Charles de Agustin

Kelly Lloyd
Monday, May 23, 2022, 12pm (New York) / 5pm (London)

Zoom video recording can be viewed here, text transcript can be read here

There could be no better way to kick off Present: KELLY LLOYD, Monday, May 23, 2022 at 12pm (New York) / 5pm (London) on Zoom. RSVP to charlesdeagustin@me.com for the link. For Present, Kelly Lloyd, creator and producer (and introvert) of “This Thing We Call Art”, a podcast and online archive of interviews with people in the arts about their livelihoods, will facilitate an open-ended discussion around the nature of "presenting" in a post-pandemic art world full of introverts, grant applications requiring public engagement, and institutions trying to salvage their front-end programming.

Kelly Lloyd is a transdisciplinary artist who focuses on issues of representation and knowledge production and prioritizes public-facing collaborative research. Lloyd has recently held solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy Schools (London), Crybaby (Berlin), Bill’s Auto (Chicago), Demo Room (Aarhus), and Dirty House (London) for which she won the Art Licks Workweek Prize. Lloyd was the Starr Fellow at the Royal Academy Schools during the 2018/19 school year and is currently studying at The University of Oxford's Ruskin School of Art and Wadham College for her DPhil in Practice-Led Fine Art with support from an All Souls-AHRC Graduate Scholarship and an Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Programme Studentship. In 2021, Lloyd launched This Thing We Call Art, a podcast and online archive featuring excerpts from 50+ interviews with people in the arts she has conducted since 2017.  k-lloyd.com

Notes on access: This Zoom discussion will feature automated closed captions. An audiovisual recording of the event, along with a text transcript (edited for accuracy from automated CC), will be made available afterwards. This event is free and open to all who RSVP.

Present: Valerie Asiimwe Amani
Monday, June 6, 2022 – 12pm New York / 17:00 London
Zoom video recording can be viewed here

Building off of inquiries from her current residency at South London Gallery, the artist will lead a performative gathering around how food and lyrics can be a source of knowledge; experiments in scent and story making.

Valerie Asiimwe Amani is a Tanzanian artist and writer working through explorations of video, text, performance, textile, and installation. Her practice interrogates how body erotics, place, language, and the metaphysical are used to situate the self in and out of communities. She holds an MFA from the Ruskin School of Art and has exhibited internationally, including the GRASSI Museum (Leipzig); Rele Gallery (Lagos) and the Zeitz Museum (Cape Town).

Notes on access: This Zoom event will feature automated closed captions. An audiovisual recording will be made available afterwards. This event is free and open to all who RSVP.

Present: Devon Narine-Singh
Monday, June 13, 2022 – 6pm New York / 23:00 London
Zoom video recording can be viewed here.

Narine-Singh will screen and discuss a new short film, which continues his usage of found materials to address personal histories within political landscapes, proposing questions around illness, intimacy, and pop culture as recovery.

Devon Narine-Singh is a filmmaker, curator, and educator. He teaches at RISD. His films have been screened at Prismatic Ground, Oxford University, Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, and many more. He has presented screenings at Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Maysles Cinema, and NYU. Along with Alia Ayman and Suneil Sanzgiri, Narine-Singh programmed Flaherty NYC 2020–21. He has a BFA in Filmmaking from SUNY Purchase and an MA in Screen Studies from Brooklyn College. His writing has been published in Dedza Scrapbook.

Notes on access: This Zoom event will feature automated closed captions. An audiovisual recording will be made available afterwards. This event is free and open to all who RSVP.

Present: Xiaolu Wang
Tuesday, August 9, 2022 – 6pm New York, on Zoom

Recording can be viewed here.

Xiaolu will revisit excerpts of conversations with narrative therapist Poh Lin Lee that happened in the spring of 2022, as an ongoing process to notice the quieter voices diverging from the “hero’s journey” narrative, to welcome less well-known practices, and to invite beyond-human collaborations in filmmaking.

Xiaolu Wang is a documentary filmmaker, curator, and translator from the Hui Muslim Autonomous Region of China, whose practice is based in the mapping of interiority, with the use of video, poetry, memory, translations, and a decolonial lens. Their work have been screened at local venues and international film festivals. They contributed translations to journals including 單讀. They are a recipient of the 2019 Jerome Film and Media Grant, a fellow of DocX Archive Lab 2021-2022 organized by Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. They are also a part of On Being Project's inaugural artists-in-residence. Besides being a practicing cinephilia, they occasionally host podcasts, and frequently read the Tao Te Ching. Their work has been generously supported by Metropolitan Regional Arts Council of Minnesota, Saint Paul Neighborhood Network, Jerome Foundation, Women Make Movies, and UnionDocs. They live on occupied Dakota homeland (present day Minneapolis) with two cats, Marvin and Moto, who sleep on separate couches.

Notes on access: This Zoom event will feature automated closed captions. An audiovisual recording will be made publicly available afterwards, so all participants should consent to being represented in the recording. This event is free and open to all who RSVP.

Present: Tenzin Phuntsog
Thursday, August 25, 2022 – 3pm CA / 6pm NY / 11pm UK
Zoom gathering

Recording can be viewed here.

A chat with Tenzin Phuntsog.

Tenzin Phuntsog works primarily as an artist and director, and lenses his own hybrid projects. The practice touches into themes of presence and belonging as well as landscape. The works have presented at notable cinema and fine art spaces internationally. tenzinprojects.com

Present: Jamie Holland Jr.
Friday, September 9, 2022 – 2pm CA / 5pm NY / 10pm UK
Zoom discussion

Recording can be viewed here.

Jamie Holland Jr. uses the camera to image connectivity and primarily focuses on fitting work to the book form/images to the sequence. He looks to speak about the shapeshifting qualities of Love, its proximity to fear, pain, and lineage.

The discussion will deal with the indeterminacy of images and how we as practitioners and viewers can provide them with meaning and accessible context through the book.

instagram.com/jamiehollandjr

Present: Miranda Mungai
Friday, September 23, 2022 – 10am LA / 1pm NY / 18:00 UK
Zoom discussion

Recording can be viewed here. During the discussion, references are made to reading materials which can be viewed here. The folder is open access and the public is encouraged to add their own thoughts to the “scroll along” document.

Miranda Mungai is a freelance documentary film programmer, events producer & writer based in Norwich, UK. Her curatorial specialty is closely aligned with her research interests: short documentary and artist moving image that prioritises themes of community, technological mediation and politics of space, citizenship and nation-state sovereignty.

She is in the process of trying to find new situations for screening and viewing films that are more conducive to building sustainable and supportive communities that are not film festivals or corporate cinema spaces. The discussion will consider what alternatives might exist, how we might be able to build community-focused screenings and support films (and filmmakers) beyond a single film festival cycle.

mirandamungai.co.uk/home

Present: ON INSTITUTIONS AND OTHER DIGRESSIONS OR A LOOP, a performance by Frank Wasser
Monday, October 10, 2022 – 10am LA / 1pm NY / 18:00 UK

Recording can be viewed here.

ON INSTITUTIONS AND OTHER DIGRESSIONS OR A LOOP is a short live performance by Frank Wasser drawing on and conflating the childhood memories that the artist has of The Liberties, an area of inner-city Dublin where the artist grew up. The piece conflates anecdotes with lived experience to convey and explicate the indelible mark and influence produced by colonialism in Dublin. The performance will unfold simultaneously in London and New York; it can be viewed in London or through a Zoom broadcast. A discussion will follow the performance.

Frank Wasser is an artist, curator, writer and educator based in London, Dublin and Oxford. His work often takes the form of performance, images, writing and sculptures which question and complicate the parameters of contemporary art practice. He has exhibited, written and lectured nationally and internationally. Recent projects and exhibitions include: ‘Speech Sounds’ at VISUAL Carlow, Ireland, ‘Urgencies’ at CCA Derry/Londonderry, ‘THE CRIT’ University of Oxford, ‘Title, yet to be announced’ at Catalyst Arts (FIX 21), Belfast, ‘Return to Disintegration: Periodic Review 11’ at Pallas Project Space, Dublin, ‘Survey’ at Jerwood, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, The Buecoat and G39 Cardiff, United Kingdom. Recent writing and criticism has been included in and commissioned by Flash Art, Burlington Contemporary, AEMI, Art Monthly, Art Review and the Visual Artists Newsheet. Wasser will release a short book with MA Bibliothèque in early 2023. Wasser is currently completing a DPhil in Fine Art at the University of Oxford. He is an associate lecturer in Critical Studies and Fine Art Practice at London Metropolitan University. Wasser also regularly runs workshops and lectures at Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Wasser is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. He is the founder of ‘The Virtual Lectures’ which is supported by the Arts council of Ireland Project Award (2022).

Present: M Woods
Wednesday, March 8, 2023 at 8:30pm ET

Recording can be viewed here.

M will demonstrate the techniques of vinyl sampling to an MPC2000XL as a means of hip hop practice in homage to The RZA and JDilla. M presents hip hop as an avant-garde tactic and means of survival, a continuation of their musical practice first established by their grandmother, Ana Lucia Solis.

M. Woods (1988, NYC) is a Latino artist, activist, media terrorist working in avant-garde strategies using experiential design, recordings, samples, the body, instruments, immersion, conspiracy theories, and political demonstration. The work is an exploration of and attack against the distribution of nihilism through the apparatus of the global Digital Sickness; the discourse of nothingness creates a hallucinatory zone of empty value called The Numb Spiral. The augmented reality of the Numb Spiral is the main commodity of Disassociative Productions.

Present: Roopa Vasudevan
Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 6pm ET

Recording can be viewed here.

Roopa Vasudevan will present a lecture performance tracing the evolution of her personal and professional relationships with technology alongside important moments in computing history. Framed through the lens of Moore’s Law—a 1965 forecast for the exponential progression of technology—Vasudevan will explore themes of speed, digital adaptation, and the never ending race towards the future in which we all, willingly or not, participate.

Roopa Vasudevan is a South Asian-American media artist, computer programmer and researcher, currently based in Philadelphia. Roopa’s practice examines social and technological defaults; interrogates rules, conventions and protocols that we often ignore or take for granted; and centers humanity and community in explorations of technology’s impacts on society. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and supported by Eyebeam (Brooklyn, NY); the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy (Philadelphia, PA); the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation (Philadelphia, PA); the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives (Haverford, PA); SOHO20 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); the Arctic Circle Residency (Svalbard); China Residencies; SPACES (Cleveland, OH); and Flux Factory (Queens, NY). Roopa is currently a member artist at Vox Populi, a 30+ year old collectively run arts space in Philadelphia; a member of the Art & Code track at NEW INC, the art and technology incubator at the New Museum (New York, NY); and a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is researching the complex and involved relationships between new media artists and the tech industry. roopavasudevan.com

Present: Lyndon Barrois Jr. & Lydia Rosenberg
Wednesday, April 19, 2023 at 6:30pm ET

Recording can be viewed here.

In Now is one fine moment, artists and friends Lyndon Barrois Jr. and Lydia Rosenberg ask each other questions about fragmented narrative, fiction, and translation as methods for pursuing ideas over a prolonged period of time. Each approach different narrative forms—cinema and literature respectively—as generative frameworks for object-making, and as a means to incrementally, and nimbly, work on large-scale projects that might be otherwise unattainable. Each invites a conversation about the importance of story, parts vs. the whole, and the ways that fiction might affect the construction of reality.

Lydia Rosenberg is an artist currently based in Pittsburgh.  Her project of writing a novel as a way to make a sculpture began in 2018 and is ongoing.  Recent solo exhibitions include The complete subject at Napoleon, Philadelphia for which she made several hundred sculptures in the shape of lemons based on written descriptions of the fruit found in paintings, Spaghetti Restaurant at BasketShop Gallery, Cincinnati, which transformed the gallery into a pop-up, cost-free spaghetti-restaurant-as-sculpture and most recently, Do this while I wait at Mattress Factory Museum where she presented a series of domestic cleaning tools made to aid in the meditation practice of one of the novel’s characters, an artist named Annette. She is a co-founder of Anytime Dept. a now on pause artist-run exhibition project which was based in Cincinnati. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA in Intermedia from Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Lyndon Barrois Jr. (b. New Orleans, LA) is an artist based in Pittsburgh, PA and an Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He is half of LAB:D, with artist Addoley Dzegede, with whom he has collaboratively staged four exhibitions, and co-authored a book of essays (Elleboog, at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2019). He uses cinema as a means to travel both temporally and geographically, bringing to mind ideas of anachronism, simultaneity, and reanimation. Looking at branding strategies of old cinema—along with the phased-out profession of shooting film stills—he considers these methods ways to represent a film that has yet to be seen. Barrois Jr. received his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis (2013), and his BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (2006). He has completed residencies at LATITUDE Chicago, Loghaven, the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (Netherlands), Fogo Island Arts in Newfoundland, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland.

Present: Francis Whorrall-Campbell
Monday, June 5, 2023 – 1pm NYC / 6pm London
No recording due to technical difficulties, unfortunately!

Francis will present a to-be-determined work in progress. Likely a reading of some description, possibly a conversation, the presentation will deal with the troubles of being a creative person, the models we have available to follow, and how life comes to imitate art (and vice versa).

Francis Whorrall-Campbell (b. 1995) is an artist and writer based in the UK. Guided by histories of DIY gender transition and mutual aid, they make collective structures, texts, and modified commercial objects. Their practice attempts to produce trans feelings, developing aesthetic strategies that manifest and make possible transness despite and within a hostile environment. Whorrall-Campbell’s work could be described as spinning gold from straw: trying (sometimes successfully) to fulfil subtle promises of transformation.

Their writing has been published by The White Review, The Architectural Review, Art Monthly and e-flux; and has featured in anthologies by Pilot Press, Prototype Press and Ugly Duckling Presse. They have presented projects at EACC, Castelló (2023); National Sculpture Factory, Cork (2023); MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2023); Modern Art, Oxford (2022); Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna (2022); Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2022); Auto Italia, London (2022); Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2021); Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2021); and CCA Derry~Londonderry (2021, 2022).

Saint Piñero and Sage Ó Tuama invited me to table at their B-Roll Zine Bazaar at Monira Foundation on October 20, 2024. The original idea was just to sell my 2023 book Hook, but I decided to also use this as an opportunity to assemble some printed matter from new and returning Present contributors: Emily R. Apter, Jemma Desai, Lydia Rosenberg, Lily Jue Sheng, and Francis Whorrall-Campbell.