Christopher Cozier: One Night Collaborations, version 2

Tuesday 18 March, 2014, 8 pm, at Alice Yard

Christopher Cozier is a Trinidadian artist and writer, and a co-director of Alice Yard. On the night of Tuesday 18 March, to accompany the award ceremony for his 2013 Prince Claus Award, he will stage three experimental and interactive projects at Alice Yard, involving a range of collaborators. The event is open to the public from 8 pm, and audience members are invited to record the proceedings with their cameras and phones, and post the documentation online.

The evening will include:

• The latest version of Sound System, a project which began in 2001 and has thirteen years of accumulated audio contributions, with mixes by Robin Foster, Martin Raymond, Daniel Haun, and Kevon Walker, and sound elements by Sheldon Holder, Christian Campbell, Chantal Esdelle, Sheena Rose, Ebony G. Patterson, Yvette Grey, Jomo Slusher, and Cozier himself. This is the first time the work will be presented in Trinidad. The street installation is presented with the support of Suspex Auto Club.

• A series of animated projected sequences by Nadia Huggins, Rodell Warner, and North Eleven, interpretations of Cozier’s recent project The Arrest: Hands Up, Hand Out.

• Made in China, a live action in collaboration with Sean Rambarran.

All are invited.

Jean-Louis Huhta: EXOTICA 2014

TALK TO ME IN MY DREAMS
Thursday Feb / 6th /  7.30pm

A mixed-media collaboration between Nanna Dalunde, Jean-Louis Huhta and Rodell Warner
FOUND  OBJECTS, FLAGS, FIELD RECORDINGS, FILM, PROJECTIONS AND MODULAR SYNTHESIZER.

















Partners Nanna and Jean-Louis have been on a tour performing in NYC as Dungeon Acid at the music festival, Swedish Energies, after that they participated in the Ghetto Biennial in Port au Prince Haiti, with Per Hüttner and our X-Klubb collective. On December 17th, they came to Trinidad and were hosted at Alice Yard and began interacting with various artists and musicians.

















Jean-louis has family in T&T  and went to school in Arouca in his childhood.
"A lot has changed since then" he observed. "Together we explore memories impressions, how the sea was and is now,  recording sound, filming and building the world of Exotica 2014...It's a play on a  music style from the 50's... A time travel, a scene from the future where a plastic bottle on a beach 
is a mysterious piece of nature or technology, the sounds of the birds become integrated
with the machines mimicking nature...A meditation on the time it takes for the sea to shape corrals... 
Shapes from the deep sea speak to us in our dreams telling their stories..'Sunken City' a tune recorded in the 60's by composer Les Baxter . The 5 minute piece  has been stretched to three hours in duration The character of the music changes drastically into a spooky angelic kind of soothing drone..."

A conversation with Remco de Blaaij

Monday 16 December, 2013, 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Remco de Blaaij is a Glasgow-based curator and the second recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean. On Monday 16 December, at 7 pm, he will give an informal talk at Alice Yard on his current research project.

The Cisneros Award supports a contemporary art curator based anywhere in the world to travel to Central America and the Caribbean to research art and cultural activities in the region. De Blaaij recently conducted research about women’s activist practices in Guatemala, Jamaica, Nicaragua, and Suriname. He visited local artists, art institutions, and non-profit organisations such as EspIRA in Nicaragua and Ciudad de la Imaginación in Guatemala, and interviewed local art historians and curators. His project explores how to think about the wealth of artistic practices in this region, and the social and economic context in which art is produced.

All are invited.

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About Remco de Blaaij:

Remco de Blaaij has been curator at CCA Glasgow since October 2012. Previously he co-curated Picasso in Palestine while working at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2007–12). He also worked on the team of Be(com)ing Dutch, a two-year project in the museum that dealt with residues of globalisation, national identity, and immigration. He moved to London in 2011 to conclude his research at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University, with the publication too little, too late, on border practices of visual culture against the backdrop of Suriname.

Versia Harris: They Say You Can Dream a Thing More Than Once

Thursday 21 November, 2013, 7.30 pm, at Alice Yard

Versia Harris is artist in residence at Alice Yard during November 2013. She has spent her time in Port of Spain revisiting and re-exploring two ongoing video animation projects, in conversation with Alice Yard’s network of collaborators.

On Thursday 21 November, at 7.30 pm, Harris will present these two works — A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes When You’re Awake and They Say You Can Dream a Thing More Than Once — in a large-scale installation at Alice Yard. All are invited.

Versia Harris writes:

“My work explores the fantasies and experiences of an original character. This character is introduced to Walt Disney animations and consequently layers what she desires from these animations onto her life, especially her physical self. Her perception of and her relationship with her world change, as she compares reality and fantasy.... I have created two narrative animations surrounding the chase of continuously unfulfilled desires. At Alice Yard, my intention was to revisit these animations and explore different and more engaging ways of presenting this story to an audience.”

About the artist:

Versia Harris is a Barbadian artist living and working in Weston, St James. She graduated from the Barbados Community College with a BFA in the Studio Art programme in 2012, with an award from The Leslie’s Legacy Foundation. She has previously participated in residencies at Projects and Space (Barbados, 2011), Fresh Milk (Barbados, 2013), the Vermont Studio Centre (USA, 2013), and Instituto Buena Bista (Curaçao, 2013).

This event is supported
by North Eleven.

Project 35 Volume 2

Selections from an international exhibition of artists’ videos, produced by Independent Curators International

Tuesday 12 November, 2013, 7.30 to 10 pm, at Alice Yard



Still from My Father Looks for an Honest City (2010), by Basim Magdy


Project 35 is an itinerant video exhibition selected by 35 international curators, and organised by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. First launched in 2010, it now includes a second programme of single-channel videos, again drawing from ICI’s extensive network of curators to trace the complexity of regional and global connections among practitioners, and the variety of approaches used to make video.

This new selection of 35 curators from six continents (including Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier) each chose one work for this compilation, touring September 2012 through December 2014.

On Tuesday 12 November, 2012, from 7.30 to 10 pm, Alice Yard will present an installation of selected works from Project 35 Volume 2 (to be followed by a second selection in January 2014).

These selected video works — by artists ranging from Turkey to the Bahamas, from Egypt to Brazil, from China to Norway — reflect on the intersections of routine and ritual, the mundane and the absurd, the possibility or impossibility of intelligible communication.

The occasion will also welcome Alice Yard’s current artist in residence, Versia Harris of Barbados.

All are invited.

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Project 35 Volume 2 is a traveling exhibition produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. The exhibition is made possible, in part, by grants from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and the Robert Lehman Foundation; the ICI Board of Trustees; and donors to ICI's Access Fund.

Independent Curators International (ICI) connects emerging and established curators, artists, and institutions to forge international networks and generate new forms of collaboration through the production of exhibitions, events, publications, and curatorial training. Headquartered in New York, the organization provides public access to the people and practices that are key to current developments in curating and exhibition-making around the world, inspiring fresh ways of seeing and contextualizing contemporary art. Since it was established in 1975, ICI has worked with over 1,000 curators and 3,700 artists from 47 countries worldwide.

A conversation with Kobena Mercer

Wednesday 23 October, 2013, 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Kobena Mercer is an art historian based at Yale University. In October 2013, he will visit Alice Yard to explore recent developments in Trinidad's art scene. On Wednesday 23 October, at 7 pm, he will give an informal talk at Alice Yard.

Beginning with a screening of an excerpt from Vincent Meessen's Vita Nova (2009), Mercer will explore some of the questions raised by the short film. Vita Nova was inspired by the image of an African military cadet saluting the French flag, which appeared on the cover of Paris-Match, and was analysed by Roland Barthes in his 1957 essay "The Myth Today".

All are invited.

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About Kobena Mercer:

Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora, examining African-American, Caribbean, and Black British artists in modern and contemporary art. His research addresses cross-cultural aesthetics in transnational contexts where issues of race, sexuality, and identity converge.

His first book, Welcome to the Jungle (1994), introduced new lines of inquiry in art, photography, and film. Mercer is the author of monographic studies on Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien, Renee Green, and Keith Piper, as well as historical studies of James VanDer Zee, Romare Bearden, and Adrian Piper. He is the editor of the Annotating Art’s Histories series, published by MIT and INIVA. He is also an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing awarded by the Sterling and Francise Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts.

His next book, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s, is a collection of essays forthcoming from Duke University Press. Current research interests include the historiography of Black Atlantic visual arts and a new book-length study on Diaspora Aesthetics in Afro-Modernism.

A conversation with Tobias Ostrander + Postcards from the New Republic

Thursday 5 September, 2013, 7.30 pm, at Alice Yard

Tobias Ostrander is chief curator and deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. In early September 2013 he will visit Alice Yard to meet members of our network of collaborators and explore recent developments in Trinidad's art scene.

On Thursday 5 September, at 7.30 pm, Ostrander will give a short and informal talk about key issues in contemporary curatorship, some recent curatorial projects, and his vision for PAMM.

The evening also includes an installation of Postcards from the New Republic, a work by Pinky and Emigrante (Alicia Milne and Luis Vasquez La Roche), created during their recent participation in the Open Ateliers Zuidoost Artists in Residence (OAZO AIR) programme in Amsterdam.

P&E created a series of postcards and posters that poke fun at relations between the former coloniser and colonies that now make up the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Upon investigating the national symbols of the former Netherlands Antilles, P&E decided to redesign the coat of arms of Aruba and Curaçao by removing European elements and replacing them with imagery with an island context.

Images of the new coat of arms are combined in postcard and poster form with photographs of the Netherlands landscape, but labelled as an Antillean country. The project suggests questions about a hypothetical role reversal in Dutch colonial history, and notions of ownership and control.

All are invited.

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About Tobias Ostrander:

Tobias Ostrander has served as chief curator and deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (formerly the Miami Art Museum) since 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he was the director of the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, where he produced solo projects with numerous artists, including Geoffrey Farmer, Melanie Smith, Thomas Glassford, Karina Peisajovich, Mario Garcia Torres, Pablo Rasgado, Leonor Antunes, Praneet Soi, and Mariana Castillo Deball. From 2001 to 2009 he served as the Chief Curator at the Museo Tamayo. Examples of the exhibitions he produced there include Liliana Porter (2009); Jeff Wall (2008); Lisa Yuskavage (2006); Unspeakable Happiness: A Selection of Contemporary Art from China (2005); Sodium and Asphault: British Art in Mexico (2004); Bas Jan Ader (2003). He is a founding member of the Museum As Hub at the New Museum in New York City and has co-curated several exhibitions for the project, including: Marcel Broodthaers and Liliana Porter: The Incongruous Image (2011) and Tlatelolco and the localized negotiation of future imaginaries (2008). His recent exhibitions in Miami include Frames of Reference: Latin American Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection and Restless: Selections from the Collection of the Miami Art Museum (2012).

About Pinky and Emigrante:

Luis Vasquez La Roche was born in 1983 in Caracas, Venezuela. He moved to Trinidad and Tobago in 2002. He later studied visual arts at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. His works are explorations of personal experiences and his new adopted space and culture. He has participated in several group shows, such as Erotic Art Week TT (2010), Mensajes Positivos in Chile (2011), and PFC (pon una foto en la calle) in Venezuela (2012). In 2012 he had his first solo exhibition in Trinidad, titled The Search – La Busqueda.

Alicia Milne is a Trinidadian artist who enjoys working with tactile materials. She also has an interest in manipulating moving images. Her drawings, plaster, ceramic and video works have been exhibited in Trinidad, Grenada, and the United States. After a voluntary sabbatical while settling into teaching art in a local secondary school, she is currently working on a series that merges digital and drawn images on tactile surfaces.

While both artists maintain individual artistic practices, they also collaborate in creating street installations and pastings, zines, exhibitions, and murals.

A conversation with Michelle Eistrup

Thursday 15 August, 2013, 7.30 pm, at Alice Yard

Michelle Eistrup has been artist in residence at Alice Yard during July and August 2013. She has spent her time in Port of Spain working on two ongoing projects, This Particular Masquerade and Pitch Molded Animability, as well as meeting and collaborating with Trinidad-based artists in Alice Yard’s network.

On Thursday 15 August, at 7.30 pm, Eistrup will give an informal talk about her recent and current work, accompanied by an installation of recent video works. All are invited.

Still from Too Long Are Our Memories Recordings, Nairobi, Kenya, 2010

About the artist:

Michelle Eistrup was born in Denmark and grew up in Jamaica, Paris, and New York City. She currently resides in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, and has a BA in social anthropology from Haverford College, Pennsylvania. She has exhibited in art institutions and galleries in Europe, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, including the Aarhus Art Museum, Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Arnolfini (London), the Momentum Nordic Festival for Modern Art (Moss, Norway), the Modern Museum (Stockholm), Sparwasser (Berlin), the Fine Art Museum (Kuala Lumpur), The Taitu Art Center (Addis Ababa) and the National Art Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston).

This residency is supported by the Danish Arts Council