Artist Talk: Crystal Z Campbell and Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger
Join us for the second of a series of online artist talks as Crystal Z Campbell and the duo Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger discuss their work on view in I don’t know you like that in the context of their wider research-based practice. This conversation centers on artistic inquiries into select medical experiments from the second half of the 20th century–namely, the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks’s immortal cells and the transversal use of the chemical compound DNCB in photography and early AIDS care–and their contemporary legacies. Carried out by professional researchers and citizen scientists, these endeavors variously mobilized hospitality in their approach to care and cure.
RSVP: This event is virtual only. RSVP for Zoom details.
Image: (left) Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, DNCB (still), 2021. Multi-channel moving-image installation with sound. Installation dimensions variable; 16mm film: 5:30 minutes, video: 9:50 minutes. Courtesy of the artists. (right) Crystal Z Campbell, Portrait of a Woman I, 2013 and Portrait of a Woman II, 2013. Custom 3-D laser cut solid glass cubes of HeLa cells (image of HeLa cells made with Dr. C. Backendorf and G. Lamers) and Henrietta Lacks, upcycled wood, and MDF. 35 x 6 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Colin Conces.
Crystal Z Campbell is a 2021–2022 UB Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar, multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Their archive-driven work in film/video, performance, installation, sound, painting, and text has been exhibited at Drawing Center, New York; Nest, Den Haag, Netherlands; ICA-Philadelphia; Studio Museum of Harlem; SculptureCenter, New York; and SFMOMA, San Francisco, amongst others. Honors and awards include the Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and Flaherty Film Seminar. Campbell was a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center/David & Roberta Logie Fellow in 2020–2021, and is founder of the virtual programming platform archiveacts.com
Artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain is based in Toronto, Canada. Husain’s projects often begin with a fragment of history, a rumor, a personal encounter or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages and visual pleasures—such as dance, puppetry, costume, special effects—to animate his research and fold viewers into complex narrative set-ups. DNCB (2018 – ongoing), his collaboration with Kerstin Schroedinger, was shown in different formats at Schwules Museum, Silent Green, and nGbK in Berlin and at mumok in Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2018); Gallery TPW, Toronto (2016); and Western Front, Vancouver (2016). Group exhibitions include Taking a Stand, Stamps Gallery, Ann Arbor, MI (2020) and Immaterial Architecture, Art Museum at the University of Toronto Stamps Gallery. Festival screenings include Toronto International Film Festival; Berlinale, Berlin International Film Festival; Oberhausen Short Film Festival; Flaherty Seminar, New York; and Experimenta Festival, Bangalore (award 2017). Edited by Oliver Husain and Shai Heredia and dedicated to “Loud Mess,” the 8th issue of NANG, a magazine focusing on cinema in Asia, was published in August 2020. husain.de
Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist working in performance, film/video, and sound. Her historiographic practice questions the means of image production, historical linearities, and the ideological certainties of representation. She researches the coinciding histories of industrialization and film. Her works and curatorial practice are often collaborative. Recent works include DNCB in collaboration with Oliver Husain and The Song of the Shirt (video/installation, 2020). Her works have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Forum Expanded of Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival; Wavelengths, Toronto; mumok, Vienna; and exhibited at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; Photo Cairo #6; nGbK Berlin; and the 2nd Kiev Biennial, among other places. schroedinger.blackblogs.org
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