The Grant Wood Art Colony is hosting Taraneh Fazeli, Visiting Curator in Painting and Drawing, this week.

Taraneh Fazeli is an arts curator and educator from New York that is currently the curator at the Bemis Center in Omaha, Nebraska. Her practice emerges from legacies of institutional critique and radical pedagogy, witnessed in her work in the New Museum’s education department, as a Contributing Editor to Triple Canopy, and the Managing Director of e-flux, where she oversaw publications such as art-agenda and organized exhibitions with artists including Raqs Media Collective, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Mladen Stilinović. Fazeli’s upcoming exhibitions will examine voice as acoustic material and vehicle for representation (Bemis, Winter 2018-19) as well as cultural rituals of justice in extraterritorial spaces (Bemis, Spring 2019).

She has been working on a multi-phased curatorial project entitled “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” that deals with the politics of health and care. It showcases the work of artists who examine the temporalities of illness and disability, the effect of life/work balances on wellbeing, and alternative structures of support via radical kinship and forms of care. (Note: “Crip” is a political reclaiming of the derogatory label cripple.) The impetus to explore illness as a by-product of societal structures while also using cultural production as a potential place to re-imagine care was her own chronic illnesses and work in the realm of institutional critique. The project will be up from September 22-November 8, 2018 at the Luminary (St. Louis, Missouri) and has previously taken place at arts organizations including Bemis Center (Omaha, Nebraska), EFA Project Space (New York), Lawndale Art Center and Project Row Houses (Houston, Texas), as well as numerous social service organizations. Her talk, “Labor of Love: To Curate is to Care,” looks at the shifting role of the curator as caretaker throughout history, proposing an ethics of care grounded in a discussion of her own practice and various theoretical texts.

Visit the the SAAH calendar for more information about her talk, Labor of Love: To curate is to care.