SculptureCenter Announces Next SUBJECTIVE HISTORIES OF SCULPTURE & More Speaker Events for March

SculptureCenter has announced two upcoming speaker events: SUBJECTIVE HISTORIES OF SCULPTURE: NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN on March 15 at 6:30pm and TRANSLATING SPACES: TRANSLATING LAW on March 17 at 4pm.

SculptureCenter, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, has announced they will continue the artist-led lecture series SUBJECTIVE HISTORIES OF SCULPTURE. The program explores how contemporary artists think about sculpture; its history and its legacies. Citing specific works, bodies of work, texts, or even personal anecdotes taken from inside and outside cultural production, and inside and outside art, these subjective, incomplete, partial, or otherwise eclectic histories question assumptions and propose alternative methods for understanding sculpture's evolving strategies.

Working in sculptural installations and photography, Nairy Baghramian engages interior design, literature, and art historical debates around minimalism in order to comment on current issues of materiality, manufacture, and display. Her practice examines political and social systems of power, encompassing questions of context, institutional framing and the production and reception of contemporary art. Baghramian’s work possesses a sense of immediacy that favors the physicality of the object itself. Baghramian’s sleek, polished aluminum pieces and cast rubber forms taken on a corporeal identity, often arranged in intimate mise en scènes to highlight the absence of a body while imbuing the forms themselves with a degree of bodily presence.

Nairy Baghramian was born in Isfahan, Iran in 1971, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Baghramian's recent exhibitions include Illuminations at the 54th Venice Biennale; a two person show with Phyllida Barlow at Serpentine Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Aachen; Entr'acte, at Sculpture Project Munster 07 and the Kunsthalle Basel.

SculptureCenter and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts will present the conversation TRANSLATING SPACES: TRANSLATING LAW with LaToya Ruby Frazier, Sina Najafi, Huong Ngo, Sean Raspet, and moderated by Kristen Chappa and Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento. Panelists will discuss projects that are situated in between the physical and immaterial, the public and private, and the artistic and legal. Some projects enact discursive, conceptual gestures through enforceable agreements, while others raise legal issues in specific geographic spaces and virtual communities. Often co-opting and repurposing multiple spaces as a strategy, these artists destabilize notions of use, appropriation, and function in relation to property, particularly when considering the problematic of increasingly hybrid, interconnected sites, spaces, and loci.

LaToya Ruby Frazier will discuss her performance, video, and photography work examining the impact of America's industrial revolution and specifically the politics in her hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania. Sina Najafi will present on Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates--irregular parcels of land purchased from the city of New York in the early 1970s--and Cabinet Magazine's subsequent exhibition Odd Lots (2005) that reanimated these 'gutterspaces' in Queens and Staten Island. Sean Raspet will detail his most recent project, Untitled (Sublet), that establishes an expanding network of interconnected, re-possessed spaces among various arts and non-arts institutions. Huong Ngo will discuss her collaborative, interdisciplinary projects Fantastic Futures, Secret School and Pop-Up Studio that engage public space, online platforms, and educational space.

SculptureCenter Curatorial Associate Kristen Chappa and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts Associate Director Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento moderate the discussion and Q&A with audience members, discussing the practical and theoretical implications of these works.

This program was organized in conjunction with SculptureCenter's 2012 In Practice program exhibition You never look at me from the place from which I see you, and presented in collaboration with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.

For more information and program updates please visit www.sculpture-center.org.

Photo credit: Nairy Baghramian.