#INDIAONMYMIND: An Art Talk about Photo-collages by artist Rashmi Talpade

Artist and ECOCA Board Member Rashmi Talpade will give a talk focused on photo-collages from her “City of Bombay” series and offer a subsequent Q & A about India and how it has influenced her work..

Rashmi is an artist and photographer who migrated to Connecticut from Mumbai, India in 1990. As she settled in her new country of residence, India had always played a part in her development and growth as an artist. She specializes in photo-collages utilizing fragments of photo prints from her own collections. Funded by a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, she created a series of cityscapes of her hometown of Mumbai.

Lilliam Nieves (Puerto Rico)
Daniel Arnaldo-Roman (Puerto Rico)
Angelika Rinnhofer (New Mexico), moderator
and
Nicolás Dumit Estevez (New York), interpreter

Lilliam Nieves is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Nieves has received numerous international residencies and recognitions for her mixed media, installation, and performance art. This includes being a 2018 Artist-in-Residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA. Nieves uses a variety of materials to manifest her investigation of the connections between women’s bodies and capitalism. Her work centers body justice and questions stereotypes of beauty and femininity by creating and documenting beauty rituals of excessive and incomprehensible nature. From 2007 to 2012, Nieves was co-founder of Trance Líquido, a contemporary arts platform in Puerto Rico. With Trance Líquido and numerous contributions to a variety of arts publications, Nieves is part of an independent arts movement in Puerto Rico that democratized documentation and discourse of contemporary Latinx art. Nieves is co-founder of Resistance Is Power Studios, alongside a group of other prolific artists in Santurce, Puerto Rico. Nieves has a Master of Fine Arts in New Media from Donau-Universität Krems in association with Transart Institute (Austria / Berlin / New York). And a Bachelor of Fine Arts from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico, with a concentration in Art Education. -Shey Rivera

Daniel Arnaldo-Roman, a Puerto Rico-based media artist, works in code technology and experimental media and also designs responsive web environments and social print based projects. His works range from sound and movement activated installations to large-scale generative projects, photography, design and painting. Arnaldo-Roman holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts (Painting) from Escuela de Artes Plasticas de Puerto Rico and a Master’s degree in New Media Art, from Donau-Universität Krems (Transart Institute). Along with Lilliam Nieves, Arnaldo-Roman also founded Trance Líquido, an art, design, music and culture blog-magazine and Grupo Probeta; a design and technology studio, creating interactive experiences for clients.

Angelika Rinnhofer (moderator) is an artist and an art educator. In her art practice, she works primarily in photography, video, dance, and performance but sometimes incorporates non-traditional art media such as baking, gaming, and trace making. In her work, she reflects on the feeling of belonging and the effect of memory on her sense of affinity.

She is the recipient of grants and two fellowships, and the New York Foundation for the Arts/ARTSPIRE granted fiscal sponsorship to her project “A Family's Secret a priori”.

Her art has been shown in solo exhibitions at Miami Beach Urban Studios, Miami; the Jewish Community Center in Dresden, Germany; the New Britain Museum of Art in New Britain, CT; at Light Work in Syracuse, NY; the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami, and the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles. In the summer of 2017, she was invited to perform aspects of her current project “A Family's Secret a priori” at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale during the exhibition Anselm Kiefer from the Hall Collection.

Rinnhofer received her Master’s degree in Fine Arts in New Media in 2010 from Transart Institute in Berlin. Currently, she is an instructor for art and photography at CNM in Albuquerque. She is in the beginning stages of a new series about neglect and reform.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo (interpreter) treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively, through creative experiences that he unfolds within the quotidian. He has exhibited and performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, Princeton University, Anthology Film Archives, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Estévez Raful Espejo has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field. Residencies attended include P.S. 1/MoMA, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Estévez Raful Espejo holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, where he studied with Coco Fusco; and an MA from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, in 2011 Estévez Raful Espejo was baptized as a Bronxite; a citizen of the Bronx. elmuseo.org/office-hours and interiorbeautysalon.com @interiorbeautysalon

Zoran Poposki (Hong Kong)
Susie Quillinan (Peru)
Konjit Seyoum (Ethiopia)
Sean Stoops (Philadelphia)
Mary Sherman (Boston)
and
Debbie Hesse (For ECOCA)

Zoran Poposki, FRSA, MFA, PhD is an award-winning transdisciplinary artist, curator, and cultural studies scholar based in Hong Kong. Dr Poposki explores cultural translation, liminality, identity, and public space through painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, performance, video, curating, and publishing.

His work has been shown in 100 exhibitions, screenings and festivals worldwide, including: 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts Ljubljana, XIII Cairo Biennale, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Xi'an Art Museum in China, National Gallery of Macedonia, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, Minsheng Art Museum Beijing, Art Basel Hong Kong, City Art Museum Ljubljana, Sergey Kuryokhin Modern Art Center in St. Petersburg, National Museum of Montenegro, CICA Museum in South Korea, etc.

Dr Poposki's curatorial projects have been presented at: Hong Kong Arts Centre, Osage Gallery Hong Kong, Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art Manchester, Anita Chan Lai-ling Gallery Hong Kong, Videotage Hong Kong, Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, ArtStays International Festival of Contemporary Art Slovenia, etc. Dr Poposki is a member of Independent Curators International (ICI). poposki.art

Susie Quillinan is a curatorial researcher based in Lima, Peru. She has developed curatorial programming, editorial projects and study programmes in Lima, New York, Berlin, Melbourne, Bogotá and Mexico City. Susie's current research focuses on practices of collective reading and study, weaving as discursive methodology and a curatorial ethics of accompaniment. Susie is currently co-director of HAWAPI, an organisation that each year takes a group of interdisciplinary practitioners to a place where a particular struggle (political, social, environmental, often all overlapping) is central to daily life. HAWAPI has worked in places such as informal gold mining settlements in the Amazon; disputed territory on the Peru-Chile border; a FARC ex-combatants re-incorporation camp in Colombia; and with a family of campesinos and land rights’ activists in the Peruvian Andes who are resisting eviction from their land by a multinational mining consortium; among others. HAWAPI's primary mission is to challenge artists to deepen their engagement with the nature of how they approach work related to sites of conflict or struggle in order to develop more nuanced public conversations around issues impacting communities beyond major urban centres. The participants develop works, interventions and interpellations in public space, with and alongside the place and community members. These encounters are followed by opportunities for presentation and discussion via exhibitions, public programming, public conversations and publications. In addition to research and development of each edition, Susie is the lead editor of publications. From 2015-2020 Susie worked with Transart in various roles including most recently as MFA Program Manager. She is currently a candidate in the PhD - Curatorial Practice program at MADA, Monash (Australia).

Konjit Seyoum (b. 1963 Addis Ababa) is a freelance conference interpreter who was trained at the School of Interpretation and Translation at the University of Trieste, Italy. In 1996 Seyoum opened ASNI Gallery in Addis Ababa with the aim to promote contemporary Ethiopian art, focusing on experimentation and supporting young and emerging artists. She conceived ASNI as an independent alternative space that runs with no predefined programs and maintains a low budget, avoiding aid, sponsorship, funds, and even art sales in most cases. She has curated numerous solo and group shows, and has organized talks, workshops, residencies, community works, and children’s activities. Seyoum has also been promoting innovative vegetarian cooking at her gallery, drawing on traditional Ethiopian cuisine. She creates black and white photographic works that emanate from her time-based cotton sculptures through which she explores womanhood, the personal, and spirituality.

Sean Stoops is an independent curator, new media artist, and writer based in Philadelphia, PA. Stoops holds a MFA in video art and curating from Transart Institute, Donau University, Austria- an international graduate program for new media art and creative practice (locations also in Berlin, Germany; Brooklyn, NYC; and Plymouth, UK). He earned his BFA in painting and drawing from Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, PA and studied at Temple University Abroad in Rome, Italy.

In the spring of 2005, Stoops organized INHABIT: an Apartment Installation, a site-specific group exhibition about post-modern domesticity, in his former West Philly apartment. Stoops has curated and exhibited at galleries and museums in Philadelphia including: Painted Bride Art Center, Asian Arts Initiative, Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art, International House/Lightbox and, in winter 2011, was visiting curator of Bird Cages and the Gilded Boat at the ISE Cultural Foundation, in Manhattan, NYC. Stoops organized and directed site specific mural animated films: Muralmorphosis (2009) and Cosmic Terrarium (2010), in cooperation with the Mural Arts Program of Philadelphia.

In April 2012, Stoops was named as one of thirty-five art project award winners to receive grants that year from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as part of its Knight Arts Challenge, which funds innovative projects that engage and enrich Philadelphia’s communities. As a result, Stoops curated and launched "Animated Architecture: 3D Video Mapping Projections on Historic Philadelphia Sites," a recurring series of site-specific outdoor/indoor video art events, usually held at night and screened at various Philadelphia buildings. 

In summer 2016, Sean Stoops brought Animated Architecture video art works to Brooklyn, NY as a pop-up gallery installation at Rabbitholestudio in DUMBO. Stoops was invited to guest curate Under the Knife: Contemporary Cut Paper Art at Hicks Art Center, Newtown, Pennsylvania in fall 2017. In recent years, Sean Stoops has been focusing on immersive, interactive, and virtual / augmented reality art projects and is always searching for digital artists for collaborations.

Mary Sherman ( marysherman.org) is an American artist, curator, director of TransCultural Exchange and adjunct professor at Boston College. She has written for various publications (including for the Chicago Sun-Times, Boston Globe, Boston Review and ARTnews) and, in 2010, served as the interim Associate Director of MIT's Program in Art, Culture and Technology. Her grants and awards include three Fulbright Senior Specialist Grants (Taipei, Trondheim and Istanbul), and artist-in-residencies at such institutions as MIT, Cité international des arts and the Taipei Artist Village. Among the shows she's curated, two received awards from the Northeast Chapter of the International Art Critics Association. Her recent project TransCultural Exchange Hello World was created to address COVID-19 crisis’ travel restrictions and interacting with others. The result is a virtual travelogue of artworks created by 250 artists. With the mere click of a mouse, stay-at-home voyagers can now collaborate with artists around the globe, listen to music from a mix of cultures, browse galleries of contemporary artists’ works and take in movies and dance pieces from around the world. Her own works explore the intersection of technology, the fine arts, scientific inquiry and aesthetic research. At the core of her investigation is the role of the senses in knowledge acquisition and the impact of technology’s mediation of these. Her works have been shown at numerous and varied institutions, including Taipei's Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, the International Digital Art Biennale (BIAN), ars libri Boston (organized by Mario Diacono), Beijing's Central Conservatory, the London Biennale, APO-33, and New York's Trans Hudson Gallery.  In 2016 Goldsmith University Press published a survey of her work, Mary Sherman: What if You Could Hear a Painting.

Debbie Hesse is an award winning installation artist, curator and educator who brings communities together around social, cultural, political and environmental ideas and issues through her unique light-based installation art and innovative curatorial and programmatic initiatives. Hesse is a practicing artist who also enjoys helping other artists through curatorial community building.

Hesse serves as Gallery Director and Curator at Ely Center of Contemporary Art (where she is also on the board) after a fifteen-year tenure as Director of Artistic Services & Programs at The Arts Council of Greater New Haven where she curated over two hundred exhibitions. Hesse holds a B.A. from Smith College, a Masters in Painting and Printmaking from University of New Mexico where she was a fellow at Tamarind Institute of Lithography. She has been a panelist and juror for many arts organizations including the Cultural Affairs Office for the City of New Haven, the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and the Sea Grant Program at University of Connecticut.

Sheila Lynch (Chicago)
Leah Decter (Winnipeg)
Aurora Del Rio (Germany)
Linda Duvall (Saskatoon)
JoMichelle Piper (Sydney)
Anne Sophie Lorange (Norway)
and
Stephanie Reid (Austin)

Join us in this roundtable discussion as seven artists discuss their relationship to their surrounding landscape and how it has affected their art practice during this time of a global pandemic.

Sheila Lynch is an artist whose practice examines the body and natural landscapes as sources of knowing. 

During the pandemic limits on movement and interaction with other offer a space to explore more subtle energies. Studies look at how connection is enhanced, deepened, contained, changed abruptly. Media include drawing, photography and video.Sheila is also working with Faith Arnold, the Community Writing Project and the SEIU (Service Workers International Union) in Chicago to examine members' individual and shared experiences of the past year. sheilalynch.com

Leah Decter is an inter-media/performance artist, educator and scholar based in Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Canada. Working from a critical white settler perspective her current artistic projects address social-spatial dynamics of settler colonial contexts and consider the ethics of being-in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty. Decter has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada, and internationally in the US, UK, Germany, Malta, Netherlands, India, and Australia, where she was a Visiting Research Fellow at University of New South Wales’ National Institute for Experimental Arts in 2017. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, Canadian Theatre Review, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies and Fuse Magazine’s Decolonial Aesthetics Issue. Decter holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queens University and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute. From 2019-2020 she was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University's Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology and she currently holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Technologies in the Media Arts Division at NSCAD University. leahdecter.com

Freya Björg Olafson (Winnipeg)
Claire Elizabeth Barratt (Asheville)
and
Louis Laberge-Côté (Toronto)

The discussion will include concepts of the body as medium, the body in motion and the body in collaboration—yet also the body as transient and ephemeral. Exploring work in which the body seems to shed its solidity and concreteness to shift in time and space as though vacillating between alternative times and spaces to the one being witnessed. Transmutations of the body in relationship with technology, nature, sound, concepts and imagery.

Freya Björg Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, animation, motion capture, XR, painting, and performance. Her praxis engages with identity and the body, as informed by technology and the Internet. Olafson’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally at the Bauhaus Archiv (Berlin), SECCA – SouthEastern Center for Contemporary Art (North Carolina), LUDWIG museum (Budapest), and The National Arts Center (Ottawa). Olafson has benefitted from residencies, most notably through EMPAC – Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center (New York), Oboro (Montreal), and Counterpulse (San Francisco). Olafson holds an MFA in New Media from the Transart Institute / Donau Universität and joined the Department of Dance at York University as an Assistant Professor in July 2017. This past spring Olafson was one of the recipients of the 2020 ‘Sobey Art Award’. freyaolafson.com

Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) is an inter-disciplinary artist with a performing arts background. She is the director of Cilla Vee Life Arts—an arts organization with a focus on cross-media collaboration. Her work utilizes artistic disciplines of dance, music, text, media, visual and installation art.

Claire has presented her work in venues as diverse as Jacob’s Pillow, the New York Botanical Gardens, Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center and Art Basel Miami. She has performed and taught throughout the USA and in Canada, Europe, Japan, Israel and Pakistan.

Claire received her professional training in London at The Laban Centre For Movement and Dance and at the London Studio Centre For Performing Arts. Her pre-professional training includes the Royal Academy of Dance and the Royal Schools of Music Examinations. She also served an apprenticeship with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation in New York and holds an MFA in Creative Practice from the Transart Institute with Plymouth University, UK.

On moving to the USA in 1992, Claire held the positions of Dancer for Unto These Hills drama on the Cherokee Indian Reservation and for Asheville Contemporary Dance Theater in North Carolina, as well as serving as a Co-Founder and Director for Circle Modern Dance and as Choreographer for the Knoxville Opera Company in Tennessee. Once based in New York in 2002, Claire founded Cilla Vee Life Arts and, with the support of arts advocates such as Chashama, Bronx Council on the Arts and Arts for Art, began to develop and present her signature modes of work—including Motion Sculpture Movement Installations and The Sound Of Movement projects. She is the creator of the Living Art pedagogy for performance art. Claire now uses Asheville, NC as her home base and tours frequently to connect and collaborate with a variety of international artists.

Louis Laberge-Côté is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Ryerson University, School of Performance (Toronto, Canada), since July 2018. He is an active Toronto-based dancer, choreographer, teacher, and rehearsal director. An acclaimed performer, he has danced nationally and internationally with over thirty companies and has been a full-time member of Toronto Dance Theatre (1999-2007) and the Kevin O’Day Ballett Nationaltheater Mannheim (2009-2011). He has created over eighty choreographic works, which have been presented and commissioned in Canada and abroad. His research and creative work examines how engagement in thoughtful exchange with the bodily self allows for greater expressiveness, sustainable working practices, and empathic connection. It is rooted in the belief that, by transcending cerebral understanding, dance and somatic knowledge have the power to profoundly transform who we are, reshape our perceptions, and bring us all closer together. His writings have been published by the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Choreographic Practices, The Dance Current, and the International Dance Council Online Library.

A Q&A with Mikkel Niemann (Denmark)
and Christian Gerstheimer (Michigan)

Mikkel and Christian will present their (notso) Short Fest video works and discuss their personal process of making artworks over a geographic border during a pandemic. This will be followed by a conversation between the two about ongoing challenges and strategies that they continue to confront. Their visit will be followed by a Q&A open to the public.

Mikkel Niemann is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. His practice revolves around the relationships between the human body, architecture, memory and history, with an underlying current relating to decay and transformation. He is both fascinated and deeply disturbed at the fact that decaying and transformation are fundamental conditions for all things. Despite scientific evidence, he cannot stop himself from seeing decay and transformation as mystique, especially in relation to the body, memory and history. All his works reflect these notions of organic life, dead materials and human culture degrading crystalized through full color videos, sound recordings, photographs, performances and installations.

 After he received his diploma from University of East London, department of Architecture Niemann worked as an architect at several offices in Europe, later he received his MFA from Transart Institute, Plymouth University. He have received the Grand Prix Prize for his work at The Baltic States Biennial of Graphic Arts Kaliningrad and the first prize for a project proposal for reestabilizing the harbour in Reykjavik, Iceland.

 His works have been shown at Compound Yellow in Chicago (2020), SUNY Potsdam (2019), North Willow in New Jersey (2017), Powerstation of Art in Shanghai (2014), The One Minutes video series at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam (2014), The Baltic States Biennial of Graphic Arts Kaliningrad (2013), FOKUS Video Festival (2015 and 2012), Danske Grafikere (2011), Esbjerg Kunstmuseum (2008).

Christian Gerstheimer is an artist, curator, and educator based in Michigan. He lived in El Paso from 2003 to 2019 and was a curator at the El Paso Museum of Art for fourteen years. He has taught drawing and art history classes at the University of Texas at El Paso, and currently teaches art history at the University of Michigan-Flint.

His artwork has been exhibited in Berlin, New York, Chicago, Flint, Detroit and El Paso, TX, and is often presented as public interventions because site, context and social engagement are important factors. His practice seeks to raise awareness about the struggle of immigrants and immigration laws through interventions; performances and sculptural installations. His on-going November Project has become more oriented toward social justice and precarity since 2012 as well as increasingly utilizing new, digital media. Whether kinetic, video or assemblage Gerstheimer’s practice speaks the truth to power for the exploited in the US, Mexico and beyond. In addition, Gerstheimer’s Discrete Interventions have been installed in cities throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe.

Gerstheimer earned a B.A. degree in Humanities Interdisciplinary, and an M.A. degree in Art History from Michigan State University, a B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an M.F.A. in Creative Practice from the Transart Institute with Plymouth University.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively, through creative experiences that he unfolds within the quotidian. He has exhibited and performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, Princeton University, Anthology Film Archives, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Estévez Raful Espejo has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field. Residencies attended include P.S. 1/MoMA, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Estévez Raful Espejo holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, where he studied with Coco Fusco; and an MA from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, in 2011 Estévez Raful Espejo was baptized as a Bronxite; a citizen of the Bronx. elmuseo.org/office-hours and interiorbeautysalon.com  @interiorbeautysalon

Anna Recasens is a visual artist, researcher and cultural manager who combines her personal and collective artistic proposals with research and cultural revitalization intiatives. Her projects center around art, nature, urban issues, and social space. She also teaches workshops, publishes articles, and participates in forums related to these subjects. Recasens’ individual and collaborative work has been presented internationally in residencies and exhibitions. Between 2012 and 2017, she founded and directed the Laboratori Social Metropolità, based in the NauEstruch, Sabadell, Catalonia. Recasens is part of and collaborates with art programs and platforms such as Idensitat and Plataforma Vértices. annarecasens.org

Laia Solé’s work explores the social and physical dimensions of space. She intervenes in spaces by actions that communicate and/or transform the dynamics of each site, using resources that are immediate and interactive. Her work often develops as a cooperative practice, working with other artists and local communities. In her recent works, she blends her passion for the early cinema’s visual tricks and site-specific actions. She was an Artist-in-Residence at LABMIS at Museu da Imagem e do Som (Sao Paulo), 2012 and has exhibited her work extensively including at MAC (Santiago de Chile); Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona); The Drawing Center (New York); and the Fundación Chirivella-Soriano (València). laiasole.net

Meet some of the participating artists and exhibition organizers for an informal walk through the 9 galleries of multimedia artwork in Our Bodies Ourselves. We will discuss the artwork on display and the ideas behind the exhibition.