Lecture By Visiting Artists Eunsong Kim And Gelare Khoshgozaran Of Contemptorary.Org

When Tragedies And Farce Reappears: Letters To Our Ancestors

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
–Marx

The history and present of arts education has been a consistently unstable one, from elevated budget cuts, to structure-less programming, to standardization and removal. The arts in primary, secondary and college environments are often treated as a selection of excess and wealth. Such conditions further exceptionalize The Arts School: this is where we want to begin the conversation. In a time of surging neo-fascist politics and policies (bent on cutting public funding for cultural institutions and projects) how has arts education responded? The history of legible and funded arts (and arts education) has been a history of collusion with state forces, and empire. Given this backdrop, how might an allotted space for the arts become a space of breaching? Our discussion will grapple with these questions in the letter form, to ancestors who have failed us, as well as ancestors we wish to hear from today.

Eunsong Kim is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego. Her essays on literature, digital cultures, and art criticism have appeared and are forthcoming in: Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, Scapegoat, Lateral, The New Inquiry, Model View Culture, AAWW’s The Margins, and in the book anthologies, Poetics of Social Engagement, and Reading Modernism with Machines. Her poetry has or will been published in: Brooklyn Magazine, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, Seattle Review, Feral Feminisms, Minnesota Review, Interim, and Iowa Review. She was the recipient of a 2015 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for the blog contemptorary and her first book Gospel of Regicide will be published by Noemi press in 2017.

Gelare Khoshgozaran گلاره خوشگذران is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and translator working across the mediums of video, performance, installation and writing. Born and raised in Tehran and living in Los Angeles, she envisions the city as an imaginary space between asylum as “the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee” and the more dated meaning of the word, “an institution offering shelter and support to people who are mentally ill.” Gelare is the recipient of the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, the 2015 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and the 2016 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She is the co-founder and editor of contemptorary.org.

contemptorary.org is a cyberspace project covering: women of color and indigenous women queering the art world: marginalized genders disrupting white hegemony: immigrants and those displaced due to war, occupation and colonialism who breach all terrains. This project is a twofold: the contempt as a commitment to clearing the horizon for necessary ruptures, and the forging of communities to build new horizons. contemptorary is a project supported by the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.

part of UNSETTLING THE CANON: Decolonizing Art Education
Decentering Dominant (Eurocentric, white supremacist, cis-gender, patriarchal, heterosexist, colorist, ableist) paradigms in arts and art education

This event is part of the Flaxman Library Bibliodérive on 2.24.17, http://biblioderive.tumblr.com/

Presented with the generous support of the Dean’s Office and the departments of Liberal Arts, Performance, Visual and Critical Studies, and Fiber and Material Studies in partnership with the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship in Fiber and Material Studies.

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Tags: Chicago, Decolonizing Art Education, Eunsong Kim and Gelare Khoshgozaran, Loop, School of the Art Institute of Chicago