ISCP TalkApril 12, 2023, 6–7pm
Vibe Overgaard, Mary. N Taylor, and Rakhee Kewada discuss ‘Spindle City’
In conjunction with the exhibition Spindle City, on view at ISCP through July 21, 2023, artist Vibe Overgaard, anthropologist and urban theorist Mary N. Taylor, and geographer Rakhee Kewada will discuss the history of capitalist industrialization, the legacy of its visual and architectural forms, and its role in shaping urban space, social practices, and popular movements.
Their conversation will explore the value of artistic practice as a means for considering the contradictions of capitalism, and trace the critical path that is illuminated in the artist’s video work, Spindle City, which was produced for the exhibition.
Vibe Overgaard is a Danish visual artist working with installation, sculpture, performance, video, archive material and critical writing. Her research-based practice focuses on economies seen from a historical perspective. Often researching industry and production relations of a specific location, her work links local circumstances to greater global-political questions and critiques. She has exhibited work at Kunsthal NORD, Denmark; Goethe-Institut, Palestine; and Floating Projects, Hong Kong, among others. She was an ISCP artist-in-residence in 2022 and 2023 supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.
Mary N. Taylor is the Assistant Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Working at the intersection of anthropology, urbanism, and dialogical art, her praxis investigates sites, techniques, and politics of civic cultivation and the production of political personhood, the ethics and aesthetics of nationalism/cultural differentiation, and the history of communist experiments. She is the co-editor of Co-revolutionary Praxis: Accompaniment as a Strategy for Working Together and author of Movement of the People: Folk Dance, Populism, and Citizenship in Hungary, a historical ethnography. Most recently, she co-authored The Commonist Horizon: Futures Beyond Capitalist Urbanization. Her work has also appeared in numerous journals. Taylor has taught at Hunter College, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Parsons School of Design. She is a founding member of the LeftEast collective.
Rakhee Kewada is a Zimbabwean geographer whose research interests include agrarian studies, development of the global south, and decolonization. Kewada is a PhD candidate in Earth and Environmental Sciences (Geography) at the Graduate Center, CUNY where her dissertation research on cotton and textile production in postcolonial Tanzania examines changing geographies of underdevelopment in the 21st century. Kewada has taught Urban Studies at Hunter College and Queens College.
This program is supported, in part, by Consulate General of Denmark in New York; Danish Arts Foundation; Hartfield Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; New York City Council District 34; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.