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.

Please enjoy photos from the event in the slideshow below.

Thanks to everyone who came out for Poetics of Refusal, which showcased three scholar-artists’ aesthetic practice grounded in refusal: Pedro Lopez, Sahar Khraibani, and Hamed Sinno. This event was also 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 read from their work, followed by a moderated discussion. 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 was 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 health. If you need a place to cry go to the tear basin — (40.668500, -73.968165).

Hamed Sinno: was born 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: