heartbeats.exe :: abstract [body]
In tandem with painter Georgia Elrod’s solo exhibit at Peninsula Art Space, you are invited to join us for “heartbeats.exe.” Curated by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson [Elæ], this event presents an evening of performance in and around an exploded understanding of the body / self / form / space / perception, in which performers working across mediums will present work created in response to the work as well as read / perform from their own original pieces exploring themes resonant with Elrod’s visual investigations.
Participants include Ashna Ali, Liz Bowen, Joselia Hughes, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Mercedes Roffé and Joanna Valente
Performer Bios and Links for heartbeats.exe
ELÆ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson] is a multimodal creative practitioner, cultural scholar and educator. Their work employes relational aesthetics, text, installation, sound design, performance, digital tech and speculative theory in addressing the somatic, ontological intersections between persons, forms of language, and systems, as well as the study of resilient, open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent features include Dixon Place’s HOT! Festival, Big Echo, Matters of Feminist Practice, and The Exponential Festival, the Speculative Resilience Radical Practice Library & Lab for the Anarchist Bookfair, and an onsite field lab installation for bioart/AI collaborative team APRIORI at Ars Electronica / STWST 2019. They teach at Pratt Institute, publish and perform regularly, and are Founder/Creative Director of The Operating System / Liminal Lab as well as lead R&D for the Brooklyn node of the Mycelium Network Society.
Use this door to their rhizomatic links on IG: @thetroublewithbartleby
Ashna Ali is a writer, researcher, and educator. Their poetry has appeared in several journals including HeART Online, Bone Bouquet, femmescapes, and Nat. Brut. They research postcolonial diasporic feminisms and is a professor of English at Bard High School Early College Manhattan.
Liz Bowen is a poet and critic living in New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Sugarblood (Metatron 2017) and Compassion Fountain (Trembling Pillow Press 2020). She is also a Ph.D. candidate in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she is working on a dissertation that explores disability and animality as intertwined sites of literary experimentation in 20th and 21st century American literature. Liz is a poetry editor at Peach Mag, editorial fellow at Public Books, and assistant editor at Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. Her writing can be found in The New Inquiry, American Poetry Review, Lit Hub, Boston Review, TAGVVERK, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere.
Joselia Hughes is a Black Caribbean-American writer and self-taught allodisciplinary artist living with Sickle-cell disease. Utilizing creative non-fiction, fiction, poetry, anagramming, tweet threads, visual and performance art, and archival study, she untangles the language(s) of liminality; instruments abstractions on the conditions of Blackness; interrogates reclamation and refusal through play; and reappraises society’s perceptions of ability, chronic illness and disability to imagine and concretize alternative passages of survival. She has performed and exhibited at bookstores and art centers around New York City including The Strand, Bronx Art Space, Gibney Dance Studio, Participant Inc, and National Sawdust.
You can reach her at IG: @joselia.jpg and www.joselia.info
Maryam Ivette Parhizkar is a poet, scholar, occasional musician and author of the chapbooks Pull: a ballad (The Operating System, 2014) and As For the Future (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2016). She is a PhD candidate in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University and a CantoMundo Fellow. Born and raised in Houston, Texas by Iranian and Salvadoran immigrants, she lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Mercedes Roffé is one of the most renowned contemporary Argentine poets. Widely published in the Spanish-speaking world, her books appeared in translation in Italy, France, Romania, England, Canada, Brazil, and the United States. English translations of her work include, Floating Lanterns, translated by Anna Deeny (UK, Shearsman, 2015), and Ghost Opera, translated by Judith Filc (US, co-im-press, 2017). In 2012, her poetry collection, La ópera fantasma, was chosen one of the best books published that year in Mexico. In 2016, her Definiciones Mayas (1999) was listed by El País (Spain), as one of the 100 best books published in Spanish in the last 25 years. She has published two books of photographs: The Blue Line (Madrid, 2012) and Otras lenguas (Santa Fe, 2019). Roffé is the founding editor of Ediciones Pen Press. Among other distinctions, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim and the Civitella Ranieri foundations fellowships.
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Sexting Ghosts, Xenos, No(body), #Survivor, (forthcoming, The Operating System), and is the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault. They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Joanna is the founder of Yes Poetry and the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine. Some of their writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Them, Brooklyn Magazine, BUST, and elsewhere. Joanna also leads workshops at Brooklyn Poets.
joannavalente.com/ Twitter: @joannasaid / IG: joannacvalente / FB: joannacvalente