In conjunction with ISCP’s exhibition The Animal Mirror, London-based artist Marcus Coates will present his work for the first time in New York City. Coates’s films and performances employ animal vocalizations and ritualistic public interventions to provide new functional languages for situations where conventional strategies of understanding and rationalization fail. His presentation will be followed by a conversation with Una Chaudhuri, New York University Professor of English and Drama.

Marcus Coates’s recent exhibitions include Workplace Gallery, London, 2016; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2015; Handwerkskammer, Berlin, 2015; and Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, 2014, among others. In 2013 he was shortlisted for the Trafalgar Square 4th Plinth. In 2008 he was the recipient of a Paul Hamyln Award and in 2009 he won the Daiwa Art Prize. Recent publications include The Trip, Serpentine Gallery, Koenig Books, 2011; UR…A Practical Guide to Unconscious Reasoning, Book Works, London, 2014; and Marcus Coates, Kunsthalle Zurich/Milton Keynes Gallery, Koenig Books, 2016.

Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is the author of No Man’s Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet’s Plays and Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, as well as numerous articles on drama theory and theatre history in such journals as Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, and Theatre. She was guest editor of a special issue of Yale Theater on “Theater and Ecology” and a special issue on Animals and Performance, for TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies (2007). Recent publications include Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, co-edited with Holly Hughes, and Ecocide: Research Theatre and Climate Change, co-authored with Shonni Enelow. With director Fritz Ertl, she has developed a number of theatre pieces using a process they call “Research Theatre,” and she has worked collaboratively with the artist Marina Zurkow, most recently in a multi-platform project entitled “Dear Climate.”

This event is free and open to the public.

This program is supported, in part, by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Greenwich Collection Ltd, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York State Legislature, and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.