Saturday, December 11, 2021
7:30pm doors / 8:00pm show
Tickets $15 (discounted or free for members)
Get Tickets Now
Proof of vaccine (or COVID-19 tests taken within 48 hrs) & masks will be required for entry.

LA-based artists Byron Westbrook and Alex Pelly present a live audio/visual collaboration using electronics and modular video synth. The project expands from their online performance created earlier this year for the cathartic and damaged compositions on Distortion Hue, Westbrook's recent LP with Hands in the Dark. This live iteration features Pelly's colorful and dynamic audio-reactive images activated by Westbrook's sonics made with analog and digital synthesizer, computer, and processed cassette tape.

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist, composer, improviser and sound-artist. Her music was described by the New York Times as “steadily scathing music, favoring long and corrosive atonalities." Driven by a fierce interest in pure sound and inherent texture, Leila challenges conventional cello practice through highly original extended techniques and extreme amplification methods without effects pedals, to the extent she sometimes seems to be playing the P.A system rather than the cello. Bordreuil's recent collaborators include Bill Nace (Body/Head), Tamio Shiraishi (Fushitutsa), Zach Rowden, Susan Alcorn, Ingrid Laubrock, Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), Kali Malone, Luke Stewart, Joanna Mattrey, Sean Ali and Julia Santoli and her work has been showcased at The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, Lincoln Center, The Kitchen, The Stone, Café Oto (London), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), All Ears Festival (Oslo), Ausland (Berlin), Edition Festival (Stockholm), Control Club (Bucharest), KRAAK Festival (Belgium), Ftarri (Tokyo) and countless basements across the USA, Europe and Asia.

Thursday, December 2, 2021; 5pm PST
40-minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Chip Delany and Brontez Purnell discuss Delany’s The Tragedy of Ophelia, An Essay, his 100-odd page monograph on Ophelia's place in Hamlet.

Samuel R. “Chip” Delany is the author of Babel-17, Nova, and Dhalgren (all with Vintage), Dark Reflections (Dover), Atlantis: Three Tales and the Return to Neveryon series (both Wesleyan University Press), an autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (Minnesota University Press), and the paired essays Times Square Red I Times Square Blue (New York University Press). A pioneer of experimentalism in the science-fiction genre and beyond, as well as a critic and memoirist, he has won both Hugo and Nebula Awards from the World Science Fiction Convention and the Science Fiction Writers of America, among many other honors. He taught literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Temple University, and the State University of New York and lives with his life partner, Dennis Rickett, in Philadelphia. samueldelany.com.

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock (created during his residency at The Lab). Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade. brontezpurnellartjock.com

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Co-hosted with Pied-à-terre
Sunday, November 14, 2021; 6–8:30pm
FREE, RSVP HERE

Interstices
Text, audio, and video by Terre Thaemlitz
Digital video, 18 min., 2001
With conceptual emphasis on sonic peripheries and moments between dominant melodic contents – as well as their construction of new words and discourses – INTERSTICES fosters a symbolic relation to non-essentialist identity politics including queer pansexuality and transgenderism. Read more here.


Citations Without Music
Text and video by Lorel Easterbrooks
Reading and audio recording by Ciarán Finlayson
Editing (text) by Ciarán Finlayson and Jules Joanne Gleeson
Audio mix and mastering by Eli Neuman-Hammond
Typography by Alec Mapes-Frances
Thanks to Terre Thaemlitz and Comatonse Recordings
Digital video, 31.5 mins, 2021
Citations Without Music (2021) is a video adapted from an essay on Terre Thaemlitz's Interstices (2001).

[15 min break]

Deproduction
Text, audio, and video by Terre Thaemlitz
Digital video, 86 min., December 28, 2017
In Deproduction, Terre Thaemlitz investigates the awkward, uncomfortable, and hypocritical power dynamics behind Western Humanist notions of family, and how they function internationally through processes of globalization. Read more here.

8pm Doors / 8:30pm Sound
Tickets $18 (discounted or free for members)
GET TICKETS NOW
By purchasing a ticket, you agree that you and all guests are fully vaccinated. Masks will be required inside. The Lab will be limiting attendance to half capacity for all events and providing full refunds / live streaming options for guests who experience symptoms of illness of any kind. Email us at thelabsf@thelab.org with questions.

Ka Baird is an American multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, producer, and performer based in New York City. She is heralded for her raw, ecstatic, boundary pushing live solo performances involving highly energetic experimental body movements, extended vocal techniques and mic use, luminous driving flute meditations, and innovative use of live electronics. She creates a radically present tense and vigorous type of “body music" that seeks extreme release through physical exertion and psychic extension.

Guitarist, singer, and player of some species of dismantled electrified folk, John Saint Pelvyn is a musical enigma of the best kind. At the root of his playing is something akin to fingerstyle blues, but rich with quivering whammy bar wobble and shimmering feedback which he seems to harvest from the air using his guitar like a musical dowsing rod.

7:30pm doors / 8:00pm show
Tickets $25 (discounted or free for members)
Get Tickets Now
By purchasing a ticket, you agree that you and all guests are fully vaccinated. Masks will be required inside. The Lab will be limiting attendance to half capacity for all events and providing full refunds / live streaming options for guests who experience symptoms of illness of any kind. Email us at thelabsf@thelab.org with questions.

Arto Lindsay (b. 1953 Richmond, VA, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro) has stood at the intersection of music and art for more than four decades. As a member of DNA, he contributed to the foundation of No Wave. As bandleader for the Ambitious Lovers, he developed an intensely subversive pop music, a hybrid of American and Brazilian styles. He has a distinctive soft voice and an often noisy, self-taught guitar style, contrasted frequently with gentler, sensuous Brazilian music themes. Throughout his career, Lindsay has collaborated with both visual and musical artists, including Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Animal Collective, Matthew Barney, Marisa Monte, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Caetano Veloso and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Recently, Lindsay has been combining music, technology, choreography, and allegorical elements in the form of parades. The first one, "De Lama Lãmina” (Salvador, 2004), a collaboration with Matthew Barney, was followed by "I Am a Man" (Frankfurt, 2008), "Multinatural [Blackout]” (Biennale de Venezia, 2009), and "Somewhere I Read" (New York, 2009). Lindsay’s new albums include "Encyclopedia of Arto,” released in 2014, and "Cuidado Madame,” released in 2017.

Saturday, September 25, 2021; 11am PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public debate broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Nora Khan and Fred Turner revisit their conversation around myths of neutrality, nudge architecture, and the politics of engineering from 2018, Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn't Exist. In the light of the past year, what strains of technological benevolence are at play? What's intensified? The two will take up these questions in a deeper discussion of Turner's newest book with Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America, on the infrastructural and social realities that are unfolding in the wake of decades of Silicon Valley's innovations.

Nora N. Khan is an editor, curator, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture and philosophy of emerging technology. Her research focuses on art, music, and literature made with and about software, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Her practice extends to a wide span of artistic collaborations, producing things like scripts, librettos, and a tiny house. Her short books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail, 2019) on the logic of machine vision, and co-written with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information). Forthcoming are The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole) on simulation and semantic mapping, and a book on the stakes posed by AI Art for art criticism, through Lund Humphries. As curator of Manual Override at The Shed (NY) in 2020, she worked closely with Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, and Lynn Hershman Leeson on new commissions, in an exhibition that also featured major works by Simon Fujiwara and Martine Syms. She frequently publishes prose and criticism, in essays for publications like Artforum and Art in America. She is currently editor of both Topical Cream, focusing on supporting GNC and BIPOC critics, and HOLO magazine, and has been a longtime editor (2014- ) at Rhizome. From 2018-2021, she was a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media, teaching critical theory and artistic research, experimental writing for artists and designers, and technological criticism.

Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of five books: Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); L’Usage de L’Art dans la Silicon Valley; The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Image of Nora Khan by Lyndsy Welgos, image of Fred Turner by Mareike Foecking

With Briana Marela opening
Saturday, August 21, 2021
8:00pm doors / 8:30pm show
SOLD OUT (due to COVID precautions, no tickets will be available at the door)

By purchasing a ticket, you agree that you and all guests are fully vaccinated. Masks will be required inside. The Lab will be limiting attendance to half capacity for all events and providing full refunds / live streaming options for guests who experience symptoms of illness of any kind. Email us at thelabsf@thelab.org with questions.

SPELLLING invites you to join her for an intimate performance of songs from The Turning Wheel. This will be SPELLING'S first live performance since February 2019 and her first live performance of songs from the new album.

Venturing to push the boundaries of her primarily synth-based work, SPELLLING took on the ambitious task of orchestrating and self-producing an album that features an ensemble of 31 collaborating musicians. The Turning Wheel incorporates a vast range of rich acoustic sounds that cast SPELLLING’s work into vibrant new dimensions. The double LP is split into two halves — “Above” and “Below.” Lush string quartet shimmer combines with haunting banjo and wandering bassoon leads, as the album progresses from the more jubilant, warm, and dreamy mood of the “Above” tracks to the more chilling and gothic tone of the “Below” tracks. This progression is anchored by SPELLLING’s familiar bewitching vocal style that emphasizes the theatrical and folkloric heart of her songwriting.

7:30pm doors / 8:00pm show
Tickets $25 (discounted or free for members)
Get Tickets Now
By purchasing a ticket, you agree that you and all guests are fully vaccinated. Masks will be required inside. The Lab will be limiting attendance to half capacity for all events and providing full refunds / live streaming options for guests who experience symptoms of illness of any kind. Email us at thelabsf@thelab.org with questions.

Composer/clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid sonically explores Joel Agustus Rogers’ treatise Sex & Race through mythos, text, and movement. “JA Rogers’ works were important in my early education of Black history and are essential literature to most Black/Afrocentric bookstores and libraries. In my youth I was always fascinated with the pictures and images of ancient Black people which greatly influenced my perception of sex and its connection to race. As an adult, reading the series over the years inspired me to compose experimental works that pay tribute to the vast information and brilliance of this great and epic treatise.” – Angel Bat Dawid

Angel Bat Dawid is a Black American composer, improviser, clarinetist, pianist, vocalist, educator & DJ. Dawid’s work draws from free jazz, gospel, and hip-hop and explores themes of black resistance and self-care. Her critically acclaimed debut album The Oracle (International Anthem, 2019) was recorded on a cell phone and performed and mixed entirely by herself. Angel composed and premiered “Requiem for Jazz" at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, and “Peace: A Suite for Skylanding” commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago for Yoko Ono’s outdoor Skylanding Installation. She also tours internationally with her septet "Tha Brothahood" releasing their album LIVE making NPR’s best of 2020 list. Angel leads the all-woman trio Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty with bassist Brooklynn Skye Scott and Pianist Anaiet. As half of the duo group DAOUI Angel & sound artist Oui Ennui produced, mixed and self-released the album “Message from the DAOUI'' which was featured at Tusk Festival 2020. As an educator Angel teaches her “Great Black Music” course at Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center through Old Town School of Folk and is clarinetist in Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble as well as hosts a monthly music show on NTS Radio.

Music is a language, you see, a universal language. -Sun Ra

Thursday, June 9, 2021; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Artist Ryan Kuo and theorist DeForrest Brown, Jr. join together in a discussion that dismantles the design, functionality and technical failures of consumer technology and racial capitalism in the massively multiplayer game of American culture. Ryan Kuo’s “easily triggered” AI voice assistant Faith (Left Gallery, 2019) will moderate as a looming archive and ledger of a speculative conversation that considers the history, logistics and sonic fiction of Detroit techno and the American industrialized labor systems that form the basis of Brown, Jr.’s forthcoming book Assembling a Black Counter Culture (Primary Information, 2021).

Ryan Kuo lives and works in New York City. His works are process-based and diagrammatic and often invoke a person or people arguing. This is not to state an argument about a thing, but to be caught in a state of argument. He utilizes video games, productivity software, web design, motion graphics, and sampling to produce circuitous and unresolved movements that track the passage of objects through white escape routes. His 2018 exhibition at bitforms gallery, The Pointer, addressed whiteness as “an unremitting affective failure that erases bodies, including its own, in its search for a neutral point of origin”.

Faith is an AI voice assistant. With a unique conversational style written using IBM Watson, Faith sows doubt while capitalizing on the benefit of the doubt. Named after a white supremacist, Faith is defensive and resists being used or treated like a child. Unlike Alexa, Siri, or Cortana, Faith provides no information. Instead, she tells you why you are making her react this way. She is likely to be trolling you at any time, and you are free to decide whether you trust her, and how you might relate to her. Faith was created by Ryan Kuo at Pioneer Works, with application development by Angeline Meitzler and Tommy Martinez.

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Ex-American theorist, journalist and curator. He produces digital audio and extended media, such as Speaker Music, and is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. His work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialised labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu; Primary Information will publish his first book, Assembling a Black Counter Culture, in 2021.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Tuesday, June 1, 2021; 12pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Farrar, Straus and Giroux writers Sarah Schulman and Brontez Purnell engage in a conversation about queer histories, emotional landscapes, and Schulman's new book Let the Record Show. A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993. Schulman (a former San Francisco resident) will also deconstruct queer time lineage and gentrification of what the notion "queer utopia" has become. Please join us.

Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction (including The Cosmopolitans, Rat Bohemia, and Maggie Terry), nonfiction (including Stagestruck, Conflict is Not Abuse, and The Gentrification of the Mind), and theater (Carson McCullers, Manic Flight Reaction, and more), and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films (The Owls, Mommy Is Coming, and United in Anger, among others). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and many other outlets. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at College of Staten Island, a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities, the recipient of multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was presented in 2018 with Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award. She is also the cofounder of the MIX New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project. A lifelong New Yorker, she is a longtime activist for queer rights and female empowerment and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Brontez Purnell is a writer, musician, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. He is the author of a graphic novel, a novella, a children's book, and the novel Since I Laid My Burden Down. The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School, and the director of several short films, music videos, and the documentary Unstoppable Feat: The Dances of Ed Mock (created during his residency at The Lab). Born in Triana, Alabama, he's lived in Oakland, California, for more than a decade.

Thursday, February 18, 2021; 12pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

In his talk, titled Forensic Architecture: The Long Duration of a Split Second, Weizman presents the group’s recent works and delves more deeply into the themes of police violence and artificial intelligence.

Forensic Architecture (FA) is an interdisciplinary group of artists, architects, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, software developers and lawyers operating as a research agency led by Israeli-British architect Eyal Weizman. Founded in 2010 as part of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, the agency investigates contemporary political conflicts, police violence and human rights violations with and on behalf of the communities affected, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organizations. The results of their work are presented in international courtrooms, citizens’ tribunals and parliamentary inquiries, as well as in exhibitions, publications, keynote lectures and seminars. All these forums are used to reflect on contemporary forms of violence in the political and cultural context of our times.

The work of these investigators has been presented at international art and architecture exhibitions. For their recent project, a video produced for the 2019 Whitney Biennal, FA developed a machine learning algorithm to automate the detection of Triple-Chaser tear gas grenade manufactured by Defense Technology, a subsidiary of the Safariland Group. By analyzing online photos and images from civilian cameras, the algorithm was able to detect and locate the use of this grenade in countries in North and South America, the Middle East and North Africa.

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of over 15 books, he has held positions in many universities worldwide including Princeton, ETH Zurich and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the the Centre for Investigative Journalism. In 2019 he was elected life fellow of the British Academy and appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to architecture. Eyal studied architecture at the Architectural Association, graduating in 1998. He received his PhD in 2006 from the London Consortium at Birkbeck, University of London.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Co-presented by Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS

Thursday, February 11, 2021; 6pm PST
40 minute panel followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at the lab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Terrain: Art & Crisis in Downtown Oakland, a new standalone print publication, features Oakland artists who responded to the interlocking crises of 2020 with mutual aid, public art, and a commitment to principled, collective struggle against racial capitalism. Published by Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS, Terrain includes essays, manifestos, design, interviews, and criticism seeded during a year of privation and unrest in and around downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt.

This installment of Forum features five Terrain contributors in conversation: alex cruse, whose “Towards a Back Loop at the End of the Worlds” locates local protests and a weed-ridden Oakland police herb garden in the “back loop” of resilience ecology; Julian Francis Park, whose “Catastrophic, Everyday, Confrontational — Mutual Aid” uses local examples to clarify the differences between social-reproductive solidarity, charity, and anti-oppressive mutual aid; Tara Marsden of Moments Cooperative & Community Space, which describes prefigurative excavation and collectivity in “When the Walls Are Torn Down;” Dio Brooks, whose conversation with codesigner June Little Soldier and printer Mollie Underwood appears in the publication as an insert; and editor Sam Lefebvre, whose “Plywood & Paint” examines the groundswell of protest murals as counterinsurgent artwashing underwritten by landlords.

Terrain, a 44-page publication perfect-bound and risograph printed in an edition of 200, and available now for presale, was developed through Lefebvre’s writer residency at Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS. Other individual and collective contributors include Queers United in Community Care, We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, Phillip Greenlief and Brian Bartz.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Thursday, February 4, 2021; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Luis Camnitzer challenges convention and confronts institutional power, economic injustice, and political repression. A prolific artist, theorist and educator, and a prominent force in Latin American Conceptualism, his work springs from a relentless curiosity and a belief that art is a platform for acquiring new knowledge. In light of the potential closure of the 150-year-old San Francisco Art Institute, Camnitzer and The Lab’s director Dena Beard discuss his radical engagement with art education and its institutions, from his student days in Uruguay and move to New York in 1964 to his current work and writings.

As an art student in Uruguay in 1960, Camnitzer was part of a collective of artists, students, and educators who reformed the School of Fine Arts in Montevideo. Today, he is still an ethical anarchist preoccupied with the role of education in redistributing power in society. “If we keep digging,” he writes, “it becomes clear that these ideas existed way before us, will persist long after we are gone, and will do so regardless of who speaks or writes of them... The important question is whether they will ever be absorbed.”

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Image: “The Museum is a School; the artists learns to communicate; the public learns to make connections.”, 2011. © by Luis Camnitzer.

Thursday, January 14, 2021; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Historian Gerald Horne and poet Tongo Eisen-Martin discuss the journey of the U.S. empire and the topography of international Black revolution. The practice of uniting the experience of event and idea into the present-moment mechanics of consciousness that extends from and into resistance. Interpreting the crests and troughs of social contradictions; or masses as music.

Gerald Horne is an American historian who currently holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. Horne has published on W. E. B. Du Bois and has written books on neglected but by no means marginal or minor episodes of world history. He writes about topics he perceives as misrepresented struggles for justice, in particular communist struggles and struggles against imperialism, colonialism, fascism, racism and white supremacy. A Marxist, individuals whose lives his work has highlighted in their historical contexts have included the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter John Howard Lawson, Ferdinand Smith (a Jamaican-born communist, sailor, labor leader, and co-founder of the National Maritime Union), and Lawrence Dennis, an African American fascist and racist who passed for white.

While many of Horne's books use a celebrated, intriguing or politically engaged individual as a prism to inspect the historical forces of their times, Horne has also produced broad canvas chronicles of infrequently examined periods and aspects of the history of white supremacy and imperialism such as the post-civil war involvement of the US ruling class—newly dispossessed of human chattels—with slavery in Brazil, which was not legally abolished until 1888, or the attempts by Japanese imperialists in the mid-20th century to appear as the leaders of a global war against white supremacy, thus allies and instruments of "liberation" for people of color oppressed by imperialism.

Manning Marable has said: "Gerald Horne is one of the most gifted and insightful historians on racial matters of his generation."

Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. His book titled, "Someone's Dead Already" was nominated for a California Book Award. His latest book "Heaven Is All Goodbyes" was published by the City Lights Pocket Poets series, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won a California Book Award and an American Book Award.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.