About the exhibition
The video exhibition Shifters in the James Gallery focuses on three artistic practices that propose new means of engagement with public space in cities as diverse as Guadalajara, Cairo, Novi Sad, and Austin. Whether nomadic or bound to the conditions of a specific locale, these practices operate at the scale of personal relation to larger urban dynamics. Participating artists include Hala Elkoussy, Valerie Tevere & Angel Nevarez, and the artist collective Kuda.org.
New York-based artists Valerie Tevere and Angel Nevarez’ interests lie in the investigation and configuration of performative and discursive-based social spaces. Their current projects examine contemporary music, dissent, and public fora, and move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon the projection of political agency through transmission and song. Nevarez and Tevere have produced new projects for international exhibitions including Manifesta 8 (ES), New Museum (NY), Casco, Utrecht (NL), Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden/Oslo (NO), Creative Time (NY), Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara (MX), United Nations Plaza, Berlin (DE), among others. In 2009 they received a Creative Capital fellowship, a grant from Art Matters, and were artists-in-residence at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS), Stockholm.
Tevere is an Associate Professor of Media Culture at CUNY, College of Staten Island, and Nevarez is a Lecturer in the Department of Art, Culture and Technology at MIT. www.nevareztevere.info
Egyptian artist Hala Elkoussy delves into intimate and overlooked sides of communal living to highlight the underlying dynamics at play within the complex urban structure that creates the city of Cairo. In 2008 she was awarded an artist residency with the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, and in 2005-6 she was in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University in London. She has had solo exhibitions at the Goteburg Konsthall in Sweden in 2009 and the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, in 2006. Her film work was shown in the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2011. www.halaelkoussy.com
Serbian artist collective kuda.org is dedicated to new technologies, art, activism, and politics. Organized as a youth media center since the mid-1990s to provide communication during a time of ban on travel and alternatives to youth fascist movements, the collective continues to host and spark civic dialogue through critical commentary on encroaching privatization of the public sphere and fosters the use of new media art, lectures, exhibitions in collaboration with such international organizations as V2 in Rotterdam, publications, and street activism to combat this. www.kuda.org
