SVA invites you to join us almost every week this fall for the re-envisioned Studio Sessions, a collection of public talks, panels, workshops, and readings featuring relevant, critical, and expansive perspectives from the frontiers of design.
IN THE BEGINNING there was vibration: the originary pulse from which everything in the universe is shaken into being. Sound is one way vibration, that foundational matter-mover, makes sense. For the great artist-composer Camille Norment, sound is both a material essential to her practice which arcs across sculpture, installation, drawing, music, and live performance and a catalyst for the rearrangement, the reinvigoration, of perception, relation, and the attention we pay to the inner and outer worlds. “I believe in the sonic metaphor,” she said in a public conversation with Axel Wieder, director
A DAY AFTER DEINSTALLING my own show, a firewall downtown at Blade Study, and one before the ashen haze from Canadian fires began its acrid encroachment across the skies of greater New York, a very online and apocalyptic bard, angelicism01, premiered a first cut of Film01, histoire(s) de l’internet at Anthology Film Archives. Logistical information, relayed with paranoia and an unearned solemnity of tone, was withheld from my inbox until two hours prior: “Keep location information private for our safety,” the email read. The original invitation, dated May 17, declared, “Film01 is a peace zone.”
I first heard about the work of performer, musician and artist Kembra Pfahler in the early ’90s when a friend told me she’d seen a Richard Kern film Sewing Circle (1992) that documented Pfahler getting her vagina sewn shut. I recall her gesture making me feel sad and a little sick, yet I mostly felt deep admiration for the extremity of her self-possession. Here she was taking on rape culture (among other violences), prohibiting the penetration of her body by means of needle and thread, the classic tools of “woman’s work.” Perhaps best known for her death rock project the Voluptuous Horror of