New Museum's 2015 R&D Seasons to Explore SPECULATION and PERSONA

Organized by the New Museum's Department of Education and Public Engagement, R&D (Research and Development) Seasons allow artists and audiences to engage through research-based activities around objects, ideas, and artistic practices across multiple platforms.

Including artist residencies, exhibitions, live performances, conferences, screenings, online publications, after-school programs for teens, family day activities, and archival research by way of topical questions, Seasons are divided into Fall and Spring periods.

Each Season, in turn, is organized around a central theme, connecting various projects within a larger context that emphasizes process and emerging ideas. Anchoring the New Museum's dedication to expanded forms of knowledge and cultural production, Seasonal themes are wide-ranging and limber, rather than illustrative, and the artists, scholars, and curators whose work is examined test the limits of the themes themselves.

Past Season thematics have included ARCHIVES, VOICE, and CHOREOGRAPHY.

Upcoming R&D Seasons will explore SPECULATION (Spring 2015) and PERSONA (Fall 2015):

SPRING 2015 R&D SEASON: SPECULATION

The Spring 2015 R&D Season leads an investigative examination of the theme of SPECULATION via a range of programming centered around residencies with artists Chelsea Knight and Constantina Zavitsanos and culminating in an exhibition organized in collaboration with Taipei Contemporary Art Center. For this R&D Season, SPECULATION is considered for, among other things, its volatile relationship to faith and evocation of diverse possibilities for imagined futures, including alternative economies that focus on caregiving, collective labor, and new modes of distribution.

Chelsea Knight: Fall to Earth
March-September 2015
For her residency, Chelsea Knight will produce the final chapters of Fall to Earth, a cycle of short videos inspired by Salman Rushdie's magical-realist novel The Satanic Verses. Staged as a series of live events produced for video, each chapter takes as its point of departure themes related to socially condemned speech and other forms of silencing or restraint and includes original scores created by different collaborating artists. The chapters' themes are "Conversion," "Blasphemy," "Resistance," "Violence," and "Silence."

March 28: Fall to Earth, Chapter 2-"Blasphemy," with Mathew Paul Jinks

April 18: Fall to Earth, Chapter 3-"Resistance," with Ryan Tracy

June 7: Fall to Earth, Chapter 4-"Violence," with Nick Hallett

June 20: Fall to Earth, Chapter 5-"Silence," with Christine Sun Kim

Two additional programs organized with Knight examine fiction as a way to forecast-and even change-the future. "Knight + Knight Latencies" is a performance that is part lecture, part dinner party, and part therapy session in which two female artists who share the same last name examine their symmetries and, in the process, some fundamentals around feminism and race. "Screening the Speculative" brings together filmmakers who are all pursuing, in various ways, the promise of disrupting notions of seamless, unified reality.

• April 26: "Knight + Knight Latencies," with Autumn Knight
• May 9: "Screening the Speculative," with Melika Bass, Jen Liu, and Peter Hopkins Miller

Constantina Zavitsanos: "THIS COULD BE US"
March-September 2015
Constantina Zavitsanos's residency "THIS COULD BE US" includes a series of research-driven programs organized around speculative concepts of planning, contingency, and care. Care is not only one of the primary sources of surplus value within capitalism, as feminists have argued, but is critical to the organization of society. "Still Life, a workshop" and "Vanitas, a rehearsal" are two live events organized with Park McArthur that expand ideas of debt and dependency in order to think more complexly about decay, cyclical relay, "premature aging," persistent immaturity, and other issues of development. Two Speculative Planning Sessions with Reina Gossett and invited speakers take up questions relating to debt, futurity, and the contingencies of chance, and include contributions from the Speculative Planning Study Group and teens participating in the New Museum Experimental Study Program. "Deferment & Late Arrivals," a screening and discussion with Caroline Key and Soyoung Yoon, foregrounds two films that address the reproductive labors of organizing: Grace Period (by Caroline Key and KIM KyungMook, 2014) and Finally Got the News (by Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, and Rene Lichtman, in association with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, 1970).

• March 26: "Still Life, a workshop," with Park McArthur
• March 29: "Vanitas, a rehearsal," with Park McArthur
• April 25: Speculative Planning Session with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
• May 7: Speculative Planning Session with Denise Ferreira da Silva
• May 16: "Deferment & Late Arrivals," Caroline Key and Soyoung Yoon

Taipei Contemporary Art Center: "The Great Ephemeral"
May 27-September 6, 2015
Fifth Floor Gallery
Established in 2010, Taipei Contemporary Art Center (TCAC) offers a local platform for artists, curators, scholars, and cultural activists to gather and evolve projects dedicated to the role of contemporary art within an international context. The Center has been invited to participate in a Hub residency to co-organize an exhibition for the New Museum focusing on issues of infrastructure and modes of production in art-making and reception today. The exhibition "The Great Ephemeral" will negotiate the role of "economics" (whether financial, symbolic, or alternative) in various artists' works while highlighting the deeply unquantifiable aspects of "value" itself.

New Museum Seminars: (Temporary) Collections of Ideas
Sessions: March 8-May 25, 2015
Aligned with R&D Season themes, New Museum Seminars provide a peer-led platform for a select group of participants to discuss and debate ideas as they emerge. This Season, the group will consider how we can approach different visions of future political and social orders while acknowledging that these visions will inevitably become valuable to capitalist and other forces that are generally understood to limit them.

Experimental Study Program
Classes: February 4-April 22, 2015
The New Museum's Experimental Study Program pairs youths (fifteen to twenty years old) with artists in residence to collaborate on projects and research related to Season themes. Over several months, teens and Museum staff will explore issues around race and the body, routine acts of care, and access to "the commons" with Knight and Zavitsanos.

FALL 2015 R&D SEASON: PERSONA

The Fall 2015 R&D Season: PERSONA will explore the ways and means by which we craft ourselves as subjects and present ourselves to others. Considering the roles that the media, celebrity culture, politics, theater, and art play across the spectrum of subjecthood from "self" to "character," the Season will be anchored by a multiphasic residency by Wynne Greenwood, best known for her multimedia queer feminist art band Tracy + the Plastics (1999-2006). Greenwood works with video, performance, music, and object-making to practice culture healing. Her work has been included in performances and exhibitions at independent and institutional spaces internationally, including the Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Kitchen, New York. Upon ending Tracy + the Plastics, Greenwood shifted her focus to installation and object-based work. Most recently, Greenwood participated in "Anti-Establishment," a group show at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies, and released the full-length music album A Fire To Keep You Warm (2012). Greenwood also teaches performance and video through workshops and after-school programs. More information will be released in early summer.

ABOUT THE R&D SEASON TEAM - The New Museum's Department of Education and Public Engagement is spearheaded by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement. Chelsea Knight's and Constantina Zavitsanos's residencies are organized by Burton with Travis Chamberlain, Associate Curator of Performance, and Taraneh Fazeli, Education Associate. Museum as Hub is curated by Lauren Cornell and directed by Burton. New Museum Seminars are organized by Burton with Fazeli and Alicia Ritson, Research Fellow. The Experimental Study Program is organized by Sasha Wortzel, Educator, G:Class and High School Programs, and Jen Song, Associate Director of Education. Felix Bernstein is the New Museum's Spring 2015 Season Fellow.

Pictured: Chelsea Knight, Fall to Earth, Chapter 1 -"Conversion," 2014 (production still). HD video; 5 min. Photo: Jeesu Kim.