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Looking towards the future of the Vera List Center, the third day of the Vera List Center Forum 2022 introduces the 2022–2024 VLC Fellows: Carmen Amengual (Los Angeles) and Anna Martine Whitehead (Chicago); Boris Lurie Fellow Omar Mismar (Beirut, Lebanon); Borderlands Fellows Beatriz Cortez (Los Angeles) and Fox Maxy (San Diego); 2022-2023 Sámi Fellow Matti Aikio (Finland); and ArtsLink International Fellow Aleksei Borisionok (Minsk, Belarus, and Vienna, Austria). In this first encounter with Vera List Center audiences, the fellows present on their distinct practices as they embark on developing their fellowship projects.
Appointed under the VLC’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction*, each of the fellowship projects—in form and content—explores the perils and potentials of the political, social, and metaphorical implications of “correction.” The fellowship projects, which range from a feature film to an opera, are in different stages of research and production. Each project takes speculative, poetic, critical, and activist approaches to correction, reconsidering existing histories, systems, and practices of correction as well as our relationship with it. Through their projects, the fellows contribute to the intellectual foundation of the VLC, now in its 30th year, and to the public’s understanding and engagement with creative practices and pressing issues through the lens of correction.
Matti Aikio, Finland, 2022-2023 Sámi Fellow
Matti Aikio is a Sámi visual artist from Finnish side of the Sápmi. He has a background in Sámi reindeer herding culture. He works with mixed media, photography, sound, installations, video, sculpture and text. His main interest as an artist is to try to offer the spectators a possibility to shift perspective on established dominant narratives and marginalized topics. He’s focused on topics like the concept, the idea and the image of nature and how the indigenous cultures seem to get suffocated by the schizophrenic nature relationship of the nation states and capitalism. Aikio is one of TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Fellows 2022 and also performs as a DJ.
Carmen Amengual, Los Angeles, 2022–2024 VLC Fellow
Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist from Argentina, whose work examines the interstices between memory, biography, and history. A Non-coincidental Mirror fabricates a memory for a forgotten event: the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algiers, 1973–Buenos Aires, 1974), while exploring a failed documentary project, which the organizers intended as a tool to educate a Latin American audience about anti-colonial struggles in Africa.
Aleksei Borisionok, Minsk, Belarus, and Vienna, Austria, 2022-2023 ArtsLink International Fellow
Aleksei Borisionok is a curator, writer, and organizer. Alexei focuses on art and politics in Eastern Europe during the socialist and post-socialist periods. His current research investigates the temporalities of post-socialism.
Beatriz Cortez, Los Angeles, 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores simultaneity, different temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. Cortez’s VLC Fellowship project considers the Tierra Blanca Joven—white ash deposited in many parts of the world by the immense, fifth century C.E. eruption of the Ilopango volcano—as sacred land with spiritual meaning to people who also migrated (and continue to migrate) from the Central American region to other territories.
Fox Maxy, San Diego, 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow
Fox Maxy is a film director and artist from San Diego. Watertight, her first feature film with an anticipated release date of 2024, is an artwork about mental health and suicide, about what harms and heals. Watertight is a hybrid documentary, where casual group interviews intertwined with narrative scenes serve as surreal commercial breaks.
Omar Mismar, Beirut, 2022–2024 Boris Lurie Fellow
Omar Mismar is a Lebanese visual artist whose project-based practice is materially loose and conceptually driven. Revolution is a Frown Gone Mad investigates the rampant culture of Botox in Lebanon as an extension of war and the witnessing of perpetual violence. The project raises fundamental questions about the aesthetics of disaster, reframed as a discourse on the sensuous body and the anesthetization of the body politic.
Anna Martine Whitehead, Chicago, 2022–2024 VLC Fellow
Anna Martine Whitehead is a Virginia-raised Chicago-based performer, artist, and writer interested in Black queer temporalities. FORCE! an opera in three acts, is a world-building and Black femme story of interior lives and shared dreams that examines relationships and sisterhood that can bloom in the shadow of prisons and the prison industrial complex. Whitehead presents an in-progress preview of FORCE! as part of Forum-concluding, celebratory concert with Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty on Saturday evening at 8 pm.
This event will also be livestreamed on veralistcenter.org.
Presented by Vera List Center for Art and Politics at Schools of Public Engagement.
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Aleksei Borisionok is a curator, writer, and organizer currently based in Minsk, Belarus, and Vienna, Austria. He is a member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective and the Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. Alexei focuses on art and politics in Eastern Europe during the socialist and post-socialist periods...
Omar Mismar is a visual artist based in Beirut. His practice is project driven, probing the entanglement of art and politics, and the aesthetics of disaster. Mismar takes up conflict and its representations via form deliberations, material interventions, and translation strategies, using the performative as gesture and...
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Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and versions of modernity, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. She has had numerous solo exhibitions and has participated in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. She has received numerous awards, including the California Studio Manetti Shrem Artist Residency at UC Davis (2022); Longenecker-Roth Artist Residency at UCSD (2021); Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020); Frieze LIFEWTR Inaugural Sculpture Prize (2019); Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018); and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among others. Cortez holds and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate from Arizona State University. She teaches in the Department of Central American and Transborder Studies at California State University, Northridge.
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Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist from Argentina living and working in Los Angeles. Her projects encompass research, film, sculpture, sound, text and installation strategies to examine the mediations between memory, biography, and history. Through engagement with research, archives, literature, myths, and oral histories, her works examine the way experience is transmitted within and across generations, focusing often in the legacies of worlds about to be lost, from political imaginaries to biological life.
Amengual’s work has been exhibited at Artists Space (NYC), Table (Chicago), Human Resources, EPFC, and E.D. Freeman Gallery (Los Angeles), Biquini Wax (Mexico City) and Museo Trabucco (Buenos Aires). She was Assistant Curator and Exhibitions Manager at the Gallery at REDCAT in Los Angeles, and Research Fellow and Assistant Curator for the Getty PST LA/LA project The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War.
Amengual has participated in residencies at SOMA Mexico, Mountain School of Arts, and The REEF in Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Buenos Aires, an MFA from CalArts, and was a fellow of the 2021-22 Whitney Independent Study Program.
Anna Martine Whitehead does performance. They have been presented by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; San José Museum of Art; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. They are a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant recipient, 2020 Graham Foundation Fellow, and an awardee of a 2020 MAP Fund grant. And in 2022 they will be institutionally supported by the Rauschenberg Foundation and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, frieze, Art Practical and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017); and is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).
Omar Mismar is a visual artist based in Beirut. His practice is project driven, probing the entanglement of art and politics, and the aesthetics of disaster. Mismar takes up conflict and its representations via form deliberations, material interventions, and translation strategies, using the performative as gesture and rehearsal. Mismar partook in residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Whitney Independent Study Program, SOMA, and Art Omi. He has participated in exhibitions at the San José Museum of Art, Tabakalera, MoMA, Home Works 8, VideoBrasil, Oakland Museum, Leslie Lohman Museum, Hamburg Phototriennale, and Beirut Art Center among others. In 2019, he won the VideoBrasil jury award for the MMCA Changdong Residency. Mismar taught at California College of the Arts, The University of San Francisco, Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts, and The American University of Beirut, and is the art editor of Beirut’s literary and art journal Rusted Radishes.
Matti Aikio is a Sámi visual artist from the Finnish side of the Sápmi. He has a background in Sámi reindeer herding culture. He holds an MA in contemporary art from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. Aikio’s art has been exhibited in various countries in Europe, Asia & Latin America. He works with mixed media, photography, sound, installations, video, sculpture, and text. His main interest as an artist is to try to offer the spectators a possibility to shift perspective on established dominant narratives and marginalized topics. Lately, he’s been focused on topics like the concept, the idea, and the image of nature and how the indigenous cultures seem to get suffocated by the schizophrenic nature relationship of the nation states and capitalism. Aikio is one of TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Fellows 2022 and also performs as a DJ. Aikio is a 2022-2023 Sámi Fellow, a joint initiative between Frame Contemporary Art Finland, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
Aleksei Borisionok is a curator, writer, and organizer currently based in Minsk, Belarus, and Vienna, Austria. He is a member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective and the Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. Alexei focuses on art and politics in Eastern Europe during the socialist and post-socialist periods. His work has been published in various magazines, catalogues, and online platforms including L’Internationale Online, Partisan, Moscow Art Magazine, Springerin, Hjärnstorm, Paletten, and syg.ma, among many others. Aleksei has written and curated exhibitions on education and unlearning, workers’ movements and strikes, the history of artistic practices, museum displays, and social movements. His current research investigates the temporalities of post-socialism. Borisionok is an ArtsLink International Fellow at the Vera List Center.
