Amy Khoshbin: Word On The Street
April 20th, 2017
Leila Heller Gallery, New York
Word On The Street bridges the gap between art production and social action, the institution and the street, ephemerality and physicality. Leading up to the 2017 Presidential Inauguration, artist amy khoshbin invited writer Anne Carson to respond to the current political situation in America with language. Carson's slogans were then given form and physicality by Khoshbin as large-scale handcrafted banners. These banners have been and will be displayed in a variety of institutions and taken out into the streets to be carried by marchers as protests arise. The banners, transformed perhaps by the residue of their exposure to street-action, are then be re-installed in institutions as both art and archival object. This gesture is intended to blur the boundaries between the institution and the street, and to create an ongoing physical archive addressing the urgent and timeless concerns of the individual, the community and the requirements of citizenship. A selection of these banners will be on display at Leila Heller Gallery during the banner-making performance, curated by Mitra Khorasheh as part of Hands Off Our Revolutions' performance series.
Language can enter, move and change human history, but it needs to be formed by mind and heart and real time, not just tweet-crazy fingers. To engage the arts community in social action and encourage a physical artistic response similar to Khoshbin + Carson’s banners, Khoshbin is hosting a banner-making as performance event. She will encourage the group to respond to the current political landscape with language and imagery that feels honest to their own perspective. Participants will use this content along with ready-made materials to create wearable banners/signs. This group will exhibit their signs at Leila Heller Gallery, and then transform these art objects into protest materials at upcoming demonstrations such as the March for Science on April 22 and the Climate March on April 29, 2017.
amy khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist merging performance, video, installation, collage, and fabric arts to examine our individual and collective compulsion to create, transform, and sometimes destroy the stories of who we are and who we think we should be. She produces media and mythologies using humor and a handmade aesthetic to throw a counterpunch at the high-definition, profit-generating codes and signals that audiences are trained and accustomed to consuming. She has shown her solo and collaborative work at venues such as Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Mana Contemporary, NURTUREart, Abrons Arts Center, National Sawdust, The Invisible Dog Arts Center, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest. She is currently in residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace Residency 2014-17, and has completed residencies at The Watermill Center, Mana Contemporary, Banff Centre for the Arts, Team Effort! in Glasgow, Scotland, and at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has received a Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant and is on Creative Capital's On Our Radar for her recent project, The Myth of Layla. Khoshbin has bachelor's degrees in Film and Media Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a master's degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Tina Barney, and poet Anne Carson among others.