Please note: the artists have cancelled their visit and talk.
Nina Sarnelle and Selwa Sweidan will introduce their collaborative work “Touch Praxis,” a collaborative research project exploring touch as a time-based medium and a collective system for embodied learning. The artists will offer a brief survey of touch media and aesthetics from intersecting fields of attention studies, performance art, media art/design, haptic technology, and healing arts.
This practice is informed by participatory, anti-colonial methodologies in which ‘every body’ is engaged in processes of making and knowing. Guided by thinkers such as Karen Barad, Édouard Glissant, Petra Kuppers, Erin Manning, Hortense Spillers, and Hypatia Vourloumis, Sweidan and Sarnelle use touch to feel their way through complex issues of consent, inclusion, power, entanglement, relationality, and multisensorial spectatorship.
Collaborators since Spring 2020, the L.A.-based artists have developed a research methodology consisting of workshops, touch interviews, embodied reading, participatory performance, and collaborative writing.
Selwa Sweidan (she/her) is an artist and researcher of emerging technologies. She has been published in the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Journal, the Internet Policy Review Journal; and exhibited at Bevilacqua Gallery, Center Du Pompidou, HomeLA, Monte Vista Projects, Spring/Break LA and UC Irvine. Selwa has co-curated exhibitions and symposia including Beyond Embodiment, Performative Computation, STACKED Expo developed, Super Radiance and Clustering. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Media Arts and Practice at University of Southern California. IG: #SelwaSweidan
Nina Sarnelle (she/they) makes research projects, participatory performances, music composition, video and sculpture; her work often interfaces with sites of neocolonialism(s), ecological destruction and labor exploitation in strange and intimate ways. They recently had a solo video exhibition at the New Museum. Her work has also been shown at Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Recess (NY), Black Cube (Denver), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), Fundacion PROA (Buenos Aires), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Mwoods (Beijing) and many others. IG: @ninasarnelle
