Golden Thread presents the dialog NO SUMMARY: Comedy as a Form of Solidarity and Resistance livestreaming on the worldwide, commons-based, peer-produced HowlRound TV community on Friday 14 April 2023 at 11 a.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 1 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 2 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4).
In the primary episode of our 2023 season, government inventive director Sahar Assaf and artist-in-residence at Golden Thread Wafaa Bilal, can be joined by the courses of affiliate professor Simon Anderson, a British-born-and-educated cultural historian, and interdisciplinary Syrian artist Sami Hussain Ismat, on the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago.
Bilal, an Iraqi-born artist and presently an Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, will focus on comedy as a coping mechanism and a type of solidarity and resistance. Join us to find out about what compelled Wafaa Bilal to curate Amreeka: The Comedy Show. Students and normal audiences will get the prospect to ask their questions on to the artist.
Bios
Wafaa Bilal (visitor speaker): Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal is thought internationally for his on-line performative and interactive works upsetting dialogue about worldwide and interpersonal politics. Bilal’s work explores tensions between the cultural areas he occupies—his residence within the consolation zone of the U.S. and his consciousness within the battle zone in Iraq. For his 2007 set up, Domestic Tension, Bilal spent a month in FlatFile Galleries the place individuals may shoot him through a remote-access paintball gun. The Chicago Tribune known as it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time”—naming him 2008 Artist of the Year. That yr, City Lights printed Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun about Bilal’s life and Domestic Tension. Using his personal physique as a medium, Bilal continued to problem the general public’s consolation zone with tasks like 3rdiand and Counting…. Bilal’s work, Canto III, was included as a part of the Iranian pavilion on the 2015 Venice Biennale. Bilal’s present work 168:01 brings consciousness to cultural destruction and promotes the collective therapeutic course of by way of training and viewers participation. His work will be discovered within the everlasting collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; amongst others. He holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was conferred an honorary PhD from DePauw University. Bilal is presently an arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Sahar Assaf (moderator): is a Lebanese theatre-maker and the manager inventive director of Golden Thread Productions. Before becoming a member of Golden Thread in May 2021, Sahar was an assistant professor of theatre and headed the minor program in Theatre Arts on the American University of Beirut, the place she additionally co-founded the Theater Initiative, an interdisciplinary group of college and artists working to facilitate theatre creation and analysis domestically, regionally, and internationally. Her directing credit for the Theater Initiative embody Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding as a site-specific promenade efficiency within the village of Hammana in Mount Lebanon, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Ritual of Signs and Transformations by Sa’dallah Wannous, and Watch Your Step, a site-specific devised work on the Lebanese civil struggle. Sahar is an advocate of documentary theatre and her documentary theatre work contains Meen El Felten, an immersive documentary play about sexual assault in Lebanon as a part of the Abaad MENA marketing campaign of 2018, and No Demand No Supply, a documentary play about intercourse trafficking and prostitution in collaboration with the Kafa group. Sahar is a recipient of the Fulbright scholarship (2009) and holds an MA in Theatre Studies from Central Washington University (2011) and an MA in Sociology from the American University of Beirut (2005). She is an alumna of Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab in NYC (2014) and he or she is the co-founder and inventive director of Directors Lab Mediterranean.