Featured readers will include Israel Centeno, Kayhan Irani, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and Nathalie Handal. 

The event will also feature the work of visual artists  Arahmaiani, Zunar, Owen Maseko, Chaw Ei Thein, Issa Nyaphaga and others. (Please note that artwork by Kardash Onnig will not be featured.)

Free and open to the public. Seating is limited–please RSVP

Readers:

Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) has published thirteen books, mostly novels, but also short fiction and poetry. His books include the novels Calletania (Monte Ávila, 1992; Periférica, 2010), Exilio en Bowery (Troya, 1998; Nuevo Espacio, New Jersey, 2000), El Complot (Alfadil, 2002), and Bajo las hojas (Alfaguara, 2010). He has published two books of short stories: El rabo del diablo y otros cuentos (Eclepsidra, 1993) and Criaturas de la noche (Alfaguara, 2000, 2011). He currently lives, with his wife and two daughters, in Pittsburgh, where until 2013 he has been Exiled Writer in Residence in City of Asylum. Sampsonia Way has published his novel The Conspiracy in an English translation by Guillermo Parra.

Nathalie Handal is the author of numerous books, most recently Poet in Andalucía; Love and Strange Horses, winner of the 2011 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award; and the W.W. Norton landmark anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond. Her plays have been produced at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey, London. Her poetry, stories and literary travel articles have appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, the Guardian, the Nation, and other publications. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature 2011, and Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, among other honors.

Kayhan Irani was born in Bombay, India and was raised on the mean streets of Queens, NYC. She is an Emmy award winner, a Fulbright Fellow and a Theater of the Oppressed trainer.  Kayhan loves playing theater games.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo was born in Havana in 1971 and came to the US in March 2013. In Cuba he published the narratives Collage karaoke (2001), Empezar de cero  (2001), Ipatrias (2005) and Mi nombre es William Saroyan (2006). His novel, Boring Home, was censored by the Letras Cubanas publishing house in 2009 and then published by Garamond (Paris, 2009) and El Nacional (Caracas, 2013). In Cuba he was an independent journalist and photographer. He is the webmaster of the blogs Lunes de Postrevolución and Boring Home Utopics and the founding editor of the magazine Voces. He contributes columns to Diario de Cuba (Madrid, Spain), Sampsonia Way (Pittsburgh, Penn.), and El Nacional (Caracas). In 2014 OR Books published his anthology of new Cuban narrative writing, Cuba in Splinters.  He is a visiting fellow at Brown University for the current academic year. Restless Books will publish his book of photographs and essays, Abandoned Havana, this October.

A theatre director is beaten and stabbed to death in front of his apartment. Another is shot to death in front of his wife and child. A filmmaker is kidnapped, his fingers cut off, and he’s left to bleed along the roadside. A radio DJ wakes to see his car in flames. A writer comes home to a house drenched in kerosene. A dancer is raped. A performance artist is kidnapped and beaten. A singer is imprisoned for years. A television comedian is kidnapped, threatened and told to never work again or be killed. These are real cases of artists whose artwork speaks truth to power and upholds social justice.

Shall we measure the work of these artists by the number of people in their audiences, how many workshops they have given or how much turnover their artistic output has generated, directly or indirectly, to the ‘evening economy’ of the city? Can these standardized indicators capture the depth or long term effect of thought-provoking artistic interventions in highly charged public and political contexts?

We are living in a period of measurement by economic indicators that define financial and legal support. The arts sector has continuously baulked at submitting its ‘intrinsic values’ to market measures, even if it has been tempting to play the risky game of citing urban regeneration and ‘creative’ economic development as benefits.

Today, we believe that public and private financial support ought to be awarded on the basis of objective criteria that confirm an (often elusive) idea of quality. The distribution of money must be accountable to taxpayers and donors. Subjective choice here is suspect, yet evaluation concepts have been offered, argued, and contested with no clear conclusion. Are we hell-bent on finding the perfect means of objectively assessing artistic quality, aesthetic delight, taste, and the impact of thought on human development?

Evaluating the impact of art and cultural activity is tough already. Throwing in human rights and free speech complicates the issue. Support for human rights defenders who confront governments, civil or religious groups is justified by international law. But how do we evaluate arts practices that raise awareness of universal rights or individual identities in situations where they are denied?  Egyptian writer Alaa Al-Aswany writes, “My father told me his legacy to me was prison cells. My legacy to my son will be prison cells.” On what ‘impact measures’ are artists risking their lives?

More research is needed on alternative methods to analyse fields that resist economic-based measurement. We need to describe the real impact of supporting artists and cultural communicators whose politically or socially charged work places them into the crosshairs of repressive regimes intent on quashing perspectives differing from their own. If numbers-driven criteria can be supplanted by deeper, more long-term analysis, donors can feel confident supporting such work.

Some researchers are trying to explain what happens in circumstances where traditional quantity measures are not the most meaningful indicators. In arecent article, Dr. Patrycja Kaszynska dissects “the difficult relationship between cultural value, economics and the problem of measurement and evaluation.” She concludes that a major problem is the assumption that a natural hierarchy of disciplines places economics on top, as the final arbiter of all other disciplines: a hierarchy, which is not accepted by many, and is accompanied by “the fear of flattening all expressions of value into a single register.”

Regarding human rights, Johannes Thoolen adds, “ The first problem of assessment is that common to all human rights advocacy work, namely the difficulty of measuring and establishing a causal link between a particular intervention and an outcome…. assessing advocacy for individual cases is the least developed.”

Clearly, the current means of valuing art that upholds social justice is inadequate. There must be a more comprehensive method that brings together different disciplines as well as value systems and objectives.

freeDimensional (fD) is one of a very few NGOs and non-profit associations working at the intersection of arts and human rights. Since 2006, fD has supported artists and culture workers whose artistic work presents alternatives, challenges the status quo, a government line, or fundamentalist views. These cultural communicators may be threatened, their economic livelihood denied; they and their families can be physically harmed, imprisoned, or worse. fD recognizes them as doing the work of human rights defenders, identifies shelters in artists residencies, and develops artists’ safety networks in high risk regions.

But non-profits such as fD are mired in the current evaluation stalemate, pressed by funders to demonstrate impact in an interdisciplinary area comprising sectors bogged down by lack of adequate evaluation methodologies.

There is light at the end of the tunnel. At the upcoming International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR) in Hildesheim, Germany, fD will call out to universities and researchers interested in tackling these issues, identifying best practices and exploring alternative methods to describe the impact of supporting artists whose work defends human rights and social justice.

The challenge is about measuring the impact of work that influences thought, poses a question to engrained perspectives, and may take years or even generations to reach a concrete tipping point. Rebecca Solnit finds, “many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they encounter it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience.”

Let’s work across disciplines – cultural workers, human rights workers, universities, and researchers – to share information, build upon lessons learned, and ultimately find ways to measure impact and convince potential legal and financial supporters. It is important to uncover the ripple effects of these artists’ courageous behaviour and in doing so, learn how to better support, defend, and protect those who undertake it, at great risk to their own safety.

Mary Ann DeVlieg

http://www.worldpolicy.org/blog/2014/07/09/analyzing-art-resistance

– keep messages short with simple message wishing El Haqed well and that he will soon be free.
– no political or religious comment or images ( tourist cards are appreciated….)
– Give return address/email.

Send to:

 Mouad Belghouate

Prison local Oukacha 

Quartier Oukacha 

20 580 Casablanca, Morocco 

The number of civilians so far killed by drones remains a matter of intense debate, but the worry among campaigners is that this kind of warfare makes killing unpleasantly easy. Operators have compared the experience with playing a computer game, and a Rolling Stone article in 2012 recorded their use of the term “bug splat” to describe the mess on the ground that killing someone leaves behind. The artists have chosen #NotABugSplat as the project’s name.

The intention now is that any drone operator who looks down through their camera and sees this village will have reason to think twice. In their own words, the artists hope the image “will create empathy and introspection amongst drone operators, and will create dialogue amongst policy makers, eventually leading to decisions that will save innocent lives”.

Read the full article here:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/apr/07/artists-give-human-face-drones-bug-splat-pakistan

How Green Was My Valley opens April 3 at Whitebox Art Center and runs through April 27, 2014.

In 2005, ArtPalestine International was formed to promote Palestinian artists in the US, offering them a visible, public platform through exhibitions and programming. As a dispersed and dislocated population, Palestinians navigate myriad challenges, whether it’s deep restrictions on mobility and uncertainty about statehood in the West Bank and Gaza or finding cultural identity in the diaspora.

How Green Was My Valley, an exhibition presented by ArtPalestine International and Whitebox Art Center, highlights the experience of a new generation of Palestinian artists.  Engaging international shifts that have merged contemporary art practices with eco-activism, urbanism, documentary filmmaking, and archival methods, How Green Was My Valley brings together 15 Palestinian artists from the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, and the diaspora for the first time in New York, documenting personal narratives from across the globe.st Bank and Gaza or finding cultural identity in the diaspora.

Image credit: Tarek  al Ghoussein, C Series, 2007. Archival digital print . Courtesy of  Taymour Grahne Gallery

See the whole article and a video here : http://hyperallergic.com/117587/a-new-generation-of-palestinian-artists-converges-in-new-york/

March 13, 14, &15

John Jay College of Criminal Justice
524 West 59th. Street New York, NY, 10019

Independent Artists Projects, NYC

Chaw Ei Thein (Burma/NYC) “Living Monuments.” With respondent Emily Hue.

Kymbali Craig and Samuel Encarnacion (Bailey’s Café, Brooklyn, NY,) “Skin Deep, Skin Tight.”

Racquel De Loyola (Philippines,) “Blinded.”

Margit Edwards and Seth Baumrin (NYC) “Subpoetics – raw material, roots, and ethnodramaturgy.”

Vernice Miller, Soraya Broukheim, and Winsome Brown (A Laboratory for Actor Training, Brooklyn, NY) “Experimental Theatre and Social Transformation.”

Performance and Justice: Representing Dangerous Truths is an interdisciplinary symposium on the interplay between broad definitions of performance and justice. The project brings together expertise in the performing arts, humanities, and social sciences.

At John Jay College, the term “justice”now includes definitions beyond the “criminal,” to encompass the academic, cultural, economic, environmental, international, legal, moral, poetic, political, racial, religious, social, and theoretical. For this project, we take “performance” to include film, dance, performance art, and theatre. The intersections between performance and justice are characterized by sites of social activism that lend themselves to sociological readings and analyses. Thus the symposium interrogates the ways justice is construed and constructed in various contemporary works of art and through the deployment of performance-based work in various traditional and non-traditional spaces.  The social justice impact of such art is not limited to academia, but extends itself to the court-room, home, prison, streets, and the democratic project at large. Through the lens of dramaturgy as is understood in both the social sciences and performing arts, the symposium explores theoretical and practice-based negotiations of justice as informed by artists’ prerogatives and the work of social activists.

http://johnjay.jjay.cuny.edu/performancejusticesymposium/

COL:LAB participants included representatives from Residency Unlimited, Queens Museum of Art, Theatre Without Borders, Musagetes Foundation, Global Arts Corps, Arts Action Research, Zero Capital Arts, Project Reach NYC, Doen Foundation, Arquetopia Art Space,  Slought Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Center for Art and Thought, Open Society Foundation, J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, Drosos Foundation, The New School’s Thematic Interdisciplinary Program, Breuninger Foundation, as well as independent cultural practioners working widely in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America.

We would like to thank all participants for contributing their invaluable experience and expertise to a robust, inspiring, and productive program. We look forward to growing these partnerships in the future and fortifying the global movement to defend free artistic and cultural expression as a basic human right. Special thanks to the Breuninger Foundation for their continued support and generous hosting of fD’s annual Wasan Island meeting.

Photo courtesy of Volker Hann

The controversial author was due to speak about his early work Midnight’s Children at India’s biggest literary festival, which began on Friday, though influential Muslim cheap oakley sunglasses clerics had protested his participation, BBC News reported.

“I have now been informed by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to ‘eliminate’ me,” Rushdie said in a statement that was read out at the festival.

The author’s controversial 1988 book The Satanic Verses is still banned in India, and it incited Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruohollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his execution, according to The Guardian. The threat caused the author — who was born in India but has lived in Britain for most of his life — to remain in hiding for many years.

Rushdie has visited India privately several times, and attended the Jaipur literary festival in 2007.

Author and festival organizer William Dalrymple called Rushdie’s decision to stay away from the festival “a great tragedy,” BBC reported. Rushdie will speak via video conference http://www.gooakley.com/ instead, according to reports.

On Jan. 10, Darul Uloom Deoband, a leading Islamic seminary in India, called on the government to block Rushdie’s visa as he “had annoyed the religious sentiments of Muslims in the past,” according to the BBC.

The literary festival, in which over 250 authors will be participating, began as scheduled on Friday, according to the BBC. Participants include Michael Ondaatje and Ben Okri, playwright Tom Stoppard, journalists David Remnick and Philip Gourevitch and TV host Oprah Winfrey.

Tens of thousands of people are expected to attend the festival.

The festival’s producer, Sanjoy Roy, said there was a Oakley Sunglasses cheap need in India “to question … why we continue as a nation to succumb to one pressure or another.”

“This is a huge problem for Indian democracy,” he told The Guardian.

Text reposted from Globalpost.com. Image taken from Vanityfair.com

Organized by the Triangle Network, the conference featured representatives of arts and cultural networks and organizations from around the world. Topics covered include: the principles and http://www.raybani.com/ ethics that guide cultural networks, the use of network practices in developing programs, why artists use and create networks, the environments in which networks develop and operate, support systems and challenges faced by networks, and approaches to supporting artists and grassroots initiatives.

fD founder Todd Lester presented on his experiences and insights into the role of networks in connecting artists and organizations:

‘When considering the network as institutional form, it is freeing to understand that contemporary notions of sustainability are often bound by the more rigid institutional form of non-profit (or NGO) against which the horizontal network is already an evolving juxtaposition. We must look at networks both as larger, formal structures as well as horizontal, ad hoc set-ups, such as collectives and community projects that artists create and join intuitively, and how each learn from the other.’

For more information and highlights from the conference, visit:

http://www.thetriangleconference.org/