The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School is pleased to announce its spring 2022 programs and the final chapter of its 2020–2022 focus theme: As for Protocols.
The VLC’s spring programs feature new commissions and projects produced by and in collaboration with 2020–2022 Fellows: Etcétera, Adelita Husni Bey, and Rasheedah Phillips, along with VLC Borderlands Fellows Carolina Caycedo and Maria Hupfield. Developed over the past two years, the Fellows’ culminating projects offer distinctive investigations into the protocols that govern our relationship to the environment, to each other, to capitalist frameworks, to time, to performance, and to historical precedent while enacting new systems for engagement. Join us for live performances, exhibitions, conversations, as well as online programs this spring.
Exhibition
These Conditions
February 8–April 8, 2022. Open to the public Saturdays and Sundays, 12–6 pm ET.
Annex, Brooklyn Army Terminal, 80 58th Street, Brooklyn
As the culmination of Adelita Husni Bey’s research into the current pandemic and its aftermath from a larger, historical and artistic framework, the Vera List Center presents These Conditions, an exhibition and pedagogical film set at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Through a weekly workshop, These Conditions hosts a group of individuals who have had to work in person during the pandemic as well as students to reflect on their experience and develop characters, scenes, and performative sketches that express the relationship between pandemics and social change. The structure–featuring an empty room with the sonic features of a hospital, a waiting room, and a domestic space–is altered and activated through the workshop’s discursive and movement-based activities. Two works developed last year will also be on view: On Necessary Work (2021) and Cronaca del Tempo Ripetuto (A chronicle of histories repeating, 2021). There will also be a series of public programs accompanying the exhibition, including children’s workshops, lectures, poetry readings and more.
Exhibition and Conference
Black Quantum Futurism: Time Zone Protocols
April 4–18, 2022. Open daily 12–6 pm ET, Thursdays late until 8 pm.
Parsons School of Design, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
Prime Meridian Unconference
Friday, April 15–Sunday, April 17, 2022. Online.
Developed out of Rasheedah Phillips’s ongoing practice as a member of Black Quantum Futurism, the exhibition Time Zone Protocols and the accompanying Prime Meridian Unconference explore the written “Protocol Proceedings” developed at the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference. The exhibition and Unconference trace the political agendas, social agreements, and rules underlying Westernized time constructs with the aim of illuminating the impacts that oppressive time protocols and policies have on marginalized Black communities in the US in particular, allowing us to consider new ways of understanding our relationship to space-time.
Performance
Massive Jingle: Solidarity Action–The Day After Awareness
Friday, May 6, 2022, 7–8pm ET. Location to be announced.
Convened by Maria Hupfield, this program brings together powerful Indigenous women and gender diverse performers, artists, and activists in a demonstration of sovereignty and cultural strength the day after the National Day of Awareness and Action for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Gender Diverse People with inspiring results. Hupfield’s forthcoming publication with the VLC brings together a cross-disciplinary group of Indigenous performance artists to examine Indigenous protocols and supplant traditional notions of the archive in making space for collaborative work.
Installation and roundtable
La Siembra
Saturday, May 7, 2022, 2–4 pm ET
Union Settlement, 237 E. 104th Street, New York
Carolina Caycedo returns to Union Settlement for a follow up to her September 2021 vigil and “pagamento,” a performance and solidarity action event held at El Museo del Barrio, to plant a memorial, native tree and install a sonic marker for murdered environmental activists, followed by a roundtable discussion that connects movements and Indigenous land and water struggles across the Americas.
Exhibition
Etcétera: NEO-EXTRA-ACTIVISM–Protocols for Buen Vivir
May 20–June 10, 2022
The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, 107 Suffolk Street, New York
Co-presented by the Vera List Center and The Clemente, this exhibition is the third and final chapter in Etcétera’s two-year 2020–2022 Boris Lurie Fellowship. NEO-EXTRA-ACTIVISM–Protocols for Buen Vivir brings together Etcétera’s artistic research on the neo-liberal extraction of natural resources that produces socio-environmental disasters and violations of human rights and those of other species.
Also at the VLC this spring:
Remote Control: Surveying Drones and Culture Today
Wednesday, February 9 through Friday, February 11, 2022. In person & Online.
The As for Protocols seminar series:
Seminar Ten: School of Tomorrow: From the Open Plan to the Tele-classroom
Monday, March 21, 2022, 6–7:30pm ET. Hybrid.
Seminar Eleven: Forces of Art: Protocols of Evaluation
Monday, April 4, 2022, 6–7:30pm ET. Online.
Seminar Twelve: Moving Protocols
Monday, May 9, 2022, 6–7:30pm ET. Hybrid.
For more information, full program listings, and registration, visit our website.
