In Various Tongues

A night of readings featuring artists and authors whose practice responds to place and historical memory in the Americas, while unfolding onto a larger geography of the world. The readings will be in the language of the artists’ choice.

Readings by: Maria Thereza Alves, Elsie Augustave, Lucía Caleta, Eliana Hernández, Maria Hupfield, Regina Jamison, Sheema Kalbasi, Lina Meruane y  Litia Perta.

Mezcales de Leyenda is generously providing a tasting of their mezcal for the event.

In Various Tongues is organized by Alva Mooses as a Grupo < 11 > Satellite Project. In conjunction with the Grupo < 11 > exhibition at the Instituto Cervantes in March, a series of satellite projects organized by Grupo < > members will be realized throughout the city.

*******

Una noche de lecturas  junto a artistas y escritoras. Las mismas reflexionan en sus trabajos sobre el espacio y la memoria histórica en las Américas buscando también enmarcar su escritos en geografías más amplias. Las lecturas serán leídas en el idioma que elija el artista.

Lecturas por: Maria Thereza Alves, Elsie Augustave, Lucía Caleta, Eliana Hernández, Maria Hupfield, Regina Jamison, Sheema Kalbasi, Lina Meruane y  Litia Perta.

Mezcales de Leyenda tiene la amabilidad de ofrecer una degustaciĂłn de mezcal en el evento.

En Varias Lenguas es organizado por Alva Mooses como un Proyecto Satélite de Grupo < 11 >. En conjunto a la Grupo < 11 > exhibición en el Instituto Cervantes, una serie de eventos satélites organizado por Grupo < > se realizarán en diferentes partes de la ciudad.

Readers:

Maria Thereza Alves is an artist and co-founder of the Partido Verde of SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil in 1988. In 1978 she made an official presentation on the human rights abuses of the indigenous population of Brazil at the U.N. Human Rights Conference in Geneva. Recently Alves has participated in the 32nd SĂŁo Paulo Biennale and upcoming is the Sharjah Biennale as well as the Frestas Triennial in SĂŁo Paulo. She has had a solo exhibit at MUAC in Mexico City and a survey exhibit at CAAC in Seville. She participated in dOCUMENTA (13) with an installation, The Return of a Lake. Alves is the recipient of the Vera List Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018. mariatherezaalves.org

Sheema Kalbasi was born on November 20, 1972 in Tehran, Iran and grew up in Pakistan and Denmark. She is a poet and writer on issues of feminism, war, refugees, human rights, a filmmaker on women’s issues, Sharia Law, freedom of expression and an activist for women’s rights, minorities’ rights, children’s rights, human rights and refugees’ rights. Her poems have been anthologized and translated into more than 20 languages. She has done voluntary teaching and tutoring of Baha’i refugee children, disadvantaged Pakistani children as well as Iraqi Kurdish children in Pakistan. Kalbasi has worked for the UNHCR and the Center for Refugees in Pakistan, and UNA Denmark. She was recognized for her humanitarian works in 1990s in Pakistan. Sheema is founder and president of Reel Content. She lives in the United States. sheema.info

Lina Meruane is an award-winning Chilean writer and scholar, teaching at New York University. Since 1998, she has authored a short-story collection, a play and four novels. The most recent, Sangre en el ojo, was awarded the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in Mexico and has been translated into English (Seeing red, Deep Vellum 2015), Italian, German, French and Portuguese. Meruane has also received the Anna Seghers Prize (Berlin, 2011) and Calamo Prize (Spain, 2016), as well as literary fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (US 2004), the National Endowment for the Arts (US 2010) and the DAAD Artists in Berlin Program (Germany 2017) . More recent publications include her essay book on the impact of AIDS in Latin American literature, Viral Voyages (Palgrave McMillan, 2014), a literary piece on her Palestinian origins, Volverse Palestina (Becoming Palestine, 2014) and a short essay book called Contra los hijos (Against children, 2014).

Regina Jamison is a writer and educator who lives in Brooklyn, New York.  Her poetry has appeared in print in Artepoética Press Anthology: The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2016, Promethean Literary Journal, Off the Rocks: An Anthology of GLBT Writing Vols. 14 & 15, and Poetry in Performance Journal Vol. 43, and online at Indolent Press HIV Here & Now Series, Silver Birch Press – Me as a Child Series, and Promethean eZine.  She also has an upcoming poem in Five Two One Magazine. Her erotic short stories have appeared in Girls Who Bite: Vampire Lesbian Anthology and Purple Panties: Anthology of Black Lesbian Erotica. She is a 2016 Artist-in-Residence of the Byrdcliffe Woodstock Artist Guild and a 2014 Fellow of the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer’s Retreat.  She attends City College in New York where she is working on completing her MFA in Creative Writing.

Maria Hupfield is an Anishinaabe member of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario and artist based in Crown Heights Brooklyn, New York. Her solo traveling exhibit The One Who Keeps on Giving opened for the 30th Anniversary of The Power Plant Toronto 2017. She co-organized #callresponse, grunt gallery, a multi-platform project centering performance art and the work of Indigenous women in discussions on Reconciliation, and to bring the show to NY. Hupfield was selected as a Curator for Many Possible Futures Nuit Blanche, City of Toronto 2017. Her work was included in the SiteLines Site Santa Fe Biennial and Bric Biennial: Vol II Bed Stuy / Crown Heights Edition, she is a recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter and Sculptors Award and Artist in The Market Place Bronx Museum 2014. Hupfield is founder of 7th Generation Image Makers, Native Child and Family Services of Toronto; co-owner of Native Art Department International; and was Assistant Professor in Visual Art and Material Practice appointed to the Faculty of Culture and Community, Emily Carr University of Arts and Design (2007-11).

Litia Perta is a writer and teacher currently living in Los Angeles, teaching at the University of California, Irvine. She is interested in transformation, and in collaborating with others to develop innovative ways (pedagogical, linguistic, theoretical, economic, spiritual and poetic) to support the transformations we came here to live through. Recent work is included in the group exhibition Ours is a City of Writers at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery as well as in the inaugural issue of Sublevel Magazine organized through the CalArts Creative Writing program and spearheaded by Maggie Nelson and Janice Lee. Litiaperta.com

Elsie Augustave was born in Haiti and is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Roving Tree. She is a graduate of Middlebury College and Howard University with degrees in French and Spanish. She was a teacher of French and Spanish at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, Fulbright scholar in France and Senegal, guest choreographer of the National Dance Theater of Zaire and Dance instructor at the National Arts Institute of Kinshasa. She now dedicates her time to writing fiction and to her mission as Publication Director of Nubia, based in Paris.

Lucia Caleta is an Argentinean artist and writer living and working in NY. She studied at Universidad de Buenos Aires Literature and Semiotics where she also was a Professor. In NY she earned her MFA in Creative Writing at NYU where she received a scholarship and a special award to finish her thesis in Prague. She works as a collaborator in many magazines and newspapers of Latin America. She published two poetry books and she is now working in her first novel. Last year she held an exhibition in Museo Casa Bicentenario de Buenos Aires where she studies this relationship between writing and visual arts. She won the Argentinian prize Fondo Nacional de las Artes in 2016.

Eliana Hernández was born in Bogotá, where she studied anthropology and worked with indigenous communities in the Vichada and Putumayo regions. Earning her MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU in 2015, her poetry aims to explore relationships between collective memory and archives, as well as representations of nature. She currently lives in Ithaca, where she pursues a PhD in Romance Studies and teaches.

Alva Mooses is an artist and educator based in New York. She received a BFA from The Cooper Union and a MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited her work at JCAL, the Logan Center for the Arts and the 10th Havana Biennial, among others. She has completed residencies at The University of Chicago, Columbia College, Grafisk Verksted in Stavanger, Norway and the Davidoff Art Initiative in the Dominican Republic. From 2004–09, Alva co-founded community art initiatives and organized collaborations in Latin America. Alva is a founding member of Grupo < > an artist collective founded by five artists from the Americas. alvamooses.com | colectivogrupo.com