece. In Turkey, their last name meant “red tulip” and was written with Ottoman Arabic characters. When the family migrated to Greece, the last name was pronounced in a different way and written with characters of the Greek alphabet. Its meaning of “tulip” is still recognized in Northern Greece. In America, where Lale migrated 7 years ago, Lale’s last name doesn’t have any specific meaning. It is spelled with Latin characters and has a totally new pronunciation.
website
instagram
About the Artist: Georgia Lale is a Greek visual artist with Anatolian heritage, based in New York City. Through performance, video, sculpture and installations, Lale explores the ways the human body functions and interacts within the social and political realm of modern society. Her public interventions intend to empower individual freedom of speech and expression. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York City, and her BFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece. Her work was presented at the Greek Pavilion at the 15 th Venice Architecture Biennale. She is the recipient of the Goulandris Foundation scholarship, the Gerondelis Foundation scholarship and the School of Visual Arts Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for Exceptional Achievement in MFA Fine Arts studies. Her work has been shown internationally, including New York City, Athens, Berlin, Brussels and Izmir. Lale has exhibited her work at various venues in New York City area and beyond, including Smack Mellon, Shiva Gallery, Studio 10 Gallery, Paris Koh Fine Arts/Gallery d’Arte, SVA Flatiron Gallery and The Hole, among others. She has curated the “Aegean” group show at AAA3A Gallery, NY, with Greek and Turkeys artist based in NYC. Lale’s public interventions have been performed at the Metropolitan Museum of the Arts, at the National Mall of Washington D.C., at the Statue of Liberty, at the United Nations Secretariat Building, at the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens and at the Celsus Library of Ephesus. She has been the panel member of numerous academic conferences organized by the Dedalus Foundation, the MoMA Archives, the Yale History of Art Modernist Forum and the Yale School of Management.
Marcela Casals, Parabola/Parable, 2020, plaster, mulberry paper, graphite, Durational performance
Marcela Casals
Parabola/Parable
Parabola/Parable consists of making graphite rubbings on mulberry paper from a plaster block carved with words in the artist’;s mother tongue, Spanish, and her acquired tongue, English. The words in each language can be read as an individual poem, and for those who are bilingual in both languages, as one piece of writing. In this durational performance, Casals speaks these words as she creates the rubbings. The artist notes, “I have lost much of my Mother tongue and added little to it. The new language that I learned as a young child immigrant is still not genuinely mine, and now, neither is my language of birth, which I seldom use.” In this work, she captures “this feeling of mine and not mine, of that in-between space of here and there, of a sound thread connected to my origins, now fading, through the ancient tradition of gravestone rubbings.”
website
instagram
About the artist: Marcela Casals is a Brooklyn based artist born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Marcela spent many years as theatre artist, working as an actor/director. Her first steps into visual arts were taken when designing and overseeing the construction of theatre sets, which must communicate place and conceptual theme, as well as lighting and costumes for plays she directed. In 2009 this new voice spoke loudly and she began her explorations through sculpture and ceramics, eventually moving into installation work; earning her BFA in 2012 from UNC and her MFA in 2017 from SVA. In 2016 Marcela began to study Butoh, a mid 20th century dance/movement art which began in Japan. The concepts as well as the techniques of this work ushered Marcela into performance art.
Silkworm Pupas (JinJin Xu and Jiaoyang Li), In America, You Are Asked Why Are Leaves Green?, 2020, 6 minutes
Silkworm Pupas (Jin Jin Xu and Jiaoyang Li)
In America, You Are Asked, Why Are Leaves Green?
“Immigrant artists constantly betray their sources. With tongues silenced by our homeland, what can we say in America？On the internet? How can we tell our stories to an inherently foreign audience—must we be consumed by the American gaze? Must we eat off American palms to be seen?” - Silkworm Pupas. In America, You Are Asked Why Are Leaves Green? is a video-performance showcased in an online VR installation. Within a ghostly silk forest, a world within worlds, the labor of Chinese factory workers and silkworms are evoked through a satiric reimagining of the Chinese mythology of the Silk-Worm Horse. Surveilled by hovering avatar audience members, who can enter the installation frame, the artist-duo appear in their cyborg embodiments and mirror each other as they uncannily merge into one. The work questions censorship, self-censorship, orientalization, and self-orientalization within the context of global late capitalism.
Jin Jin Xu’s website
Jin Jin Xu’s instagram
Jiaoyang Li’s website
Jiaoyang Li’s instagram
About the artists: “Silkworm Pupas” is a pop-up duo comprised of NYC-based poets Jiaoyang Li and JinJin Xu.
Jiaoyang Li is a Chinese poet and visual artist currently based in New York. Her work has appeared in LA Reviews of Books-China Channel, 3:AM, Datableedzine, Harana Poetry, The Paper, Penguin Books–Chinese blog, Chinese News Magazine, Spittoon Magazine, Enclave Poetry, Voice and Verse poetry magazine, and others. She serves as the translations editor at Washington Square Review and she is also the co-founder of interdisciplinary poetic practice journal 叵CLIP. She has performed at KGB bars, No Dear Magazine, Cave Canem Foundation, Performa, and others. Currently, she is working on a project loosely related to Fabric and Immigration.
JinJin Xu is a writer and filmmaker from Shanghai. Her poetry and prose can be found in The Common, Women Studies Quarterly, The Margins, and her films shown at Berlin’s Harun Farocki Institute. Other honors include fellowships from the Flaherty Seminar NYU’s Screenwriting Production Lab, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NYU’s Screenwriting Production Lab, Amherst College, and on shortlists for The Disquiet International Literary Prize and the Cosmonauts Avenue Nonfiction Prize. She is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU, where she received the Lillian Vernon Fellowship. After spending a year traveling as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, she is at work on a docu-poetics project collaborating with women dislocated as refugees and migrant workers.