The
Vera List Center
for Art and Politics at The New School is pleased to announce the appointment
of Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili and Israeli curator Joshua Simon as
2011-2013 Vera List Center Fellows.
Vera List Center Fellowships
The
Vera List Center Fellowships honor individuals whose work advances the
discourse on art and politics. The appointments provide the opportunity to
further develop such work drawing from the academic resources of The New School,
to expand on the work in collaboration with students and classes, and to bring
it to the public through the Vera
List Center’s
interdisciplinary programs, seminars, and occasional publications and
exhibitions. Past fellows include Maurice Berger, Wendy T. Ewald, Andrea Geyer,
Susan Hapgood, Sharon Hayes, Danny Hoch, Ashley Hunt, Lin + Lam, Kobena Mercer, Lorraine
O’Grady, Walid Raad, and Robert Sember. Their fellowship projects resulted in
performances, concerts, exhibitions, lectures, online artworks, archives, and
publications.
Chosen
from an international pool of over 200 applications from 22
countries, Bouchra Khalili’s and Joshua Simon’s proposals are notable for their
artistic excellence, political focus, and ties to New
School and Vera List Center scholarship.
The 2011-2013 Vera
List Center Fellows
Bouchra Khalili
is a Moroccan-French visual artist, born in Casablanca, Morocco.
For her fellowship
project, Paper Tracks, Khalili will
investigate New York’s
population of over half a million undocumented immigrant laborers and will
examine everyday objects that accompany their clandestine, largely invisible
existences.
Khalili later studied film at the Sorbonne nouvelle and visual arts at the Ecole
nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Clergy. She is professor of new media and
video at the Ecole supérieure des beaux-arts in Marseille and a founding
member and film curator at the Cinémathèque de Tanger, a non-for-profit based
in Tangiers, Morocco.
Khalili’s work in video, mixed media installations, and
prints combines a conceptual approach with a documentary practice to explore
issues of nomadism, clandestine existences, and the “émigré experience.” In her
work, she articulates language, subjectivity, minority discourse and speech,
investigating the interrelationships between contemporary migrations and
colonial history, physical, and imaginary geography.
Khalili’s work has been shown extensively around the world,
including recently at the 10th Sharjah Biennial (2011); the
Liverpool Biennial (2010); The Studio Museum in Harlem (2010); INIVA, London
(2010); the Reina Sofía National Museum, Madrid (2009); and the Guangzhou Triennial (2008).
Joshua Simon is a curator, filmmaker, and writer based
in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.
During his fellowship term, Simon will
investigate the object through various “stagings”—the auction, the
experiment, the tag, the classified advertisement, the forwarded message—in
order to examine historical and contemporary notions of the object as
commodity, as surplus and excess in contemporary society, and as social agent
that people are subjected to.
Simon is the founding co-editor of Maayan Magazine for Poetry and Literature and
The New & Bad Art Magazine, and editor of Maarvon – New Film
Magazine, all based in Tel
Aviv-Jaffa. Among his publications are Red: Poems
of the Working Class and Out! – Poets Against the Attack in Gaza (2008) both
anthologies in Hebrew and Arabic (co-editor, May Day, 2007). He is also the
co-editor of The Aesthetics of Terror (Charta, 2009), and the editor of United
States of Palestine-Israel, published in the Solution series
by Sternberg Press (2011).
Recent curatorial projects include ReCoCo – Life Under
Representational Regimes (co-curated with Siri Peyer, White Space, Zurich
and Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2011), The Unreadymade (FormContent,
London, 2010), Internazionale!
(Left Bank, Israeli Communist Party Culture Club, Tel Aviv, 2008), and Come
to Israel,
It’s Hot and Wet and We Have The Humus! (Storefront for Art and
Architecture, New York,
2008).
A graduate of the School
of History at Tel
Aviv University,
Simon is currently in the Curatorial Knowledge PhD program in the Visual
Cultures Department at Goldsmiths College, London.
He teaches at Minshar College of Art and is head of theory studies,
postgraduate program, at Hamidrasha College of Art, Tel Aviv.
“Thingness”
The Vera
List Center’s
various initiatives evolve around focus themes of particular urgency and broad
resonance. In the face of general enthusiasm for social media and online
activism on the one hand and sustained and international attacks on
environmentalism and civic liberties on the other hand, in 2011-2013, the
center will examine “thingness,” the nature of our material world. Khalili’s
and Simon’s fellowship projects will sustain and inform these conversations.
The cycle of programs on thingness will focus on the
material conditions of our lives and call for a comprehensive understanding of
the relationship between objects and people that may provoke more responsible,
ethical, and ecologically sound politics. Over the course of four semesters,
thingness will be dissected, and thematic program clusters will be formed around
topics such as forensics, ecology, speculative materialism, and biology. The
Vera List Center Fellows contribute to the intellectual foundation of the
center, and, through their fellowship projects, advance the understanding of the
focus theme.