Mythological Migrations Talk: Much Handled Things Are Always Soft

Artist+ Member Anthony Rosado, 2019 Day With(out) Art Artist Derrick Woods-Morrow, and Programs Associate Blake Paskal in conversation with Tamara Al-Mashouk. This conversation is a part of the virtual exhibition Chapter 2: The Darkroom curated by Abdullah Qureshi. Click here to RSVP.

About this Event

Chapter 2: The Darkroom is a multidisciplinary virtual exhibit that looks at: cruising, erotic spaces and practices that are traditionally understood as sexually promiscuous, and thus, morally rejected or pushed to the peripheries by the dominant heteronormative society, challenging and re-claiming histories of orientalism, activating and disrupting spaces that are otherwise considered dangerous, and opening up the possibilities of sex and gender expression from queer, Muslim, and migratory perspectives.

Chapter 2: The Darkroom is the second iteration of the Mythological Migrations: Imagining Queer Muslim Utopias, a project conceived by Abdullah Qureshi as part of his on-going doctoral studies at Aalto University, Finland.

Borrowing the title from the work of Derrick Woods-Morrow, this conversation explores issues of cruising, desirability, hookup culture, and the white gaze as they intersect with HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.

Panelists:

Anthony Rosado is an Afro-Boricua storyteller and cultural curator. Rosado merges anthropology, art-history, literature, visual art, performance, and creative skill-shares. Founder of Testourmonials (c. 2013), Rosado produces accessible and live arts events that share technologies for the autonomous collecting, preserving, and glorifying of stories that document community-driven cultural conservation. Rosado produces interactive visual and performance art exhibitions to provide platforms for marginalized artists, and opportunities for legacy building. Rosado’s artworks and choreography address identity, ancestral connection, legacy, ethics, unveiling true stories, and reciprocative love. Rosado curates in collaboration with grassroots groups, galleries and nonprofits in gentrified neighborhoods to bridge residents in pursuance of community-inclusive city planning, housing justice, and historiography.

Derrick Woods-Morrow utilizes childhood narratives to connect past experiences of growing up in the American South with present methods of envisioning playfulness & restoration as necessary considerations for seeing bodies, like and unlike his own, renewed. His work explores an array of Eastern & Gulf Coast historical narratives, celebrating, and archiving interactions between, bodies, ideologies & their connection to the land. Through fluidly choreographed movement black queer bodies inhabit his work, developing methods for experiencing a new American terrain, one that is playful and forgiving. Currently based in Chicago & originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, Derrick's artistic practice deploys a wide variety of media – photography and film/video, ceramics, and narrative performance.

Blake Paskal is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn. Through both his artistic and educational practices he strives to hold space for ambivalence, to challenge the binary modes of either/or thinking that are engrained in all of us, and to work through the "messiness" of human experience to find points of connection. He works as the Programs Associate at Visual AIDS, an organization that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue and supporting HIV+ artists, and as a teaching artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In both of these capacities he leads programs centering queer, trans, black, POC, and seropositive narratives, and he seeks to create inclusive spaces that welcome the participation of folks both new and accustomed to museum spaces. In his sculpture practice he explores personal histories and memory and the ways these are mapped on to the body. The hybrid figures he creates draw inspiration from a range of sources including the natural world, biology, and science fiction.

Moderator:

Tamara Al-Mashouk is a London based Arab artist, curator, and activist. Through multi-channel video, performance, and architectural installation, her work explores the movement of people across societal and geographic borders and negotiates the relationship between home, identity, and memory. It expands the study of epigenetics beyond the body into place and matter. She is the founder of Queering Space, an on-going dialogue series that addresses sexuality and space, decolonial feminism(s), borders: both geographic and societal, and explores the word queer and queerness itself as sites of resistance and potential.

Photography Credits:

Anthony Rosado, courtesy: the artist

Derrick Woods-Morrow, courtesy: Daniel Delgado

Blake Paskal, courtesy: Visual Aids