TRACING THE INDEX: final events 3/26 + 3/31

*apologies for cross-posting*

Hi all -

On Wednesday and Monday, Art in General and the New School will host the final two events in the four-part discussion series TRACING THE INDEX, organized by Index of the Disappeared (Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani). The series brings together artists, activists and writers for lively exchanges on critical ideas and practices.
Brief descriptions of this week's roundtables follow. Detailed information about dates, times, venues, tickets, participants and all their fantastic work can be found here:

http://www.kabul-reconstructions.net/index

All the discussions in the series will eventually be archived as audio and video at the same URL; the second talk in the series is already up, along with an introduction to Index of the Disappeared.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions at any point this month. We do hope you can join us, and please do forward this announcement to students, colleagues, friends, and anyone else you think might be interested in the series.

– Mariam

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ROUNDTABLE 3: COLLABORATION + CONTEXT
Wednesday, March 26th, 6:30 pm
Art in General
79 Walker Street (Broadway/Lafayette), 6th floor gallery
Admission: FREE
Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis

Description:
Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art + Community, the exhibition guest-curated by Carey Lovelace for the Bronx Museum, surveys the period in the 1970s and early 80s when women artists, inspired by the 70s feminist movement, worked collectively in new ways to engage communities and address social issues. Taking the exhibition as a point of departure, this roundtable (the second of two held in conjunction with the show) brings together artists with community-based, site-specific, public and activist practices to discuss how their work extends the history of feminist collaborative and community-based artmaking, and how their contexts, choices, and collaborations shape the politics of their practices.

Participants: Tomie Arai, Doug Ashford, Andrea Geyer + Sharon Hayes (9 Scripts from a Nation at War), Ann Messner (Artists Against the War), Naeem Mohaeimen, Robert A. Pruitt (Otabenga Jones & Associates)
Moderator: Gregory Sholette (co-editor, Collectivism after Modernism)

Directions:
Art in General is located one block south of Canal Street, between Broadway and Lafayette. Subways: 1, A-C-E, N-R-Q-W, or 6 to Canal Street.
http://www.artingeneral.org

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ROUNDTABLE 4: AGENCY + SURVEILLANCE
Monday, March 31st, 6:30 pm
The New School, Theresa Lang Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
Presented by the Vera List Center for Art + Politics at the New School
Admission: $8, free for all students and New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID

Description:
This discussion examines issues of agency in surveilled space - who can watch, who is only watched, who defines which spaces are visible to the camera and which are effectively invisible, and how artists, activists and engineers can intervene in surveillance systems to subvert, invert, and redefine these relationships. Participants include artists and activists who work with the principle of "sousveillance" - surveillance from below, or watching the watchers (extending ideas explored in the Rhizome panel at the 2007 Conflux festival); artists and engineers who collaborate to produce software and hardware applications which access and visualize bodies of data usually obscured from public view; artists whose projects have questioned the rhetorics of surveillance by intervening more playfully in the expected aesthetics or power dynamics; and activists who monitor post-9/11 surveillance by intelligence agencies and its effects on immigrant and dissenting communities.

Participants: Tad Hirsch (Institute for Applied Autonomy), Anjana Mahotra (ACLU/Human Rights Watch Fellow), Jenny Marketou, Trevor Paglen, Brooke Singer (Preemptive Media)
Moderator: Alexis Bhagat (co-editor, An Atlas of Radical Cartography)

Directions: http://www.newschool.edu/campus/directions.aspx?s=2
Tickets: In-person purchases can be made at the event, or ahead of time at the New School Box Office at 66 West 12th Street, main floor, Monday to Friday 1:00 to 7:00 p.m. Ticket inquiries can also be sent to [email protected] or 212.229.5488.
Event Information: 212.229.5353, [email protected], or online at http://www.newschool.edu/publicprograms
** The New School will most likely be webcasting this event through Fora TV; check the New School website for details or http://www.fora.tv **