Artist Talk: Claudia Joskowicz & Sara Reisman

Come and see our exhibition Enacting Stillness! The exhibition will last until 28 August and part of the program will be a guided tour and artist talk with curator Sara Reisman and artist Claudia Joskowicz which will take place 14 June from 6:30 pm.  

Enacting Stillness includes a group of visual and performance artists (Rehan Ansari, Nicolás Dumit Estévez  Brendan Fernandes, Yoko Inoue, Claudia Joskowicz, Kirsten Justesen, Clifford Owens, Jan Pfeiffer, Emily Roysdon, and Roman Stetina) who are engaged with stillness, stoppage, and slowing down in the context of performance. Artists in the exhibition employ gestures that involve turning away, inward, and upward, upending our expectations for the continuity of dance and theatrical compositions and lines of movement and thought. Enacting Stillness considers the political and emotional potential that these unexpected ruptures might mean to both the artist and the viewer.

Set in an apartment building in La Paz, Bolivia, Joskowicz’s Sympathy for the Devil almost imperceptibly unfolds in two slow tracking frames that capture the uneasy but daily encounter between two neighbors who live parallel lives. One is a Polish Jewish refugee who arrived to La Paz during World War II, and the other is Klaus Barbie, living in Bolivia under an assumed name as Klaus Altman, known in the Nazi Party as the Butcher of Lyon. The unintentional relationship between these two neighbors is representative of Jews and Nazis who both sought asylum in Latin America, and were able to live in a relative lull. Coexistence can be understood as another form of stillness, between Nazi and Jew. 

Sara Reisman is Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation which supports arts and cultural activities that engage social justice. Reisman's work at the foundation is focused on promoting access to arts and culture through grant making organizations and programming The 8th Floor, an independent art space established by the Rubins in 2010, which hosts public events and exhibitions.

Claudia Joskowicz’s work looks at history and its repercussions on landscape. In her videos and installations, the viewer’s gaze is directed to the physical movement of the camera through a cinematic space where historic events and personal stories with a historic dimension are revisited and anchored in her native Latin American landscape. On the whole, her work addresses the way technology mediates and redefines concepts like history and memory. Claudia Joskowicz lives and works between New York and Santa Cruz in Bolivia.

FREE ENTRY.