Key Terms: imagination, humor, detention, home, touch, closeness, culture, connectivity, figments, environment, apocalypse

MEETING MINUTES

In this working group, background became foreground as artists grappled with the inseparable relationship between humankind and where we reside. Themes of climate catastrophe and opposition to (or in the face of) collapse were frequent, and many of the presenters brought a much-needed cross-cultural perspective to issues that are far too easy to reduce by a tendency towards nearsighted parochialism. The group also discussed humor, speculating on why it seems to pop up even in contexts of disaster: is it facilitating art as a coping mechanism, palate cleanser, or as a more digestible means to tackle difficult issues?

Agil Abdullayev started the discussion on the subject of homophobia, which remains a problem in his native Azerbaijan. The jarring persistence of the issue after returning home from studying in the UK was enough to inspire Agil to create “The Pink City,” a ‘promotional video' for a fictitious shelter in which participants can escape reality in favor of an imagined new one. The piece is a touchstone in Agil’s broader practice, which uses a multitude of media to diffract Agil’s Azerbaijani identity through more universal struggles, such as imposed gender roles and class disparity.

Shaghayegh Cyrous spoke next. She recommended “Hindrance” by Mehregan Pezeshki for the After Hope program, because it resonated with her own liminal experience as an Iranian American artist. Being “caught between two countries” can be both disorienting and beautiful. Shaghayegh’s own work “Window to Tehran” summarily expresses this attitude towards cross-cultural expression by positing simultaneous viewing of the sunrise in Tehran and sunset in San Francisco. Her other works “The Sun Will Rise the Next Day” and “The Closest I Could Get to the Sun” follow the solar motif further. In the former, names of Iranian men and women imprisoned for peaceful demonstration are projected into empty space, only to appear when visitors offer their own touch to receive their light in a n empathetic gesture. In the latter, spectators are offered into a spatially-embellished video call between the artist and her mother at home in Iran, hindered in their would-be embrace by the U.S. travel ban policy at the time. Shaghayegh noted of the circumstances that arise ‘after hope,’ that we might think of hope as action. Raising one’s voice, reaching out to a family member one hasn’t seen in nearly a decade, or simply asking questions… both may not be sources of hope so much as they embody the action of hoping worldwide.

Connie Zheng then closed out the discussion with her video piece, “The Lonely Age (Part I).” The enigmatic film features a patchwork of narrative threads, most notably starring a cohort of speculative future tribes of extant humans, scavenging the land for what they believe to be magical seeds washed up in California from a Chinese factory. The “fictional documentary,” as Connie termed it, was designed to explore the difference between rumor and truth, with a preference for the motivating power of belief in an insecure world where knowing anything with conviction seems impossible. Much of her creative inspiration came from being born in China but raised in U.S., and navigating what she saw as two competing systems of propaganda. In “The Lonely Age,” her ensemble cast of characters, all adorned with makeshift costumes, endeavor cooperatively to reveal the coveted seeds – in spite of their many varying motivations for doing so and differing beliefs as to how the (potentially radioactive, potentially magic) seeds originated in the first place. With looming anxieties of ‘contamination’ and environmental catastrophe, Connie’s work begged the question, can we behave with compassion even in the apocalypse?

Notes taken by Katie Bruhn
Revised by Moises De La Cruz

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