LECTURE

What are the stakes of artistic research right now? Can art usher in alternate ways of thinking in a world in which discourse is polarizing, advanced technologies drive knowledge production, and scientific research is weaponized? How can art’s open-ended paradigms shift the frameworks through which we approach the ethical, political, complexities of the current moment?

How do artists de-naturalize engrained ways of looking and thinking? How can art hold space for the spectrum of ways of knowing and being in the world? How do art’s multi-sensorial ways of being in the world support the decolonization, re-Indigenization, and de-ableization of knowledge paradigms? Drawing on lines of thinking from her recent book Reclaiming Artistic Research, Lucy Cotter will foreground artists’ ability and shared desire to reimagine and redefine what we call knowledge, highlighting how art contributes to creating new paradigms in today’s world.

SCREENING

Christine Howard Sandoval, Niniwas, To Belong Here

2023, HD 4K Video, 12:25 mins

Filmed with a wearable camera, artist Christine Howard Sandoval’s film Niniwas, To Belong Here documents her passage across the grounds of Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, commonly known as Mission Soledad, a Spanish mission located in Soledad, California. Surveillance imagery is used to slowly scan the surface of the land, cultural objects on display, and the adobe ruin of the original architecture of the historic mission turned museum. It is one of the 21 former missions of California that now function as museums, none of which explicitly acknowledge their role in the state's colonial history.

The museum site is re-examined through Howard Sandoval's personal history, as the artist's direct ancestors were some of the first Indigenous captives in the mission in the mid 1700's. Imposing self-made drawings of the absent architecture of the buildings where her ancestors lived, her work contains additional historic documents and images, as well as the artist’s documentation of her 4th grade mission project which was common to California public school curriculum until 2017, allowing little or no room to acknowledge history from an Indigenous perspective.

Artist’s Bio:

Christine Howard Sandoval is a multidisciplinary artist who questions the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation, where what is held in the land and what is held within state-sponsored archives negotiate shared spaces of meaning.

Howard Sandoval's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo (Brazil), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), Oregon Contemporary (Portland, OR), El Museo Del Barrio (New York, NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY), amongst others.

Howard Sandoval is represented in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the private research collection of Indigenous art at Forge Projects (NY), the San Jose Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and is represented by parrasch heijnen (LA). She currently lives in the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations and is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Praxis at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC). Howard Sandoval is an enrolled member of the Chalon Nation in Bakersfield, CA.

WORKSHOP

How does oral knowledge show up in contemporary art? How do art’s many media enable artists to attend to orality, embodied language, and oral forms of knowledge? How does a voice that comes through the body land differently on a page or a video screen than a thought that comes from rational consciousness? How can artists work against post-Enlightenment knowledge hierarchies that prioritize academic modes?

How can art embrace the body as a site of language? Can artistic research engage orality as a register of knowing and unknowing the world? How might oral knowledge engage with complex embodied experience and create spaces for access? What can be learned from poetry and song, and how can artists use art’s ways of engaging to decolonize, re-Indigenize, and de-ableize knowledge?

In this workshop for artists, Lucy Cotter will draw on her work-in-progress on embodied language, alongside the work of several other (multidisciplinary) artists as a prompt for collective discussion on these questions. The participating artists are invited to consider their own work through this paradigm and share insights from the perspective of their own practices.

This workshop is intended for artists who directly engage with oral forms and knowledge, as well as for those for whom it seems outside of their current realms of thinking. It will offer reflections relevant to artists doing studio work, performance, socially engaged practice, and advanced technologies, seeking to generate and nourish new creative possibilities.

DIALOGUE WITH THE CURIOSITY PARADOX

How might artistic research, with its multi-sensory and open-ended ways of learning and experiencing, promote more access than traditional academic formats? How could access negotiations themselves constitute artistic research? How could thinking through the lens of access expand and deepen artistic research?

What kinds of possibilities open up when questions around disability and the arts are reimagined in terms of pleasure, and an expanded spectrum of experience? What is possible when frictions between institutions, artists, audiences, and funders are generative sources of artistic research? With its many multi-sensory media, and material-spatial possibilities, how can art help to facilitate, shape, and hold embodied knowledge?

Drawing on each of their practices, Lucy Cotter and The Curiosity Paradox (Johnathan Paradox Lee and Grant Miller) will open up some of these lines of discussion, taking as their departure point organic overlaps in their thinking, emerging questions, and a shared wish to co-imagine with a wider community.

Artists' Bios:

The Curiosity Paradox, Grant Miller and Jonathan Paradox Lee, are Access Artists who are queer, non-binary, Disabled people with white settler ancestry. They are organizers of the current iteration of Disability Representation (DisRep) and the co-creators of Threshold Practice, an assistive technology for theater, meetings, and any time two or more human or non-human people spend time with each other.

DIALOGUE WITH HANNAH KRAFCIK

Multidisciplinary artist Yo-Yo Lin uses embodied performance, video, publishing, and social organizing to lean into nuanced transcultural imaginaries around the body and incorporate experiences of chronic pain, chronic illness, and disability to create platforms for connectivity where new bodies of knowledge can be formed collectively. Lin’s practice engages with art as a space for unlearning interlocking paradigms of ableist, racist, and anti-queer thinking.

In this event, Cotter will reflect on Lin's practice together with guest artist Hannah Krafcik, whose transdisciplinary neuroqueer practice shares affinities with Lin’s practice. Krafcik has previously performed Lin’s collaborative work Distance Rituals (made with Yidan Zeng) together with dancer and body worker Emily Jones, her long-term collaborator. Cotter's extensive dialogue with Yo-Yo Lin is published in Reclaiming Artistic Rwsearch (2024).

This event will feature two accompanying screenings of works by Yo-Yo Lin: an excerpt from Channels (2022), a multisensory performance, held at The Shed, New York in 2022, and a video work by Yo-Yo Lin entitled Re:collections (2021).

SCREENINGS:

Yo-Yo Lin, Re:collections (2021),

HD video, TRT: 21 minutes

Re:collections / 再次·回顧 remembers lost language in the body, across land, and in alternate universes. Following a recent return to the artist’s motherland in Taiwan during the pandemic, the film is a first-person account of returning to a site of medical and familial trauma years later. Moving through the artist’s intimate thoughts, Re:collections explores the fallibility of time and ambiguousness of placehood in an ever-shifting disabled, immigrant body.

Melding together new media performance, self-documentary, and frameworks of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Taoist cosmology, the film interweaves the mundane with the magical, offering openings for grief, wonder and radical multiplicity.

Yo-Yo Lin, channels (2022)

Performance documentation, The Shed, New York
TRT: 27 mins. (Abridged 60-minute performance.)

channels (2022) is a multisensory performance exploring the intricate pathways of the body. Lin understands us all to inhabit multiple bodies: ones made up of what we commonly think of as our physical body composed of its parts and organs, and others seemingly invisible, extending beyond the skin, taking the form of energetic fields and kindred relationships.

In her work, Lin generates connections within and between these bodies through the concept of qi 氣, networked technologies, and disabled embodiment. As materials for this exploration, she uses and amplifies the connective tissue of her own body as well as the care relationships that bond two or more bodies together. The work includes an interdependent, cyborgian feedback loop of generative music and dance in collaboration with sound artist Despina, followed by a virtual exchange, experimenting with presence and crip movement choreographed and performed live with New Zealand/ Aotearoa-based artist Pelenakeke Brown.

This event is free and open to the public. The event will be in-person at Stelo Arts in downtown Portland. Stelo is an ADA accessible downtown space, close to public transport. Please feel free to get in touch if you wish to discuss any access needs.

Artists' Bios:

Yo-Yo Lin is a Taiwanese-American, interdisciplinary media artist who explores the possibilities of self-knowledge in the context of emerging, embodied technologies. Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with chronic illness and intergenerational trauma.

Hannah Krafcik is a Portland-based transdisciplinary neuroqueer artist and writer whose work emerges from ongoing reflections on social patterning and censorship, (over)stimulation, perseveration, and intuition. Their practices include dance and new media.

Panel discussion and screenings on the occasion of the New York book launch.

What are the stakes of artistic research in a world reckoning with social justice, climate change, and the rise of artificial intelligence? What are the unique forms of knowing and unknowing specific to artmaking? How do they relate to academic knowledge? How can they contribute to the decolonization and Indigenization of knowledge? Why is there no established discourse around artistic research in the US? Do US arts infrastructures need to shapeshift to support artistic research?

These are some of the questions raised in Reclaiming Artistic Research (expanded second ed., 2024) in which writer, artist, and curator Lucy Cotter engages in in-depth dialogue with 24 leading artists worldwide to address artistic research in practice. For this New York launch of the newly released book, Cotter will reflect on the currency of artistic research in the US and engage in discussion with two of the book’s artist contributors, Stephanie Dinkins, and Cannupa Hanska Luger. 

The event will include screenings of video work from Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies project and video documentation of Dinkins’ multi-generational narratives of Black women in Secret Garden. The discussion will be followed by a screening of contributing artist Sky Hopinka’s work Fainting Spells, an experimental filmic meditation invoking the possibility of future mythology.

SCREENINGS:

Cannupa Hanska Luger, We Live: Future Ancestral Technologies Entry Log (2019, 3 minutes)
We Live is an entry log from the wider Future Ancestral Technologies project which engages Indigenous futurism, blending media, place, storytelling, and documentation of a living practice. It documents a performative land-based action in which figures in sensory muting regalia use their physical presence to pledge accountability to the land and waters affected by resource extraction and industry.

Stephanie Dinkins, Secret Garden (2021, 3-minutes)
Secret Garden is an immersive installation and web experience, illuminating the power and resilience of three generations of Black women. In the work, interactive audio vignettes generate a multi-generational narrative that collapses past, present, and future. This video documents the experience.

Sky Hopinka, Fainting Spells (2018, 10 minutes) Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, Fainting Spells is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant, which is used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted.

Artists' Bios:

Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary artist, whose practice navigates the intersection of new and emerging technologies with narratives around race, aging, gender, and future histories. She uses innovative storytelling and cutting-edge technology to future-proof the oral archives of marginalized communities. Stephanie is at the forefront of reimagining AI and advocating for a technological future based on care and social equity. She is a Creative Time R&D Fellow, a Schmidt Futures AI2050 Senior Fellow 2023, and the inaugural recipient of the LG-Guggenheim Award 2023.

Cannupa Hanska Luger creates monumental installations, sculpture, and performance to communicate urgent stories about twenty-first-century Indigeneity. His bold visual storytelling presents new ways of seeing our collective humanity while foregrounding an Indigenous worldview. Luger has been awarded Guggenheim, United States Artists, Creative Capital, Smithsonian, and Joan Mitchell Foundation fellowships. His work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Georgia, the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, the 14th Shanghai Biennale 2024, and the Whitney Biennial, 2024.

Sky Hiopinka's work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, and language designs as containers of culture, often expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. His video, photo, and text work have been exhibited and screened internationally at festivals, museums, and art centers, including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, the FRONT Triennial, and the 14th Gwangju Biennial. He was a 2022 MacArther Fellow and winner of the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel.

This event takes place with the support of Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation.

Live Performances (Yo-Yo Lin, Yidan Zeng; Hannah Krafcik and Emily Jones) and talk by Lucy Cotter on the occasion of the Portland book launch of Reclaiming Artistic Research (2024).

Writer, curator, and artist Lucy Cotter will share her thoughts on the relevance of artistic research as a means to expand artistic practice and contribute to social transformation and the decolonization of knowledge, leaning into the idea of art as a form of embodied knowledge.

Portland-based performers Hannah Krafcik and Emily Jones will enact two works from DISTANCE RITUALS, a collaborative project by one of the book’s artist contributors Yo-Yo Lin (with Yidan Zeng). This will be followed by a newly commissioned dance-based work developed in response, which forms the first public iteration of Krafcik and Jones’s new collaborative project, The Swirl.

Distance Rituals is a score-based work by Yo-Yo Lin and Yidan Zeng that creates an embodied interface for connectivity with nature and non-human living beings. Written as a pathway for being together while physically apart, it steps away from the hyper-mediation of technology to connect to one another through the natureverse.

The Swirl is a dance-based performance and multi-media project by Hannah Krafcik and Emily Jones that takes optical illusions as a conceptual line of inquiry, where "optics" do not simply refer to the function of sight, but rather to how something is perceived in many senses. It seeks to condition bodyminds to an infinitude of shifting vantages, playing with the way multiple meanings hide in plain view.

Artists' Bios:

Yo-Yo Lin 林友友 is a Taiwanese-American, interdisciplinary media artist who explores the possibilities of self-knowledge in the context of emerging, embodied technologies. Her recent body of work reveals and re-values the complex realities of living with chronic illness and intergenerational trauma.

Yidan Zeng 曽一丹 (she/they) is a queer, Chinese American artist stitching together text, textiles, performance, and food towards an embodied practice of attention and care. Her works are continually woven webs with no center, seeking only to make tangible the invisible threads in our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the natural world.

Hannah Krafcik is a Portland-based transdisciplinary neuroqueer artist and writer whose work emerges from ongoing reflections on social patterning and censorship, (over)stimulation, perseveration, and intuition. Their practices include dance and new media.

Emily Jones is a dance artist, movement educator, and bodyworker, based in Portland, Oregon. They are interested in the honing of intuition to make choices that complicate social norms and power dynamics. They aim to make accessible work that invites the audience in with their own criticality.