Feminist Legacy Planning Workshop with Monika Fabijanska & Betsy Damon

Tuesday, July 11, 6-8 PM

Pen and Brush
29 East 22nd Street, New York, NY 10010
(212) 475-3669 info@penandbrush.org

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The workshop accompanies The Feminist Institute’s Memory Lab and Exhibition who’s afraid of feminist archives? curated by Monika Fabijanska, in collaboration with Helena Shaskevich, at Pen and Brush, June 15 - July 15.

More about the exhibition

More about The Feminist Institute’s Memory Lab

Conversation with artists
Zhanna Kadyrova and Alevtina Kakhidze
moderated by curator Monika Fabijanska
accompanying the exhibition

WOMEN AT WAR

at Fridman Gallery
169 Bowery, New York City

Wednesday, August 10, 1 PM WATCH HERE

Zhanna Kadyrova (b. 1981 in Brovary, Kyiv oblast) works in sculpture, installation, and public art, and is a member of R.E.P. collective. Her practice focuses on the context, site and space, and often references Soviet building materials, aesthetics, and symbols that shaped Ukrainian public space. She graduated from the Taras Shevchenko State Art School. She received PinchukArtCentre Main Prize, 2013, and Special Prize, 2011, as well as the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award, the Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award for Public Art, and the Grand Prix of the Kyiv Sculpture Project (all 2012). Kadyrova's works were featured in the 58th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition curated by Ralph Rugoff, 2019, and twice in the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in 2015 and 2013. Her works were shown at the M17 Contemporary Art Centre, Kyiv, 2021; the Shanghai International Sculpture Project JISP, 2020; Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France, 2020; the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2018; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2016; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013; Bureau for Cultural Translations, Leipzig, 2016 (solo); the Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria, 2015 (solo); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2013; the National Art Museum of Ukraine, 2010, Zacheta National Art Gallery, Warsaw, 2008; De Appel, Amsterdam, 2008; and several times at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, where her first major retrospective will be held in 2023. She lived and worked in Kyiv - since March 2022, she has been displaced to rural Western Ukraine.

| kadyrova.com | instagram.com/jannkad

Alevtina Kakhidze (b. 1973 in Zhdanivka, Donetsk oblast) is an artist, performer, curator, and gardener who focuses on drawing, and social and ecofeminist practice. Since 2018, she has served as the United Nations (UNDP) Tolerance Envoy in Ukraine. Kakhidze graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Kyiv, 2004, and Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, 2006, and was awarded the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award in 2008. She presented her performances and lectures at the UNWomen Conference, 2020; PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, 2019; Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2016; Manifesta 10, 2014; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, 2015; 7th Berlin Biennale: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2012; and The New Theatre in the New Great World, Warsaw, 2010. Her solo exhibitions include rum24, Aarhus, Denmark, 2020; Bozar, Brussels, 2017; PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv, 2014; FUTURA Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 2013; and Iaspis, Stockholm, 2009. Her works were featured in group shows at the M17 Contemporary Art Center, Kyiv, 2021; Elisabeth Jones Art Center, Portland, OR, 2021; Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2018; M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, 2018; Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2017; Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway, 2016; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyiv, 2014; CCA Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, 2013; Moroccan Pavilion project at the 54th Venice Biennial, 2012; MOCAK, Krakow; Galeria Arsenał, Białystok, Poland; and Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, all 2011. Since 2009, Kakhidze has lived and worked in Muzychi village near Kyiv.

| www.alevtinakakhidze.com | instagram.com/truealevtina

Betsy Damon: Water Talks
PREORDER HERE

Book launch: Betsy Damon in conversation with
John-Scott Legg, the Director of SteinerBooks

Wednesday, April 6, 7 PM

La MaMa Galleria
47 Great Jones Street
New York, NY 10003
tel. 212.505.2476

“I have lived on Planet Earth for eighty-three years. I have seen so much change, and that includes advances in living standards for millions of people on the one hand, and the increasing destruction of the environment on the other. Somehow, we must find a middle path. This is why Betsy wrote this book. All people need to be empowered to know their waters and to take charge of lifesaving decisions.”
—Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE

“As living systems, we are interconnected, reliant on our environment for the air we breathe and the water that sustains us. Damon identifies the barriers to clean water, but simultaneously offers the tools needed to create change and clarifies the key role artists play in the process.”
—Christine Filippone, Ph.D., Terra Smithsonian Senior Fellow, Smithsonian American Art Museum

In Water Talks, artist Betsy Damon offers much-needed wisdom on water we all can benefit from, whether you are an artist, a scientist, or an engineer. Damon has worked over the course of her 40 year-long career with communities around the world across geopolitical and cultural boundaries on water. The book is a great combination of empirical knowledge and exciting scientific information on water; it offers numerous examples, both accessible and practical, of planning, designing, and implementing community-based projects on water. I find this book an absolute must-have in educating, transforming, inspiring, and mentoring the next generation.
—Dr. Changwoo Ahn, Professor, Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University

“Of the many things that humans take for granted—the sun, the wind, the soil—water, as Betsy Damon beautifully states in so many ways, is the thread that binds all life systems from sociological to ecological.”
—Pliny Fisk, founder and director of Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems

“Betsy Damon shows us that the road to awareness and action always begins with listening and connectivity.”
—Julie Reiss, Editor, Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene (2019)

MORE ON BETSY DAMON

Session The Radical Outdoors: Betsy Damon’s feminist performances and eco-justice collaborations in the U.S. and China
Session ID #9460
Chairs: Monika Fabijanska, Independent Art Historian and Curator
Dr. Christine A. Filippone, Millersville University
2022 College Art Association Annual Conference
Friday, March 4, 2022, 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM (online only)

Presenters:
Monika Fabijanska, Independent Curator
Out In the Open: Betsy Damon’s Street Performances and Transnational Social Practice
Petra Poelzl, Independent Researcher, Vienna, Austria
The reception and impact of Betsy Damon’s Keepers of the Waters in China (1995) and Tibet (1996)
Dr. Christina Filippone, Millersville University, US
From Social Justice to Eco-Justice: Feminist Collaboration in the Work of Betsy Damon
Rong Xie, Independent Artist, London UK
A Journey with Water: Betsy Damon in China

Abstract:

Lucy Lippard jokingly called artists who deal with pollution and waste “Garbage Girls.” These ecofeminists challenged the definition of art and proposed a truly radical genre – the art of repairing environmental damage. Betsy Damon has worked globally to preserve living water using social justice tools: activism and community-building, both central to her feminist practice since the 1970s. A leader among lesbian activists in New York City, she co-edited the third issue of Heresies, Lesbian Art and Artists (1977). Her early performance work addressed the erasure of women’s narratives from history and their unspeakable subjects: mutilation and rape. Performing outdoors in the streets, her collaborative approach, and engagement with transnational feminism, all informed her social practice focused on water. In the mid-1990s, she organized Keepers of the Waters, collaborative public performances with local artists in China and Tibet. An early example of transcultural socially engaged art, Keepers of the Water left an indelible mark on avant-garde art in South-West China and led to her award-winning eco-art project Living Water Garden in Chengdu, a six-acre city park demonstrating water purification through natural processes.

Betsy Damon is among the most relevant pioneer feminist artists today and there is a growing interest in her practice globally. Papers in this session will discuss Damon’s feminist collaboration (Dr. Christine Filippone) and radical outdoor performance (Monika Fabijanska) as the basis for later projects of social practice and eco-justice. Petra Poelzl’s paper and Rong Xie’s film will consider Damon’s influence on generations of Chinese artists and activists.

OF CREATION /
OF POTENTIAL
Flaherty Seminar Program 3
Moderated by Monika Fabijanska
In conversation with artist Cecilia Vicuña

Sunday, December 5, 2021 7:30pm

UnionDocs
322 Union Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
ticket info coming soon!

PROGRAM 3

350 MYA (2016) by Terra Long, 5’, 16mm
Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) (2017) by Elke Marhöfer, 23’, 16mm to digital
Kon Kon (2010) by Cecilia Vicuña, 54’, Digital

TRT: 82 mins

When the land is exhausted and the sea is poisoned and species are dying off, how can the earth communicate its needs and pass on its knowledge of growth and survival for the future? The filmmakers in this program look towards the earth with sensualist and materialist eyes, seeking to discover ancient ways of communing with the natural elements and creating new ways of being and perceiving through film. As Cecilia Vicuña writes, “To recover memory is to recover unity: / To be one with the sky and the sea / To feel the Earth as your own skin / is the only way to pleasure Her.” Immersed in this pleasure, the earth communes with the human, and through our participation, transforms us.

2021 Flaherty NYC Programmers: Kelsey White and L u m i a

More information