With Melissa Hilliard Potter, moderated by David C. Terry
In the framework of our Shaping the Past event series and with the joint screening of two performance films by Elana Katz, we are presenting Memory Laps: A Conversation with Artist Elana Katz. Social trauma, collective memory, and the historical erasure of oppressed bodies have driven art creation for decades. This discussion will deepen the analysis of Elana Katz’s performance films Aiming for Hopelessness (2021) and Running on Empty (2018), which will be on view in the Goethe-Institut New York's shop window, at KWADRAT Gallery in Berlin, and online. In a panel dialogue, the artist, respondent, and moderator extend this discourse with diverse knowledge bases, from the historical implications of these performances to their place in a contemporary discussion on the memorial and transformative potential of the body.
The cross-cultural topics expressed in Katz’s work will be considered with extended societal contexts, creating a dialogue about histories of trauma, manifestations of memory, and consequences of denial.
The discussion will be held over Zoom. Registration is required.
Accessibility: Live captioning or ASL interpretation is available for this event upon request.
Please send an email to info-newyork@goethe.de 3 days in advance to request.
Elana Katz is a conceptual artist working primarily in the medium of performance art. Katz’s work confronts cultural conventions, critically examines the complexity that lies within contradictions and thus aims to provoke experiences of unlearning the assumed. Katz has exhibited/ performed all over the world, including at the Museum of Sundsvall, Sweden (2019-20), where her work has been acquired into the museum’s permanent collection. She is a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (2011), and her research-based work in the Balkans has been supported by the US Embassy of Kosovo, Israeli Embassies of Belgrade & Bucharest, Goethe-Institute Bucharest, Goethe Centers of Cluj & Iasi, and Trust for Mutual Understanding of New York. In 2020, in cooperation with Gallery KWADRAT, she founded the Berlin contemporary art space House for the End of the World, where she curates an ongoing program focused on site-specificity.
Melissa Hilliard Potter is an Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago and a feminist interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work has been exhibited in White Columns, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and more. Her films have been screened at international film festivals, such as the Cinneffable and the Reeling International LGBT Film Festival. She has been the recipient of three Fulbright Scholar grants, as well as grants that enabled her to build two papermaking studios at university art departments in Serbia and Bosnia & Hercegovina. A major focus of her work is the protection, interpretation, and archiving of endangered women’s handicrafts and social customs, and she collaborated with women felt artisans and activists from Georgia through her project Craft Power with Miriam Schaer. As a curator, Potter’s exhibitions include Social Paper: Hand Papermaking in the Context of Socially Engaged Art with Jessica Cochran and Revolution at Point Zero:Feminist Social Practice with Neysa Page Lieberman. Her writing has been featured in BOMB, Art Papers, Flash Art, Metropolis M, Hand Papermaking, and AfterImage among others.
David C. Terry is an artist, independent curator, and cultural producer and is currently the Director and Curator for C24 Gallery in New York City. He was a visiting faculty member at Bard College, Berlin, the former Director and Curator of Grants and Exhibitions at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and Assistant Director at the Pelham Art Center. He is a working artist, a curator with over 100 exhibitions and curatorial productions and experiences to his name nationally and internationally, as well as a juror and panelist for various arts councils and festivals. His awards include Artists in the Marketplace Program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts; BRIO, Bronx Council on the Arts; The Puffin Foundation; New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture, the Arts and Business Council’s Arts Leadership Institute Award, and the Elizabeth Foundation’s Residency Grant and the Node Center for Curatorial Studies’ Innovators Grant.
