Community Gathering, Conversation & Celebration

Poetics of Refusal

Thu, Mar 12, 2026

6:30 PM–8:30 PM

Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to all. Please register to attend.

Join us for Poetics of Refusal, which will showcase three scholar-artists’ aesthetic practice grounded in refusal: Pedro Lopez, Sahar Khraibani, and Hamed Sinno. Each engages deeply with forms of aesthetic making—in public space, against the white cube gallery, through DIY practices, and adhering to copyleft—as practices of refusal of colonial, cisheteronormative logics and of nominal inclusion into violent institutions.

This event will also be a celebration of their new and/or ongoing work—Lopez’s Tear Basin in Prospect Park and accompanying manifesto-pamphlets, Khraibani’s book Anatomy of A Refusal, and Sinno’s solo performance, Poems of Consumption.

Each thinker will read from their work, followed by a moderated discussion. Together, we will think through the newest surge of attacks on the arts, concurrent capitulation of art institutions to conservative demands, and the ongoing tensions between art as a liberatory cultural front and as liberal assimilation. Ultimately, these thinkers help us see the horizon of art-making beyond dominant institutions of aesthetic capture in their own practices and scholarly research. This event will be moderated by Rebecca Teich.

Participants

Sahar Khraibani: is a writer, artist, and the author of Anatomy of A Refusal (1080PRESS, 2025) and ONE THOUSAND GHOSTS IN THIS FEAST (Wendy’s Subway, 2025).

Pedro Lopez: is an organizer, facilitator, and artist whose work focuses on public works, including Tear Basin in Prospect Park.

Hamed Sinno: wasborn in Lebanon, but now lives in Lebanon, NH, where nice white people routinely correct their pronunciation of the town’s name, and they have to explain that they’re actually from there. They are a designer by training, currently working on text, video, and sound.

View some of the scholar-artists’ work in the slide-show gallery below:

This event is organized and hosted by the Center for the Humanities and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Iniatitive, and co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in English, CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, The Master’s in Liberal Studies Program (MALS), and the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council (DSCG).