How do our own bodies react to, resist, and subvert the city’s imposed geographic arteries, institutions, and invisible borders? Participants joined artist Daniel Bejar aboard a co-opted double decker bus for an alternative participatory tour of Williamsburg’s gerrymandered arteries, an extension of his current work, “RE-districting” (featured in The Drawing Center exhibition, Marginalia), which illuminates gerrymandered Congressional and State Senate districts through site-specific walks with a GPS device.
Multidisciplinary performance artists Morgan Bassichis and Amy Khoshbin joined on board as we explored the streets that pump political influence through the neighborhood and our bodies via sound, song, and speech.
Daniel Bejar is an artist whose work considers and critiques the representation of history, place, and the self within the structures of power encompassing our physical and digital worlds. Bejar is currently a 2016-17 Artist-in-Residence in the Mana Residencies program at Mana Contemporary, and participating in The Drawing Center’s 2016-17 Open Sessions Program. He is also a 2015 fellow in Interdisciplinary Work from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a 2014 recipient of a Franklin Furnace Grant, and a 2013 recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Visual Arts Grant. Bejar’s work has been featured in publications such as the New Yorker, Harpers Bazaar HK, Magazine B, and Hyperallergic, among others.
His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is currently in the exhibition Marginalia at The Drawing Center, New York. Additional exhibition venues include Brooklyn Museum; Espai-d’art Contemporani de Castello, Spain; El Museo Del Barrio; SITE Santa Fe; Artnews Projects, Berlin; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Morgan Bassichis lives in New York and performs live comedic stories that explore history, mysticism, and just like, being alive. Morgan’s work has been featured at MoMA PS1 as part of the 2015 Greater New York exhibition, as well as at Artists Space, Dixon Place, the New Museum, PARTICIPANT INC, Poetry Project, and the Whitney Museum. Morgan’s essays on queer politics have appeared in the Radical History Review, Captive Genders, and other edited volumes. Morgan was a 2015 Process Space Artist with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a 2015 Art Matters grantee. Morgan’s shows have been described as “out there” (by Morgan’s mother) and “super intense” (by Morgan).
Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist merging performance, video, collage, costume and sound to examine our individual and collective compulsion to create, transform, and sometimes destroy the stories of who we are and who we think we should be. She produces media and mythologies using humor and a handmade aesthetic to throw a counterpunch at the high-definition, profit-generating codes and signals that American audiences are trained and accustomed to consuming. She has shown her solo and collaborative work at venues such as Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Mana Contemporary, NURTUREart, National Sawdust, Abrons Arts Center, The Invisible Dog Arts Center, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest. She is currently in residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency 2014-17, and has completed residencies at The Watermill Center, Mana Contemporary, where she curated a group of 12 artists for the BSMT Residency, Banff Centre for the Arts, Team Effort! in Glasgow, Scotland, and at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has received a Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant and is on Creative Capital’s On Our Radar for her recent project, The Myth of Layla. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Tina Barney, and poets Anne Carson and Bob Currie among others.
