Soft Borders: Conversation with Scherezade Garcia and Nadir Souirgi
Live transcription is available here.
Visual artists Scherezade García and Nadir Souirgi will be joined by Kaiama L. Glover to discuss migration, colonialism, memory, and identity in their artistic work and practice.
García’s talk, entitled “Let’s Pretend That it is Sunny and Exercise Utopia,” will showcase a selection of her work from 1996 to 2021 and reflect on her engagement with history, ethnography, tradition, and the tension between marginal and dominant narratives.
Sourigi’s talk, “Soft Borders,” dwells in the ambiguities of colonial histories and presents. ‘Soft borders’ for him offers a way into the entanglements between Atlantic history, conservation science, and Creole identities, and reflects the mutual influences between his pedagogy, performative work, and his studio practice.
Accessibility
Event will stream online. Video will be embedded on this page or watchable on BCRW’s YouTube channel.
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided.
Please email any additional access needs to ekausch@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all. RSVP here.
Scherezade García is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist whose work often explores allegories of history, migration, collective and ancestral memory, and cultural colonization and politics. A co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA, she holds an AAS from Altos de Chavón School of Design, a BFA from Parsons School of Design, The New School, and an MFA from The City College of New York, CUNY. García has been featured in solo and duo exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas, Clifford Art Gallery at Colgate University, Miller Theater at Columbia University, Lehman College Art Gallery, Crossroads Gallery at the University of Notre Dame, Museo de Arte de Santo Domingo and others. She has participated in the Havana Biennial, the International Biennial of Paintings at Haute de Cagnes, the IV Caribbean Biennial, Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Latin American Biennial, BRIC Biennial, Venice Autonomous Biennial, and international fairs. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Museum of the Americas, El Museo del Barrio, The Housatonic Museum of Art, El Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, and others. García is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2015) and the Colene Brown Art Prize (2020). An edited monograph on her work Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, was published in 2020 by the Art Museum of the Americas. She is a member of the Artist Advisory Council of Arts Connection and No Longer Empty. She sits on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association (2020-2024). García is represented by Praxis Art Gallery in New York. Her artist’s papers can be found at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and Austin, TX.
Nadir Souirgi is a painter whose artistic practice includes performance and writing. Nadir takes the idea of ‘soft borders’ to dwell in the ambiguities of colonial histories and presents. He is interested in the entanglements between Atlantic history, conservation science, and Creole identities. He is also an elementary school educator in East Harlem, New York City, where he founded the Harlem County Bird Club, a program that introduces young children to bird watching and field science. He is also an interpretive naturalist for New York City Audubon. His work has been shown at school in Vienna, Austria, Munchner Kammerspiele in Munich, Germany, and The University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His work has been published in CameraAustria and The Great Bird Blind Debate published by the Planting Fields Foundation. He is currently an MFA candidate at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. He lives and works in New York City.
Kaiama L. Glover is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, among other publications, and prize-winning translator of three works of Haitian prose fiction. Her most recent monograph, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Kaiama is currently at work on an intellectual biography titled, “For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life,” and a collection of essays with the working title “Black Diva Saves the World.” Kaiama has been awarded grants from the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She has written regularly for the New York Times Book Review and was a host on PBS show History Detectives: Special Investigations. She tweets @inthewhirld.
This event is part of the 46th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference: Art and Political Imagination.
Accessibility
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided.
Please email any additional access needs to ekausch@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all. RSVP here.
Image credits
Top left: Nadir Souirgi, “Thinking Loa (A.J.)”; Top right: Scherezade Garcia, “Bordering the Imaginary.”