NYU's KNOWLEDGE CARNIVAL Set for Today

Independent Curators International (ICI), Pratt Manhattan Gallery, and Franklin Furnace will present Knowledge Carnival, a series of student performances developed in Professor Karen Finley's class titled Creative Response: Performance Matters, held at the Department of Art and Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Martha Wilson, founding director of Franklin Furnace, invited the burgeoning artists to present their work at Pratt Manhattan Gallery after visiting the class in fall 2014. Curated by Leonie Ettinger, the programming is inspired by Wilson's body of work and the myriad experimental performances embedded in Franklin Furnace's history.

Creative Response: Performance Matters examines private and public performance, varying aspects of staging, and bodily communication. Students are encouraged to experiment with a variety of media, such as text, script, the Internet, and improvisation. Visual and auditory aspects of performance help students find their artistic voice and deviate from the conventions of the entertainment industry. The aim is to challenge and stimulate original creative content that arouses thought-provoking performance.

Karen Finley's thirty-year relationship with Franklin Furnace began when she performed at the organization's original venue in 1983. She also presented her installation A Woman's Life Isn't Worth Much in 1990 and received a generous Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art grant, supported by Jerome Foundation, early in her career. Franklin Furnace's mission is to create a platform for emerging artists. Knowledge Carnival is intended not only to pay homage to the influence of Franklin Furnace and extend its offering of opportunities to nascent voices. The title of the evening is a reversal of a January 1984 exhibition at Franklin Furnace, Carnival Knowledge, which presented a radical reconfiguration of the stigmas associated with the porn industry. In this spirit of artistic activism, Karen Finley's students offer a performative engagement with the prestigious and avant-garde cultural institution Franklin Furnace, and prove that its important intellectual legacy carries on.

This project is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Martha Wilson, organized by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and initiated by guest curator Peter Dykhuis. The exhibition is on view at Pratt Manhattan Gallery and NYU Fales Library from February 20 - April 30, 2015.

The Performers:

Melanie Anastacia Van Allen (MA Draper | USA) is a choreographer, dancer, educator, and scholar of dance. She is currently a doctoral student in the Dance Studies Ph.D. program at Texas Woman's University. Her hybrid performance piece is an attempt to merge scholarly discourse and the realm of traditional paper presentations with performance.

Nada Azem (MA Arts Politics | Syria) is a conceptual artist whose work focuses on the politics of Syria and the stereotyped perceptions of Muslims. She believes in the unifying and interventionist powers of art. Her multimedia performance deals with concealed personal communications between America and the Middle East.

Amelia Bande (MFA Creative Writing in Spanish | Chile) is a playwright, performer, and teacher. She is the co-founder of the new experimental press Publishing Puppies. Her multimedia performance deals with New York City's queer community; she questions notions of belonging and how they relate to the need of "having a place called home."

Hanbin Deng (Visiting scholar, Hainan University | China) is a performer, theatre director, and professor. He is interested in unconventional performance on the edges of traditional theatre. His interactive, synesthetic piece experiments with live sounds through bodies and objects in collaboration with performance artists Nefeli Asariotaki and Wenjie Li.

Sophia Heinecke (BFA Dramatic Writing (Alum) | USA) is a writer for stage and film. She received a grant from the Kevin Spacey Foundation: America to produce her play Going to Market. Her interactive performance carefully examines the challenges applicants are exposed to during interviews on the contemporary job market.

Rowan Spencer (MA Individualized Study | Canada) is an actor and theatre director. He is particularly interested in integrating sound art and musical practices into his performances. His cross-disciplinary sound piece concerns the sounds of sex, exploring what gives power to stimulate and disturb at the same time.

Tian Tang (MA Arts Politics | China) is a visual and multimedia artist. She uses her practice to explore feminism in Asia and US immigration. Her video presentation critically examines the process of obtaining a green card, mocking the fact that due to bureaucratic and economic concerns, workers are selected by nationality rather than by ability.

Daniela Tenhamm - Tejos (MA Arts Politics | Chile) is a performer, choreographer, and teacher. She is interested in the political and aesthetic dimensions of bodily interactions, which she explores through improvisation and studies of individual anatomic movement. Her performance/installation relates the materiality of the body to paper.

Zhi Yang (MA Arts Politics | China) is a visual artist whose work focuses on contemporary social issues in China. She is interested in the tensions between traditional artistic practices and modern technology. Her multimedia performance questions the affective functions of art and the emotional relationship of artists to their work.

Minyue Zhu (MA Performance Studies | China) is one of the leading young belly dancers in China. She seeks to challenge the perception of the female body as an erotic object and explores the therapeutic functions of Eastern Philosophy. Her performance/installation consists of a belly dance movement called "shimmy," which looks like vibrations are coming out of the performer's belly.

The Curators:

Karen Finley (Professor) is an artist, performer, and author. Born in Chicago, she attended the Art Institute of Chicago and received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Working in a variety of mediums such as installation, video, performance, public art, visual art, memorials, music, and literature, she has performed and exhibited internationally. Finley is interested in freedom of expression concerns, visual culture, and art education; she lectures and gives workshops widely. She is the author of eight books, including her latest Reality Shows, published by Feminist Press in 2011. Her recent work includes Mandala: Reimagined Columbus Circle, an interactive walk that examines the symbols and history of Columbus Circle as a mandala presented by Elastic City and supported by GSAAP at Columbia University; Artist Anonymous - a self-help open meeting for those addicted to art - presented at Museum of Art and Design; Written in Sand, a performance of music and her writings on AIDS; Open Heart, a Holocaust memorial at Camp Gusen, Austria; Broken Negative, where Finley reconsiders her infamous chocolate performance that brought her to the Supreme Court; and Sext ME if You Can, where Finley creates commissioned portraits inspired by "sexts" received from the public. A recipient of many awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is an arts professor in Art and Public Policy at NYU.

Leonie Ettinger (Curator) is a performance curator, dramaturg, and producer whose work is situated on the intersection of aesthetics and politics. She has worked in Germany, Israel and the UK including FFT Düsseldorf and Tricycle Theatre, UK. NYC collaborations include: FringeNYC, Raised Spirits Theater, Poetic Theater Productions, Leimay-Cave, Urban Stages, The Brecht Forum, undergroundzero Festival, IASNY, Label Gray, The Secret Theatre, The Private Theatre with John Gould Rubin, The Civilians with Steven Cosson, La MaMa ETC with Everett Quinton, and The Living Theatre with Judith Malina. Currently, she is the development associate of Brave New World Repertory Theatre and assistant to professor Karen Finley at the Department of Art and Public Policy, Tisch School of the Arts. B.A., Goldsmiths College London; M.F.A.-Equivalent, Stella Adler Studio; M.A. 2016 candidate, Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.

Amelia Bande (Assistant Curator) is a writer, performer and teacher. Her theatre plays and movie-scripts have been staged, filmed and published in Chile and Germany. In 2013 she co-funded Publishing Puppies - a new press for visual work, plays, poetry, music, fiction, essays and other print experiments. She currently lives in New York where she studies writing, teaches Spanish, and runs creative writing workshops for people of all ages.

The Department:

The Department of Art and Public Policy established by the faculty and the Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, is an interdisciplinary initiative that includes faculty and students from the 13 departments of Tisch. The Department embodies the School's recognition that young artists and scholars need an opportunity to incubate their ideas outside of the safe haven of the academy, in a dialectic with real-world problems.

The Arts Politics Masters Program at the Department of Art and Public Policy, Tisch School of the Art, NYU, provides a critical and analytic setting in which artists and others with a social commitment to the arts can develop the means for an appraisal of the political implications and social significance of their work. The program combines an administrative home within the Tisch School of the Arts with partnerships across other NYU schools to offer a spectrum of interdisciplinary courses. The curriculum examines, in an activist key, the relation between art and society and the role of the artist in civic life. Art is treated as providing a particular lens through which the social world can be understood and as a medium of cultural intervention in political processes.