New Normal / Old Normal
Performance starts at 7pm, Doors open at 6:30pm
Panel Discussions at 7:45pm or 20 min after the performance ends.
Admission 10 – $25 sliding scale, available on Eventbrite.
(Recommended Member $15, Students $10)
NOTAFLOF (no one turned away for lack of funds)
Kala Art Institute is excited to present New Normal / Old Normal, a performance and panel discussion on Thursday, September 6 at 7pm. Artist Christy Chan will present a re-staging of her performance The Long Distance Call followed by the panel discussion Making Art in the Age of #45.
Expanding on her own personal experiences and interactions with KKK members during her childhood growing up in rural Virginia, Chan presents The Long Distance Call, a re-enactment of phone calls between Chan and Miss. Anne, a KKK seamstress in Alabama. During the phone calls, Chan allowed Miss. Anne to believe she was an ethnically white customer in order to convince her to fabricate a Klan robe for her video work. Their unsettling yet banal phone calls tell the story of an unexpected interaction between two women, from trust gained to the eventual abrupt end of their communications. The Long Distance Call is performed by Catherine Lerza and Christy Chan.
The original phone calls took place in 2013 and the re-enactment was first performed in San Francisco at Southern Exposure in 2015, two years before the Trump administration took office and the KKK and extreme right became politically emboldened for the first time since the 1970’s.
Following The Long Distance Call, Kala will present Making art in the age of #45, a panel discussion with Ryanaustin Dennis (founder, co-director of The Black Aesthetic), Guillermo Galindo (composer, sonic architect, performance and visual artist), Christy Chan (artist), Favianna Rodriguez (artist) and Dorothy Santos (writer, editor, and curator). Panelists will explore how the role of the arts and artists working in race, class and political issues has evolved since Trump’s inauguration. The panel moderator is Bay Area comedian Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, winner of the Liz Carpenter award for political humor (previously awarded to Samantha Bee) and hosts The Moth in San Francisco.
Tickets are $10-25 sliding scale and available on Eventbrite.
Christy Chan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland and working primarily in video, installation, performance and oral storytelling. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Kala Art Institute, Southern Exposure, Root Division, SOMarts, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and in storytelling venues such as NPR. She has been awarded residencies and support from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, Project 387, Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts and more. Chan holds an M.A. in Communication Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. Based on real-life events, Chan’s works draw on her experience growing up in a Southern town with a white nativism movement, an experience that continues to inform her ongoing explorations of race, power, and what it means to be an American.
Founding member of The Black Aesthetic, Ryanaustin Dennis is an Oakland based curator/artist/writer. His practice is concerned with how 20th and 21st century experimental performance, film, and writing histories are shaped by the metaphysics of blackness. He has done curatorial work for E.M. Wolfman Bookstore, Betti Ono, Eastside Arts Alliance, and Kadist. He is currently a Southern Exposure Curatorial Council Fellow and is working a new book of poems entitled “How to Bend…”
Guillermo Galindo’s artistic practice emerges from the crossroads between sound, sight and performance and includes everything from orchestral compositions, instrumental works and opera, to sculpture, visual arts, computer interaction, electro-acoustic music, film making, instrument building, three dimensional installation and live improvisation. Galindo’s graphic scores and three dimensional sculptural cybertotemic sonic objects have been shown at major museums and art biennials in America, Europe, Asia and around the world including documenta14 (2017), Pacific Standard Time (2017) and CTM Festival (2017). His work has been featured on: BBC Outlook (London), Vice Magazine, (London), RTS Switzerland, National Public Radio (U.S.), California Sunday Magazine (U.S), Reforma Newspaper (Mexico) , CNN and the New York Times.
Favianna Rodriguez is a transnational interdisciplinary artist and cultural organizer. Her art and collaborative projects deal with migration, global politics, economic injustice, patriarchy, and interdependence . Rodriguez lectures globally on the power of art, cultural organizing and technology to inspire social change, and leads art workshops at schools around the country. In addition to her fine arts and community work, Rodriguez partners with social movement groups around the world to create art that’s visionary, inspirational, radical and, most importantly, transformational. When Favianna is not making art, she is directing CultureStrike, a national arts organization that engages artists, writers and performers in migrant rights. In 2009, she co-founded Presente.org, a national online organizing network dedicated to the political empowerment of Latino communities.
Dorothy Santos is a Filipina American writer, editor, and curator whose research interests include digital art, computational media, and biotechnology. Born and raised in San Francisco, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Her work appears in art21, Art Practical, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Ars Technica, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. She serves as a co-curator for REFRESH, a curatorial collective in partnership with Eyebeam, and is the program manager for the Processing Foundation.
Event Details
Date: September 6, 2018
Time: 7:00 pm–9:00 pm
Kala Gallery
2990 San Pablo, Berkeley, CA 94702