Not a gimmick, a punchline, examines the making of Reality TV. Why are we all obsessing over @tommiee_ from love and hip-hop? Why does the US military hire reality TV producers to analyze Air Force surveillance footage? Why is it called reality TV when it’s scripted? How do you create drama and intimacy in reality TV? What do Cardi B, Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian share in common besides being celebrities? What’s up with this new kind of catharsis?
CHRISTELLE OYIRI (b. Nogent-sur-Marne, 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Paris: she is a sound artist and DJ as well as a performer. Her work highlights forgotten mythologies, the subtle interstices between memory and alienation, DIY culture and technology. Her work has been exhibited in France: from Lafayette Anticipations to Frac Lorraine (2019) and la Gaité Lyrique (2018), and internationally at Espace Arlaud (2018) in Lausanne, HEK Basel (2019) and Auto Italia South East (2019) in London.
If the variety show exhibits symptoms of social conditionings, can its participants distance themselves from the symptoms? How can a nation-state be seen as land when settler/post/decolonial critique’s applications are questionable? How do we speak about our own ethnicity when the doors behind us remain closed, and with walls around each of us? One participant’s provocation, “Does China really exist?” is brought into a dialogical structure that asks, “Can fear be cute?” Discussions around ethnicity are pumped into our air hammers and ghostly encounters are channeled across lifetimes, painted in smoke and fire.
Shen Xin (b. 1990, Chengdu) creates moving image installations and performances that empower alternative histories, relations, and potentials between individuals and nation-states. They seek to create affirmative spaces of belonging that embrace polyphonic narratives and identities. Shen Xin’s most recent work, Brine Lake (A New Body), will have its world premiere in Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, Gwangju Biennale (2021), and its North American premiere in their first US museum solo exhibition at Walker Art Center (2021). Shen Xin has been a visiting artist at numerous institutions including, Slade School of Fine Art, Goldsmiths University London, University of Connecticut, and Newcastle University. They received the BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017) and held the Rijksakademie residency in Amsterdam (2018-19). Shen Xin practice on Miní Sóta Makhóčhe, the land of the Dakhóta Oyáte, as well as in London, UK
Dr. You Mi is a curator, researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Her long-term research and curatorial projects spin between the two extremes of the ancient and futuristic. She works with the Silk Road as a figuration for deep-time, deep-space nomadic imageries and old and new networks/technologies. Under this rubric, she has curated programs at Asian Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016), and with Binna Choi, she is co-steering a research/curatorial project “Unmapping Eurasia” (2018-2021). At the same time, her interests in politics around technology and futures led her to work on “actionable speculations”, articulated in the exhibition, workshops and sci-fi-a-thon “Sci-(no)-Fi” at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (2019), as well as in her function as chair of committee on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational political NGO Common Action Forum. She is one of the curators of the 13thShanghai Biennale (2020-2021).
Her academic interests are in media theory and performance philosophy, science and technology studies, as well as new and historical materialism. She is fellow of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), member of the Academy of Arts of the World(Cologne), and serves as director of Arthub (Shanghai) and advisor to Institute for Provocation(Beijing).
Born and raised in Changchun, China, Wang Tuo currently lives and works in Beijing. Through his performative manipulation and intervention in intellectual legacies such as literature and historical narrative, Wang Tuo employs mediums of film, painting and performance to examine the unreliable relationship between the contemporary human status, myth and cultural archive. Wang’s practice also seeks to develop a discourse on how present ideology is derived from its historical context continues to adapt to changing condition.
Wang has recent solo shows at Present Company, New York, Salt Project, Beijing, Taikang Space, Beijing, and recent group shows at Power Station of Art, Shanghai, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Zarya Center for Contemporary Art, Vladivostok, OCAT, Shenzhen & Shanghai, How Art Museum, Shanghai, Queens Museum, New York, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung.
Wang Tuo was an Artist in Residence at the Queens Museum, New York from 2015 to 2017. He won the China Top Shorts Award and the Outstanding Art Exploration Award for Chinese Short Films in Beijing International Short Film Festival 2018. Wang Tuo is the winner of the Three Shadows Photography Award 2018 and the Youth Contemporary Art Wuzhen Award 2019. He was awarded a research residency at KADIST San Francisco 2020. In 2021, Wang Tuo will have his first institutional survey at UCCA Beijing.
Zairong Xiang is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Associate Director of Art of Duke Kunshan University. He is author of Queer Ancient Way: A Decolonial Exploration (punctum books, 2018). He was chief curator of the “minor cosmopolitan weekend” at the HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2018), and editor of its catalogue minor cosmopolitan: Thinking Art, Politics and the Universe Together Otherwise (Diaphanes 2020). As a member of the Hyperimage Group, he has co-curated the 2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial. He is working on two projects, respectively dealing with the concepts of “transdualism” and “counterfeit” in the Global South especially Latin America and China. He was Fellow at the ICI-Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (2014 – 2016) and postdoctoral fellow of the DFG Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms at Potsdam University (2016-2020). All his writings can be read here: www.xiangzairong.com
Are you still looking for love? Are you between the years 2000 and 2021? Are you ready for the algorithm to shape your desire? not/nowhere presents Pratibha Parmar’s Wavelengths (2000) alongside research by Jennifer Martin.
not/nowhere (n/n) is an artists’ workers cooperative. Black and POC-led and East-London based, we provide training in skills and techniques for film, audio, performance and writing. Our mission is to ensure that local artists who use new media in their work can access film and media equipment, and acquire the training to use these machines creatively. We are committed to Black and POC artists exploring new possibilities for owning the means of production of our work and finding sustainability in our practice. not/nowhere’s additional focus is to provide infrastructural support for artists working in all mediums, and enfranchise people living or working in London to take pleasure in expressing themselves creatively.
Jennifer Martin is an artist filmmaker, and writer based in London. Her work and research explore the performativity of belonging and instability of images; these interests manifest in a mix of narrative and experimental pieces. Martin has exhibited and screened work in the UK and abroad with recent solo exhibitions and commissions at Primary (Nottingham), Turf Projects (London), and Cypher BILLBOARDS (London).
Writer | Director | Producer Pratibha Parmar has directed numerous award-winning films for BBC, Channel 4, ITVS, PBS and European broadcaster. Her work has also had theatrical distribution. Her credits include ALICE WALKER: BEAUTY IN TRUTH, a feature length documentary on the life of Pulitzer Prize winning author of THE COLOR PURPLE and includes interviews with Steven Spielberg, Danny Glover and Quincy Jones. Recognized as a pioneering filmmaker, Pratibha directed the ground breaking film KHUSH, one of the first films to give visibility to and highlight the experiences of LGBT people in India. Pratibha made her debut as a narrative director with her award-winning romantic comedy, NINA’S HEAVENLY DELIGHTS.
In 2019 Pratibha made her US debut as a director of scripted television when she was invited by Ava DuVernay to direct episode 12 of Season 4 of QUEEN SUGAR, executive produced by Ava DuVernay & Oprah Winfrey for OWN/Warner Brothers.In 2020, Pratibha was selected as part of NBC’s pioneering Female Forward project, designed to promote female directors in the world of scripted television drama.
Pratibha is currently in post-production on MY NAME IS ANDREA, a long form, hybrid doc, featuring Amandla Stenberg, Soko, Ashley Judd, Andrea Riseborough and Christine Lahti. The Executive Producers are: Regina K Scully, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Simon Kilmurry, V (formerly Eve Ensler) & Gloria Steinem. The film is supported by the Sundance Documentary Fund, Fork Films & Artemis Rising.
A globally recognised filmmaker and human rights activist Pratibha’s films, WARRIOR MARKS and KHUSH helped gain much needed rights for women and girls as well as contributing to the visibility of marginalized LGBT communities. Her accomplishments have been recognized with multiple awards. In 2017 Pratibha received the ICON award presented by Bagari London Indian Film Festival in Association with the British Film Institute for Outstanding Contribution to Indian and World Cinema. In 2016 Pratibha was included in the BBC’s list of 100 inspirational and influential women. Pratibha is the proud recipient of the Frameline Film Festival Award, presented to an individual who has made a significant and outstanding contribution to lesbian and gay media.
Pratibha Parmar was invited to be a Visiting Artist at Stanford University and has also taught film in her capacity as a Professor in the Film Program at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America and a member of Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
This episode of Transmissions is curated by Yazan Khalili who lives and works in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, visual artist, educator, and cultural producer. He is co-founder of Radio Alhara.
Sometimes but especially during our current time, places and images have collided and became one. The image is the place, and the place is an image. The 5 videos by Palestinian artists included within “Place? What Place? I don’t see a place here… ” are asking, contemplating, and playing with this confusion between place and image. They inhabit one and run away from the other. They jump between what they are, videos on a screen, to claiming to be the only possible places where social and political events can occur. Are these images of places? Or are they places that exist only in images? Do these questions matter anymore?
Noor Abed (b.1988 Jerusalem) works at the intersection of performance, media and film, a process of image making that is intertwined with forms of movement and choreography.
Abed attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York in 2015-16. She holds an MFA in Photography and Media from California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, and a BA from the International Academy of Arts – Palestine.
Noor Abuarafeh (b.1986), based between Jerusalem and Cairo, She works primarily with video, performance, publications, and video installation. Her work addresses the memory, history, archive, and the possibilities of tracing absence. Abuarafeh’s video and performances are text based that questions the complexity of history, how is it shaped, constructed, made, perceived, visualized and understood. And how all these elements are related to fact and fiction.
Noor recently participated In Berlin Biennale (2020), Sharjah Biennale13 (2017), Off-Binnial – Gaudipolis, Budapest (2017), Qalandia International, Jerusalem (2018), In 2019 she had her first solo show “The Moon is a Sun Returning as a Ghost” in Jerusalem that is curated by Lara Khaldi.
Yazan Khalili lives and works in and out of Palestine. He is an architect, visual artist, educator, and cultural producer. He is co-founder of Radio Alhara. His works have been exhibited in several major solo and collective exhibitions, including at KW, Berlin (2020); MoCA-Toronto (2020); New Photography, MoMA (2018). Currently he is a Phd candidate at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, a guest artist resident at Rijksakademie, and the co-chair of photography discipline at the MFA program at Bard, NY.
Dina Mimi (B.1994, Jerusalem) is a visual artist Her practice is multifaceted and uses video, sound, performance, and text. Dina has been researching issues and subjects regarding the body and death in the public sphere, and notions of visibility and invisibility in the relationship of archaeology to the object, and the museum to death. She has also been researching protest as a performance. Dina obtained her Bachelor’s degree from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Palestine in 2016, and MFA degree in art in the public sphere from ECAV (École cantonal d’art du Valais) in Switzerland in 2018 and currently at De Ateliers Residency in Amsterdam.
Amani Yacoub
Amani Yacoub (b.1991) is an artist and cultural practitioner based in Ramallah. She is agraduate of the International Academy of Art Palestine and more recently the Homeworks Academy 2020. She has worked at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, and was recently awarded a grant from AFAC for Camouflaged Narratives.
Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist who lives in London. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, film and screenwriting for TV, it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, and in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally and collaboration remains a fundamental principle of her expansive practice. Recent solo exhibitions include Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2020), Tate Britain, London (2019–20) and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016). In 2018, she was the Writer-In-Residence at Whitechapel Gallery, London and she has a forthcoming Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2021). Al-Maria was the co-curator of the Serpentine Miracle Marathon in 2016, participated in the 2014 Extinction and 2015 Transformation Marathons and her films have been screening widely at Serpentine Cinemas and symposia, most recently as part of the General Ecology programme. taraxos is Al-Maria’s first public artwork.
Tosh Basco is a movement-based performance artist whose work operates through improvisation as a mode of survival and world building in the liminal, performative space where becoming meets representation. Adamant about the visceral experience of live visual performance, she makes a case for how the movement of form can communicate what remains impenetrable in images, and through language. Her performances have been presented at the Gropius Bau, the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, MOCA Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, ICA London, and Berghain. Tosh Basco has toured with Mykki Blanco, and collaborated with Korakrit Arunanondchai and Wu Tsang, as well as the streetwear label Hood By Air.
Patrick Belaga (b. 1991) is a cellist and composer whose work falls under the umbrella of contemporary classical music. His work heavily utilizes improvisation with influences from Western classical, Middle Eastern classical, Jazz and Folk traditions. He has performed comissioned and original work at museums/galleries and theaters internationally, including MOCA (Los Angeles), EMPAC (New York), The Getty (Los Angeles), Migros Museum (Zurich), Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm), Spring Workshop (Hong Kong), Parcours (Basel, Switzerlandand), SFMoMa (San Francisco), and Donaufestival (Krems, Austria). In addition to his ongoing performance collaboration, ‘Moved by the Motion’, with artists boychild and Wu Tsang, he has also recently worked with artists Josh Johnson, Jacolby Satterwhite and Nick Weiss, Ligia Lewis, Thibault Lac, Jeremy O. Harris, Kai Kight; and recording artists Asma Maroof, Ry X, Lafawndah, and Ioanna Gika. Recent compositional work also includes the original score for the Netflix documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two, documentary Wig on HBO, and several soon to be released projects.
Kelton Campos Fausto is a multidisciplinary, non-binary artist. They produce and create images in the visual languages of video, painting, and performance. They are currently interested in the construction of spiritual and cosmological scenes that propose living spaces and possibilities of health based on other ways of comprihending reality and the body. Campos Fausto proposes scenes that discuss political and social aspects of their own reality based on the narrative of metaphysical characters from non-western realities. They participated in a group show, Between Rivers, Waterfalls and the Deepest Sea, at M+B Gallery, Los Angeles (2021).
Born in Bagé, Brazil, now living in Berlin, Enantios Dromos is a model, artist and image-maker. Using a VHS camera to capture his unique perspective on the world around him as the landscape changes, Dromos’s work is imbued by his unique perspective on the world.
Electronic musician Asma Maroof’s sonic fascinations are rooted deep within her upbringing. Born outside of Washington DC to Indian parents who worked at NASA, her father played classic Bollywood cassettes on car rides, while her mother sang Lata Mangeshkar hits in their living room. Music was always present in her home, and along with her own traditions, Hip-hop, R&B, as well as Baltimore club she heard on nearby station 92.3 made up a large part of her makeup. Moving to Chicago to study film at SAIC, she was introduced to house music, Sun Ra, and improvisation, and she started making sounds with cheap gear. One day on her way home from school, found an old CDJ for $5 at a garage sale, obsessively using it to manipulate sounds. These early experiments eventually led her down the path to DJing and producing, and trying to make sense of it all.
After graduating and relocating to Los Angeles, she began recording live improvisations and re-editing them with Daniel Pineda under the name Nguzunguzu, Over the last decade, the two have toured the world multiple times, released 5 EPs of super influential left-field club music., and even DJed the MTV VMAs. Producing and playing solo as Asmara, she’s played prestigious institutions such as the Sydney Opera House and the Whitney, and is an alumni of the infamous Red Bull Music Academy. She also was M.I.A.s tour DJ, and co-produced her 2010 mixtape Vicki Leekx. Her sensual yet somber debut EP Let Ting Go embodies her adventurous relationship with sound, bridging elegant Indian strings and R&B sparkles with raw underworld drum patterns. Working with many vocalists, she’s especially worked closely with Kelela, producing tracks on all her releases and co-producing her “Take Me a_Part, the Remixes” project.
While she has many accomplishments as a DJ, Asma’s soundtracks have graced Louis Vuitton and Kenzo runway shows, commercials for Nike and Pantene Pro V, and Julia Meltzer’s documentary Dayla’s Other Country. With filmmaker and frequent collaborator Wu Tsang, she’s scored Into a Space of Love, a piece on house music in NYC, and her short film One Emerging From a Point of View. Asma now lives in Switzerland to work closely with Wu, Boychild, and Josh Johnson on soundscapes for theater at Schauspielhaus Zurich, marking a pivotal point in her career as a composer. Mesmerized by the connections sound makes internally, externally, and socially, she continues to explore its powerful storytelling capabilities, both behind the decks and on screen.
Fred Moten is a cultural theorist and poet creating new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. In his theoretical and critical writing on visual culture, poetics, music, and performance, Moten seeks to move beyond normative categories of analysis, grounded in Western philosophical traditions, that do not account for the Black experience. He is developing a new mode of aesthetic inquiry wherein the conditions of being Black play a central role.
Fred Moten received an AB (1984) from Harvard University and a PhD (1994) from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 2017, he has served as a professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He has taught previously at the University of California at Riverside, Duke University, and the University of Iowa. Moten’s additional publications include All That Beauty (2019), The Service Porch (2016), The Little Edges (2015), B Jenkins (2010), and Hughson’s Tavern (2009); and he is co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013).
Moten lives in New York with his partner and long-term intellectual collaborator, Laura Harris, and their children, Lorenzo and Julian.
Matthew Stone, born in 1982 in London, is an artist that works across a number of different disciplines including painting, sculpture, photography and performance.
Stone began his career as a leading influencer in a number of counter-cultural movements in London. He was instrumental in developing the South London art collective !WOWOW! as well as a central figure in the shift of sub-cultural understanding that came to re-imagine and later define areas of the East End of London during the mid 00’s.
The artist has been part of a number of critically acclaimed solo and group shows both nationally and internationally. In the United Kingdom he has shown at Tate Britain, the ICA and the Royal Academy of Art, and internationally at the Marrakech Biennale, Fiorucci Foundation and Viafarini, Milan. Stone has performed recent works at the Ny Glyptotek, Copenhagen and at the 2013 and 2014 editions of Art Basel Miami Beach.
Wu Tsang is a filmmaker and performance artist who combines documentary and narrative techniques with fantastical detours into the imaginary in works that explore hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself. Tsang re-imagines racialized, gendered representations beyond the visible frame to encompass the multiple and shifting perspectives through which we experience the social realm.
SEASON 3 of TRANSMISSIONS will run as six episodes screening once per month on Wednesday at 9pm GMT/BST on Transmissions TV. Each artist included in TRANSMISSIONS is paid a fee in return for their contribution. In some instances, artists have waived their fee in order to donate to a charity of their choice. With a sense of community, all the money used to pay artists in Season Three has been kindly donated by established institutions and commercially stable artists.
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