Our seasonal Show, Tell, Toast event is an opportunity to introduce our cohort to local artists and the New York arts community at large. In these gathering, the artists in residence present their research or invite a guest whose work is relevant to their own practice.

Isshaq Albarbary asks what happens when an undercover agent and an artist merge into one. In posing this question, Isshaq shares his ongoing research into the use of culture as espionage, which deals with questions of authenticity, imitation, anonymity, camouflage, normalization, and naturalization. Using storytelling, videoclips, and sounds, he explores the ways in which language conceals the complexity of knowledge systems.

José Antonio Vega Macotela walks us through his current research into a group of 18th century Bolivian pirate miners and explains how it informs his ongoing, multi-year collaboration with a group of nomadic Catalonian hackers led by Nos del Abismo. Jose Antonio explores historical and contemporary narratives of resistance and strategies of subversion, and poses a yet-unanswered question: Is it possible to explore the hacker as a mode of opposing the production of economic value based on sacrifice?

Niloufar Emamifar invites Charisse Pearlina Weston to talk about her practice. Charisse’s creative work emerges from deep material investigations of poetics and the autobiographical, including the risks of anti-Black violence and the malleability of Blackness it may ensue.

Phedra Deonarine invites Corey D. Clawson, creator of archivepelago.org and doctoral student in American Studies at Rutgers University, who researches queer writers and artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Phedra talks to Corey about his digital mapping project, to discuss how literary study and influence is a reference in her own current practice.

Reference image from Isshaq Albarbary