Shifter: Waiting | Taraneh Fazeli and Jonathan Van Dyke

February 18, 2021
Event Types
Talk / Lecture
Featuring

Taraneh Fazeli 

Jonathan VanDyke

Accessibility

This online series will use Zoom with live closed-captioning

For more information, contact:

Emily Garner eagarner [at] mit.edu (eagarner[at]mit[dot]edu)

A businessperson waits for a delayed subway. A wrongly convicted prisoner awaits justice. A refugee waits for their asylum case. A nation waits for the promised boon of economic development. The world waits for a vaccine. Nature waits for its exploitation to end. 

Waiting is usually what we do between things. It is the space between two destinations, an empty and anxious time to fill with distractions. But when we look more closely, we see that waiting is also an activity in itself, bristling with energy, uncertainty, and inequality. What does the condition of waiting reveal about us, our world, and the natural environment that sustains it? 

This series of eight sessions offer glimpses into the thought and practices of artists, architects, historians, and theorists who grapple with this question. 

In this hour-long session, Jonathan Van Dyke discusses a durational performance in which he stands sentinel outside his parents’ home where he spent innumerable hours waiting beside his ailing father. Taraneh Fazeli will speak about her ongoing research into time as it is encountered and reconsidered by those with chronic illness. A brief moderated discussion and audience Q&A will follow. 

These events, and the resulting publication, Shifter 25: Waiting, are co-hosted by MIT List Visual Arts Center and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati in conjunction with solo exhibitions  by Sreshta Rit Premnath to be held in September 2021 (CAC) and October 2021 (MIT List Center).

About the Speakers

Taraneh Fazeli is an Iranian-American curator living between Waawiiatanong/Detroit and Lenapehoking/Brooklyn. After a decade working at NYC-based arts organizations such as Artforum, e-flux, Triple Canopy, and The New Museum, in 2016 she became an independent curator.

Taraneh is currently working on a book rooted in her peripatetic group exhibition on the politics of health, disabilty and care, “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying.” Both a space for reflection on the project and a field guide of associated approaches, within the artists, curators, and cultural organizers involved will draw a map towards possible emancipatory futures centered on healing justice, disability justice, racial justice, and climate justice. 

Taraneh roots her approach to curating and accessiblity at the intersection of the disability and diasporic communities she calls home. She is co-Director of Poetic Societies, which focuses on transnational celebratory cultural events to help participants regain ancestral knowledge lost due to migration, forced displacement, processes of enslavement, or colonization. She is also co-founder of Relentless Bodies, a Detroit-based creative disability justice collective for new Afrikan and other people of color. 

Jonathan VanDyke is a visual artist based in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions have appeared at 1/9unosunove in Rome, Loock Galerie Berlin, Tops Gallery in Memphis, Four Boxes Gallery in Denmark, and Scaramouche in New York. Recent solo performances and commissions have appeared at The Columbus Museum in Georgia, Storm King Art Center, Este Arte in Uruguay, The Power Plant in Toronto, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, The National Academy Museum in New York, and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His work has been featured in many group exhibitions, including Queer Abstraction, a major survey at The Des Moines Art Center in 2019. VanDyke leads interdisciplinary creative practice workshops worldwide.

About Shifter

Shifter explores the intersection of contemporary art, theory, and experimental writing. They convene public dialogues and produce publications. Shifter is programmed by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Avi Alpert.