Saturday Events

April 15th, 3-5pm Jesal kapadia/ Jennifer Hayashida/ Ayreen Anastas/ Lana Lin

Translating the language of things into that of humans entails not only translating silence into audibility; it means translating the nameless into the name.
-Walter Benjamin

Video works and Poetic texts: an afternoon in translation, with Lana Lin, Jennifer Hayashida, Ayreen Anastas and Jesal Kapadia. Lana Lin will show excerpts from 'No Power to Push Up the Sky,' 23 min. 2-channel video installation by Lana Lin, 2001 and 'Departure,' 48 min. video by Lana Lin + H. Lan Thao Lam, 2004. Jennifer Hayashida will read work from her translation ‘Inner China’ 2005, as well as from a new work-in-process. Ayreen Anastas will show excerpts from Pasolini Pa* Palestine, 51 min. video, 2005. Jesal Kapadia will show her short videos ‘Telegraph’, ‘This is not a’ and a new work-in-progress.

Lana Lin is a New York-based media artist who has interpreted histories in different cultural contexts, raising questions about translation and the processes of identification. Her work has been shown internationally at museums and festivals, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, China Taipei Film Archive, Taiwan, and the Festival de Femmes, Creteil, France. Since 2001, she has been collaborating with H. Lan Thao Lam.

Jennifer Hayashida grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco. She received her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2003. In August of 2005, Litmus Press published her translation of Swedish author Eva Sjödin's book-length prose poem, Inner China (Det inreav Kina). Her translation of Fredrik Nyberg's début collection, A Different Practice (En annorlunda praktik), is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Ayreen Anastas was born in Bethlehem, Palestine. She relocated to Germany in 1989 for a DAAD scholarship where she studied architecture at the Technical University in Berlin until 1996. She is currently living in Brooklyn. She has taught at Pratt Institute - school of architecture in Brooklyn since 1999 and is one of the primary organizers of the 16Beavergroup, (www.16beavergroup.org) an artist community that functions as a social and collaborative space on 16 Beaver street, where the group hosts panel discussions, film series,
artist talks, radio recordings, reading groups and more. Her practice engages with issues of public and political space, language, the everyday and the question of Palestine. These concerns are articulated in various forms including videos, Audio works, books, architectural models, multi-media presentations, social forms and drawings.

Jesal Kapadia received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and is a recent graduate of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in NY. She moved to the United States from Mumbai, India,
where she studied commercial arts and worked as a graphic designer. Drawing from moments in the history of the avant-garde, particularly surrealism, and incorporating ideas from postcolonial feminist theory, her works explores alternative modernities emerging in India and its diaspora. She is also the Arts Editor for the journal Rethinking Marxism, and a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council grant for film and video artists. She currently teaches at the International Center of Photography in NYC and Rhode Island school of Design, RI.