Please join us for the second installment of The Concurrents lecture series, featuring Yasi Ghanbari and Niki Kriese, both from the School of Art, Media, and Technology. They will be screening videos and speaking about their work on Thursday, April 9, at 12:00 pm, in the Bark Orientation Room (2 W 13th Street, 1st floor).
Yasi Ghanbari uses a critique-based practice to address issues of privilege, authorship, gender-bias, and engagement. Using a variety of mediums, her work reflects on the failures and near triumphs of using a self-reflexive artistic process to critique and elicit awareness. Her artistic methodology pairs research and pop culture reference with the artist as feminist subject. She often includes herself in her work to implicate herself in an often-mystified process and to question the role of the artist as cultural influencer.
Yasi received an MFA in 2010 from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a BA from Oberlin College in 2007. Ghanbari has had several solo exhibitions and screenings in such venues as NURTUREart in Brooklyn (2014), CoWorker Projects in New York (2013), and ACRE Projects in Chicago (2011). She was awarded second place in the Union League of Chicago’s fine arts competition in 2011 and received a scholarship to attend ACRE residency in Wisconsin that same year.
Niki Kriese explores tasks that are seemingly bound to fail, and embraces the vulnerability of being wrong. Her interest is in the futility of containing the ineffable, of capturing traces of the absent, and of portraying the glint of chemistry between people. Her videos complicate ideas of control and authorship, and the art making process as performance.
After barely graduating with her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2007, Niki moved to New York in search of fame, fortune, and falafel. She doesn’t remember anything before that. She makes art and lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and freaking adorable kids.
