Please join us for 🇵🇸 Palestine Louder!!
A conversation on challenging the violence of false narratives, censorship, and the silence of and on Palestine
WHEN: Saturday, March 2, 2024, 1:00 – 3:00pm
WHERE: Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco
FREE
Join us for this round table discussion with Chris Gazaleh, Palestinian American artist; Sholeh Asgary, an Iranian American artist who defaced their own work as part of the Bay Area Now 9 exhibition in response to the censorship of Palestine by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA); Dena Al-Adeeb, an Iraqi born feminist scholar-activist, artist-cultural worker, educator, community organizer, and mother; Nora Barrows-Friedman, journalist with @electronicintifada who has been covering Palestine for the past 20 years; and Lucian González Ippolito, artist and community organizer.
On February 15th, eight artists included in the Bay Area Now 9 exhibition at YBCA covered and altered their works on view as a pro-Palestinian act. You can read more about it here:
On Feb. 26th, the YBCA staff authored a letter of support for these artists, despite YBCA’s director and Board publishing a statement that discusses the removal (censorship) of these artworks from the BAN9 exhibition, since then the artists have called for a boycott of the museum.
You can read the full statement of the artists champoy, Courtney Desiree Morris, Jeffrey Cheung, Leila Weefur, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Paz G, Sholeh Asgary, and Tracy Ren here:
🇵🇸 Palestine Louder!! Participants:
Dena Al-Adeeb is an Iraqi born feminist scholar-activist, artist-cultural worker, educator, community organizer, and mother. Her transdisciplinary research is at the intersection of U.S. imperial war geographies, militarism, and extractive capitalist economies in West Asia with an emphasis on visual, material, and petro-culture of the Arab/Muslim worlds.
Dena’s creative practice explores gendered histories and lived experiences of war, refugee narratives and collective memory, affect and embodied healing practices through a decolonial framework. Her artwork takes on varied practices including live art, video art, installation, digital art, photography, sound, text, and activism. She creates performative, relational works, dedicated to participatory art, socially engaged projects, collaborative engagement, and the cultivation of solidarity. Dena’s work appears in a diversity of publications and shown internationally in space ranging from national museums to abandoned buildings. Dena curates DIWAN: SWANA Futurisms and is a member of HEKLER Collective and Creative Action Coalition.
Dena is a recipient of numerous awards including a Mellon Artist and Practitioner fellowship at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration as well as the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has undertaken many academic research positions throughout her career including her role as Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg and Visiting Scholar at the Department of American Studies at the University of California at Davis. Dena has taught at New York University, Pratt Institute, San Francisco State University, and Expression College for Digital Arts. She holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Culture and Representation from New York University.
Dena has been involved in anti-war, Arab/SWANA community organizing, Palestinian liberation and feminism since the mid 1990s. She is the co-founder of many organizations, including the Arab- American Anti-Discrimination Committee (San Francisco Chapter), now Arab Resource and Organizing Center. Working with the Women of Color Resource Center, she served on the steering committee of movements like Racial Justice 911 and ANSWER Coalition. She has served on the board of numerous other organizations including San Francisco Women Against Rape, Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (San Francisco Chapter), and has built long-term critical alliances with social movements, such as her work with INCITE!. Dena is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective.
Nora Barrows-Friedman is an associate editor at The Electronic Intifada and the host of the regular livestream broadcast and podcast series. She has been covering Palestine as a reporter for more than 20 years.
Chris Gazaleh is a Palestinian American visual artist, musician, writer, educator and community organizer from San Francisco. His work tells a story, a Palestinian American story based on the principles of social justice. With his visual messaging, he works to educate, communicate and spread compassion amongst the public. Using elements of his culture such as the Arabic language, landscapes of Palestine, and his characters with semitic features, he works to combat negative stereotypes of his people’s image. At the same time giving people a glimpse of his people’s history, culture and struggle for freedom. He creates murals, drawings, designs and canvas work to express his message. Using mediums such as ink, paint, spray paint, and digital illustration to create his work. Chris was always drawing as a kid, writing stories, and then came graffiti and painting on canvas. Coming from a broken home as a youth, Hip Hop was a means of expression that helped him find his identity. His love for Hip Hop also has a lot to do with his connection to fighting for freedom and equity. He has painted many murals throughout San Francisco, Downtown Oakland and multiple locations throughout Palestine.
Lucia Gonzalez Ippolito is an Indigenous Mexican and Italian-American artist, teacher, and community organizer born and raised in the San Francisco Mission District. As a Chicana growing up in a Latino neighborhood that has been vastly impacted by gentrification, Lucia felt it her duty from a young age to focus on cultural/political themes in her artwork. As a muralist, she directed and designed two murals in the historic Balmy Alley, the Mission Makeover Mural, the Women of the Resistance mural and was a lead collaborator on one of the largest mural of the Latino Cultural District, Alto al Fuego en la Mision. Internationally, Lucia co-created a tile mural for a youth organization in the Dheisheh Refugee camp in Palestine. Lucia is also a screen printer and co-founded a collective called the San Francisco Poster Syndicate. Currently, Lucia has been working for three years on a love themed community street festival that takes place annually in Balmy Alley, called Lovers Lane, that features artists, street vendors, local performers, and children’s activities.
Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist and performer who researches how the auditory characteristics of a location reveal its underlying conditions and our relationship to place—echoing the near-perpetual movement across borders that characterized Asgary’s formative years. Situating the body as a site of knowledge, the work takes form as visual, sound, and collective processes, all of which she is deeply committed to. The resulting works implicate the viewer in mythological excavations that bridge large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, and voice. Asgary’s sound performances use her voice, the environment, and the innate properties of everyday objects as an ether for direct communication in an otherwise disparate circumstance of image. She explores materials and concepts used in her larger practice through improvisational performance, such as water clocks, AM transmission, frequency interference, and language.
Featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue,” Asgary is a Bay Area Now 9 triennial artist, a 2023 Artadia Finalist, and a Pacific Standard Time Getty x ART (2024-2025) artist. Her work has been presented by such institutions as the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Stanford University, The Lab, 500 Capp St., Minnesota Street Project, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Slash Art Gallery, and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. Numerous residencies have supported her practice, including Headlands Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Berkeley Art Center, Culture Hub, Arab.AMP, and ARoS Kunstmuseum. Asgary is a recipient of a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant for her solo exhibition at TSA in New York, a 2019 Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Program Grant as a composer for Dance Elixir, a 2020 California Arts Council Grant for her program MAJLES, a 2022 Center for Cultural Innovation grant, and recipient of the 2014 Alternative Exposure Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for curatorial initiatives as the previous Curator and Director of Education and Public Programs at Incline Gallery, where she founded The Project Room. Asgary is a UCLA Art|Sci Collective member, a co-founder of Iranians for Abolition, and serves on the Curatorial Council for Southern Exposure. Her ongoing collaborative projects include those with Abou Farman, Dena Al-Adeeb, and Heather Kapplow. Asgary is a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts.
photo by Ebti
Led by CAMP, Manifest Differently is a new project developed, curated, and led by Megan Wilson and Kim Shuck with support from independent curator Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, education curator Amy Berk, assistant curator Katayoun Bahrami, and Public Relations/Communications Specialist Veronica Torres. In 2023/24, we are working with 38 diverse, multigenerational visual/media artists and poets to interrogate the history of Manifest Destiny and its legacies of inherited and perpetuated violence, trauma, and addiction. The outgrowth of resistance and resilience – giving fire to movements for social/ culture change. The project will be presented in 2023/24 at seven locations – Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP), Artists’ Television Access (ATA), Minnesota Street Project, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), Book Castle, the Beat Museum, and the San Francisco Public Library.
#ceasefire #stopthegenocide
#freepalestine #manifestdifferently #clarionalley
