Women burning headscarves in Sari, Iran. Source: social media.

This text was originally published in Persian on the Iranian feminist platform Harass Watch, on September 28, 2022. The first English translation of the text was published on the Arab ezine Jadaliyya on October 5, 2022.

This anonymously written text isn’t so old. It is probably three weeks old as we write this collective introduction on why we, a non-organized group of feminists in Iran, felt that it must travel beyond the borders of Iran, beyond the limits of the Persian language. There are texts throughout history that become pivotal for a people. “Women Reflected in Their Own History” is a cornerstone, an achievement in articulating a collective desire and a collective consciousness that secures it a place in the history of Persian writing. It is a prominent text in the history of all struggles throughout the longue durée of revolutions and movements in the region.

The text at hand resonates across multiple registers: the history of protest movements; creativity; identity; and the modes of production of historical agency. One witnesses a historical collision of videos taken by mobile phones, a phenomenon that was present at the zenith of the Arab Spring and the Iranian Green Movement, here folded back onto the history of photography yet revolving around the unfolding history of citizens’ choreographed performances in the street.

What makes this text a groundbreaking piece of intersectional feminist revolutionary writing? It is in the way the author interweaves feminine sexual drives and female sexuality—a feminine identification that stimulates and invites other women into its chain of becomings. It presents and brings forth the cultivation of nervous systems that spread out quickly, beyond the borders of Iran, back and forth, weaving mourning and celebration, militant struggle and discourse.

L, the anonymous author of the text, claims to be a resident of a little town outside Tehran. She must be between her late twenties and early forties. In an almost total absence of fair and unbiased journalism in the Islamic Republic, and due to the difficulty of translating between contexts in which the protests are moving ahead, the poetic prose and theorizations of L, her personal, sensual, and affective articulations, resonate with what other individuals have experienced.

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Our conversation with Carlos Franco about frogs, flags and false hope.

Miriam Chatroom Ep. 1 features a conversation between the Editors of Precog Magazine and artist Ben Ross Davis. Together, they discuss ideas around the tension of digital, analogue and multidisciplinary art forms, exploring queer subjectivity, and the multitudes of self which emerge through creative practice.

︎︎︎Ben’s Music List
Strange boy by: Brazilian Girls
Canopée - Superorganism Remix by Polo & Pan, Superorganism
Helix by Kelly Moran
Rock 'n' roll Gay Guy by Macy Rodman
My Love's by Water From Your Eyes
GIRL by Basside, SOPHIE
You Could Be by Anz, George Riley
Start It Up by Alex Mali
A Mountain on Me by Blew Velvet
Next Tomorrow by Duval Timothy
Gold by E.M.M.A.
Baby Beige by Olive T
Hiwu by Night Helix
Because Of Love by Janet Jackson
Trigger by Maluca Mala
Graffiti Girls by Parallel Dance Ensemble
When Puppies Dream by Joseph Schiano di Lombo
While You Play by Melontropics
Sometimes at Night by Massimilano Pagliara
Hidden Tropics by Alex Kassian
Sambaca - Original by Alien Alien
Now She’s a Witch by Sateen
New Goodness by Jonah Almost, Kyle Kidd
Potential Energy by Vitesse X
Full Length Mirror by Michael Magnan
Dance II by Discovery Zone
Unfolding by DonChristian, Eartheater
Sana Sana by Dinamarca, La Favi
Genuine Hesitation by Matthew E. White
Space 8 by Nala Sinephro
everybody knows by Baby Storme
knuckle tattoo by girlhouse
Party by Planet 1999
show me your body by ernest rareberrg
Necessary Death by Rotana

A Magazine Show presents a selection of contemporary offbeat magazines, celebrating their intimate relationship with time and place, their willingness to play and shift within a rigid format, and their distinctive voices. The show—alongside public programs—offers space to read, listen, discuss, contemplate, subscribe, joke, and relax.

Our conversation with Lily Jue Sheng on Ikebana, work/life balance and elements.

Our conversation with artist Felli Maynard on fluidity, archives, and speculative queer histories.

Our conversation with Kayla Gibbons about cars, monuments and how things disappear...

Our conversation with Cristobal Cea as we talk about haunted organs and Imagined America?

Our conversation with Nancy Goldring, where we talk about curtains, concrete poetry and concoctions.

Our conversation with Mariana Garibay Raeke, where we will talk about flowers, forms, and ephemera.

Our conversation with Kati Gegenheimer and Jenny Snider about meeting cute, pronouns, and painting at the dinner table.

Our conversation with Nancy Smith about Art, Family, and Repair.

Our conversation with Esteban Cabeza de Baca on his work and current show, Nepantla, at Garth Greenan Gallery, as well as in-betweenness, landscape, and neon!

Our conversation with painter Michael Stamm.

Our conversation with art and fashion collaborative Tiempo de Zafra.

We will be talking with Heidi Howard about portraiture, collaboration and being Wide Awake.

We will be talking with Becky Sellinger about performance, objects, and images as ruses.

We will be talking with Kamari Carter about his videos, installations, and sound works, and about surveillance, speakers, and sonic metaphors.

We will be talking with Marcela Flórido who will be sharing her beautiful paintings, and talking with us about figuration, inherited aesthetics and hugs.

We will be talking with Renee Carmichael about her ideas and work between dance, writing, and coding, and how we can learn to feel with the internet.

This week we will be talking with Candystore who will usher in the Sweetness of our 20th conversation reading poetry and talking with us about resplendent joy, slime, and color-coordinated pleasure.

We will be talking with Chanice Hughes-Greenberg who will be reading some poems and sharing her take on sonic, poetic and lived erasure, as well as sampling and the visual form of poetry!

We will be talking with Ilana Harris-Babou about the erotics of internet tutorials, dysfunctional objects, and property value!

We will be talking with the wonderful Michael Marcelle where we will discuss sci-fi, horror, queerness and Americana!

We will be talking with MELT, the collaboration of Loren Britton and Isabel Paehr, on their project Meltionary. We will discussing all things Melting: the world, our brains, concepts and structures of thinking, atoms, computers. Come and bring something to Melt with us!

We will be talking with Shahrzad Changalvaee, who is a master of imagery, biting, and aquatic architectures!

This week for Precog Time, we are having a community show and tell to get to know each other beyond our Zoom boxes. Please come this Friday at 7:30 pm and bring an object, idea, or story to tell everyone about within 5 minutes! Can be: a sandwich, your art, something you're thinking about, your pet, a plant, your heart's deepest desire. See you there!

We will be tallking with Meena Hasan, where we will be discussing textiles, tree worship and the power of zooming in.

We will be talking with Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola and Diego Gerard from DiSONARE about their work in independent publishing, in relation to sound, resonance and vibrations.

We will be talking with Alex Chowaniec about Alchemy in art and healing, and how to transform illness and pain through creativity.

We will be talking with Martina Cox about her work with radical garments, windows, and tiny, clinging men!

We will be talking with Cara Chan on Pareidolia, stone carving, gem shows, and erotic sculpture in quarantine. 

We will be talking to Carlos Irijalba about relative states, and his artwork as it exists between biological forms and engineering.

We will be talking with Umber Majeed about her work, the idea of cyber geographies, geopolitics, feminism and re-historicization.

We will be talking with Virginia Lee Montgomery, who discusses her piece SKY LOOP, a metaphysical film and sculpture installation inspired by 'the butterfly effect' theory and VLM's experience of post-Harvey Houston.

We will be talking with Effy Xiaofu Wang about her paintings and video works through the lens of the Kaleidoscopic, and as always, catching up about quarantine and what life is like now where she is, 2 months into our pandemic future.

We will be talking with Vanessa Kowalski and Kirill Zakomoldin on their individual practices and collaborations, and "reflecting repetition".

We will be talking with Xandra Ibarra about the aesthetics of Stuckness, and her fascinating sculptures, performances, and videos.

We will be talking with Patricia Domínguez about her work and its relationship to metaphors of healing, ancient and technological mythology, and the generation of new energies.

Kenneth Tam’s videos and sculptures locate vulnerabilities within normative conceptions of masculinity. The screening will present several videos in which Tam reimagines the spaces and rituals that give rise to ideas about the male body and its performance. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artist.

This screening is part of the series Upstream, which features programs that offer novel ideas and unusual provocations.

Join us for a special event in celebration of the closing of Relative Fields in a Garden on the Queens Museum’s 140-foot-long Large Wall including an interactive virtual project and artist talk. Relative Fields in a Garden combines painter Heidi Howard’s vivid gestural painting with her mother Liz Phillips’ interactive soundwork, which uses wave transmissions that respond to the natural light of the museum’s atrium.

The project is featured in the current issue of Precog Magazine, a publication that explores the intersections between art, technology, and feminism. For the issue, titled Bubble Orchestra, artists were asked to contribute submissions based on the concept and materiality of bubbles: as a metaphor for thinking through ideas of individuality and group cohesion; echo chambers and their tenuousness; algorithms; and the fragility of identity. The aim in bringing together this group of “bubbles” was to see how they sing together; what kind of cacophony or harmony is achieved in the proximity of these individual projects.

Precog is simultaneously launching a virtual exhibition of Bubble Orchestra consisting of an interactive space of different “bubbles” (contributions), made in collaboration with the Virtual Dream Center, an artist-run, downloadable, video-game based virtual exhibition platform that presents non-traditional methods of art-making and viewing led by Nicholas Steindorf and Jean-Baptiste Lenglet.

From 2:00-4:30pm visitors are invited to interact with Howard and Phillips’ contribution to Bubble Orchestra, Relative Fields in a VR Garden, at a game-station situated in the Museum’s atrium.

From 3:00-3:30pm Howard and Phillips will discuss the project with Nicholas Steindorf and Precog Magazine publisher Gaby Collins-Fernandez.

Are you considering asking for a raise in your job or freelance work? This practical workshop will bring together a roundtable of speakers with experience negotiating salaries, wages and fees to share advice on how to ask for higher pay. Everyone will get a chance to rehearse and fine-tune their ask in front of peers, experts, and bosses and receive their feedback.

As arts workers we often expect low pay, making it all the more crucial to advocate for our value—but these are difficult conversations. Employers might use any number of reasons, consciously or not, to pay you less. The purpose of our session is to build confidence in your ability to negotiate and get paid.

This event is organized and facilitated by Clynton Lowry and Lucy Hunter with Admin ⚙️, and hosted by the Shift Residency at EFA in partnership with CUE Art Foundation.

Southern Exposure is proud to present Where do you want ghosts to reside?, an exhibition, publication, and performance opening January 17, 2020. This group project curated by Artist-Curators Azin Seraj and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto rearticulates historic narratives of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, examining ways in which nationalistic stories are told in support of oppressive ideologies and biases. Six visual artists from Iran, Pakistan, India, and Egypt utilize the transformative power of telling their own histories to untangle and rework problematic pasts and forgotten Islamic myths.

The title, taken from Etel Adnan’s brutal epic poem about the Lebanese Civil War, asks us to consider our position in relation to our pasts and the ways in which narratives are used to create or enforce ‘otherness’ or belonging. Through the centering of critical voices and perspectives of artists rooted in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, this project humanizes those who have been marginalized by recent political rhetoric. The exhibition will include work by Morehshin Allahyari, Heba Y. Amin, Anum Awan, Arshia Haq, Shirin Fahimi, and Umber Majeed.

Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez explores healing practices emerging from the points where many worlds meet, clash and overlap as a result of colonial encounters. Rooted in the artist’s ongoing investigation of ethnobotany in South America, her first UK solo exhibition invites the viewer to envision possible futures for humans and plants thriving in the cracks of modernity.

The exhibition presents a multi-screen video installation alongside a series of altars and totem figures. Combining ethnographic surrealism and science fiction, Domínguez’s work embraces a range of myths, symbols and rituals shaped by extractivism and global finance, from the syncretic worship of Our Lady of Cerro Rico, an infamous silver mine in Bolivia where eight million natives died, to the archaeological museum inside Scotiabank’s head office in Cusco, built on top of the ruins of an Incan palace.

Brooklyn-based photographer Lucas Blalock (b. 1978) uses both traditional and digital techniques to create uncanny and surreal images of ordinary things. An Enormous Oar, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, presents over twenty works produced in the last five years focused on still-lifes, domestic scenes, and portraits.

Unearth is informed by the mutability of the natural world. For her second solo exhibition with bitforms gallery, Sara Ludy applies attributes distinctive of her digital practice to sculpture. Transparent, enmeshed forms made of Waken Glass, a new medium developed by Upterior that unites glass and copper, transition immaterial elements of the artist’s visual language into three dimensions. The exhibition engages nature’s durational cycles of preservation and decay using real and virtual ornithological elements. A celestial union emerges, transforming the gallery into a hybrid aviary.

Subsurface Hell, Ludy’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery, presented a series of the artist’s investigations into organic environments. Clouds (2018) are a series of animated reliefs that render billowing canopies of water vapor into rhythm. The resulting landscape is mediated by generative motion of layered texture and color. New works in Unearth compound this methodology, casting abstract ephemerality into physical structures of Waken Glass. Perches (2018) appear empty, even vulnerable, floating in a tuft of blackened copper mesh. However, their glistening surfaces act as an offering, or site of potentiality that nods to the transience of the natural world.

As the exhibition continues, the spirit of an aviary unfolds. Nests (2018), sculptural habitats for imagined birds, sit opposite a live streamed projection of a nature cam. Frequently used for wildlife habitats or nature preserves, this video feed allows viewers to observe wildlife online. Trough 3 (2018) exists as a live streamed artwork, broadcast from a plinth in a nondescript high-rise. The sculpture remains unaffected as the world around it turns; birds soar to and from a neighboring sanctuary and the sun repeats its daily ritual of rising and setting. Trough 2 (2018) hangs from the ceiling in suspension. The artwork offers a similar experience to that of Perches and Nests—its silence calls for attention. Troughs inspire pause, a characteristic typically required for Ludy’s time-based work. Action is withheld from the artworks in an effort to accentuate the surrounding environment. The adjacent display of both Troughs further obscures the duality of lived experience and simulation. All streamed content is hosted online at www.birdsmadeearth.com

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce Four, a group exhibition featuring works by Felipe Baeza, Julia Bland, Arghavan Khosravi and Oren Pinhassi. All four artists in the show give form to personal experiences through material and color. Dusty pastels, velvety darks, and scuffed surfaces run through the works, inducing a contemplative atmosphere where subtle references to different histories and narrative can emerge. The exhibition will open on Saturday, March 16 with an artists’ reception from 6:00–8:00 pm and will be on view through Saturday, April 27.

The gallery is delighted to present a two-person exhibition of Brooklyn-based artists Florencia Escudero and Marcela Flórido. Paintings and drawings by Flórido are paired with soft sculptures by Escudero. The exhibition developed from the friendship and critical dialogue that Escudero and Flórido have kept since meeting each other at the Yale University School of Art graduate program, which they both attended. Their works relate themes of constructed realities, female representation, and memory.

Escudero explores the notion of a fictive world through hand-sewn, digitally printed sculptures that parse elements of the female body, sometimes through proxies. Stand-ins include fashion accessories and doll parts. Escudero gathers imagery from digital space that relates to versions of fantasy and desire often circulated in mass media. Within her broader practice, Escudero positions the sculptures inside the rooms of 'love hotels' (which have fantastical and kitschy interiors designed to enhance the experience of lovers) and photographs them. This process helps her to think about how love can be redefined beyond the version of it that consumer culture presents.

Flórido's paintings of plants native to Brazil, and her drawings of the female portrait, convey charged energies and temporal states. The motif of the heart, traditionally a symbol of love and intimacy, accompanies the portraits of Flórido's women, creating an overall mood within each of her works. At times this symbol appears as the leaf of a plant, which in turn exhibits human-like qualities. Within her canvases, Flórido finds freedom to imagine the different ways that the body can inhabit physical space. This action mirrors an aspect of her own personal experience of adapting to various places where she has lived during her life and of rendering elements of her home country's landscape from memory.

The title of the exhibition, Costilla de Adán (Monstera Deliciosa) refers to the tropical plant depicted in Flórido's recent painting. It also points to the notion of Adam's rib, and the concept of woman as an assemblage of parts. For the artists, using parts of the female form within their own works gives them as sense of freedom and agency to develop their own narratives. As the artists write, "In the exhibition, these parts function as stand-ins for whole real women in the same way that memory creates a sense of reality which is distorted and fractured."

DETAILS
• Brought to you by The Black School
• Music direction by Vulgar Colors
• One day free art & music festival for all ages
• Sunday Aug 19, 2018 at 12:00pm - 5:00pm
• Sugar Hill Children's Museum
• Concert, DJ sets, merchandise & food vendors, art installations, and art workshops

Donate, Volunteer, More Info at:
www.blacklovefest.org

For at least the past 20 years different organizations and individuals have been producing new iterations of Black Love Fest in cities across the U.S to highlight the importance of self-love and self-determination in our communities. In the summer of 2017 we were inspired by these many organizations and individuals to bring Black Love Fest to New York City with the first annual Black Love Fest NY at Brooklyn Museum. Black Love Fest NY is a free one-day celebration that builds upon work initiated in the The Black School by sharing student artwork with the community. BLF NY is a public event, creating a gathering space for all people who share in love for the well-being and self-determination of Black people. BLF NY will also include music performances, art installations by professional artist, hands-on art making workshops for all ages. The purpose of this project is to illustrate the positive impact of collective action.

If we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.—James Baldwin

MOUNTAIN is pleased to present The Texture of Want, an exhibition featuring artwork by Dalia Amara and Olivia Swider. The artwork on view explores constructions of femininity, vulnerable self-reflexivity, and fallacy in the truth of images. Both artists have a background in image-making and the study of photography, but the way they synthesize that knowledge into their respective practices varies. While Amara’s work functions in the realm of photography, the content and context takes a more sculptural/performative turn. Conversely, Swider’s practice incorporates physical works and found materials to ask new questions around what constitutes an image, appropriation/ authorship, and the documentary/indexical capabilities of objects and the stories they hold. Together, these artists present a fascinating look at a postmodern approach to capturing and creating an image.

Join us in celebrating this year’s Poetry Chapbook honorees! This year’s winner is Kimberly Kruge for her manuscript High-Land, Sub-Tropic. Honorable mentions go to David Denny and Basma Kavanaugh. Kruge, Denny, and Kavanaugh will read from their works.

Suggested admission: $10/$5 members. Guests receive a free letterpress broadside.*
A reception will follow.

As the winning selection, High-Land, Sub-Tropic is published as a limited-edition, letterpress-printed, and hand-bound chapbook created by artist Ed Rayher of Swamp Press. Limited-edition, letterpress-printed, and hand-bound chapbooks of the work of Guest Curator Juan Felipe Herrera—designed and printed by artist Amber McMillan—are published by the Center. Honorable mention manuscripts are printed as letterpress broadsides by Center artists. *Additional signed chapbooks and broadsides will be available for purchase at the reading.


ABOUT THE HONOREES

Kimberly Kruge is a poet and translator who lives and works in Guadalajara. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review and others. Her translations can be found in Precog Mag, Riot of Perfume and Luvina. She is the founder of the Comala Haven for Writers, a workshop and retreat for women in Mexico.

David Denny‘s new collection, Some Divine Commotion, is forthcoming from Shanti Arts Books this fall. Previous titles include Man Overboard, Fool in the Attic, and the short story collection, The Gill Man in Purgatory. His story, “Sometimes Only the Sad Songs Will Do,” will appear as Story of the Week on October 30 at Narrative magazine. 

Basma Kavanaugh is a Nova Scotia poet, visual artist, and letterpress printer. She produces artist’s books under the imprint Rabbit Square Books. She has published two collections of poetry, Distillo (Gaspereau, 2012), and Niche (Frontenac, 2015), which won the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

Nancy Margolis Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition, Summer 2017 is to open with watercolor works on paper by Drea Cofield, and oil stick paintings by Ping Zheng, on Thursday, June 29, 2017, 6pm to 8pm. Both artists, new to the gallery, make strikingly dissimilar works on paper, yet share a commonality of connection, a powerful emotional inner core reflected in the work's color, mark, iconography and composition.

HOODIES FOR HOMELESS LGBTQ PEOPLE
 November 5th—December 25t, 2016

Selena Gallery presents Skin Dips, an exhibition featuring work by Dalia Amara and Florencia Escudero.Skin Dips brings work together by two Brooklyn based artists exploring female phantoms, absence, and anthropomorphism. Amara and Escudero transmit a feminine Lynchian vista utilizing photograph and sculpture. Through anthropomorphism, objects and spaces create fantasies referencing the human body. These works emit female beauty terror, the body scrutinized and objectified, which is transmitted into domestic space. The materials used in these creations range from makeup, fake flowers, and sex toys: objects that occupy a place between disgust and desire, banality and trauma. The spaces explored inthe making of the works range from personal interior space to obscure motels, creating a converging of close private space public space. The presence of the artist’s hand becomes visible in their works through the performative making and positioning of objects in these space.

Selena is an artist run space co-founded by Anjuli Rathod and Olivia Swider. Exhibitions are on view for openings and thereafter by appointment only.