The New School/Vera List Center
University Center, Starr Foundation Hall
63 Fifth Avenue
New York City

Friday, September 20, 6:30-8pm
Saturday, September 21, 1:30-5pm, followed by reception

Admission is free but advance registration is requested HERE.

Over the past year, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics has partnered with ARTICLE19, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the New York Peace Institute, and Weeksville Heritage Center to address the perennially contested right to free speech. The effort stems from an invitation by artist and filmmaker Amar Kanwar, and his artwork, Such a Morning (2017), which can be seen as an allegory for retreating into darkness to consider ideas and realities that require profound reorientation. In the context of today's fraught political climate in the U.S. and internationally, the partner organizations came together to present public seminars from each of their particular perspectives as well as those of artists, writers, and poets. This two-day Closing Convening assembles both the partners in this project as well as presenters from the original seminars to engage in a public discussion of where this in-depth series of conversations has led us.

The Closing Convening is organized around a letter that the professor featured in Such a Morning pens. Letter number 7 suggests three phases to create a curriculum for studies into darkness. The first, Arrival and Anticipation, addresses legal and psychological frameworks of individual bodies, and the body politic, in relationship to freedom of speech. It includes formative uses of free speech ranging from poetry to manifestoes, addresses physical space as a site of expression and invites imagining how we might make ready or prepare for desired futures. Then comes Order and Disintegration, and here existing structures and their logics are examined alongside strategies for interruption and subversion. Finally, Silence and Transformation, the state wherein withdrawal and silence create a generative space for thinking and future action, where transformation might be possible.

The Closing Convening kicks off on Friday evening with this final state, Silence and Transformation. Renowned artist Amar Kanwar provides a reflection on the seminars and their meanings, and distinguished poet and language activist Nathalie Diaz reads from her work.

On Saturday, the afternoon begins with a roundtable discussion including all the partner organizations, moderated by Svetlana Mintcheva, programs director at NCAC. Next, Arrival and Anticipation features presentations by poet and criminal defense lawyer Vanessa Place and artist Shawné Michaelain Holloway followed by responses by cultural historian Kazembe Balagun and sociologist Aleksandra Wagner. Artist and educator Kameelah Janan Rasheed contemplates Order and Disintegration, with responses by artist Chloe Bass and writer and critic Aruna D'Souza. Each discussion is followed by a Q & A.

The Convening closes with "In The Mouth of This Dragon," a newly commissioned sound work and performance by Mendi and Keith Obadike, featuring the writings of Audrey Lorde. A reception will follow.