Bard Graduate Center Gallery

Glassblowing as Terraforming: Posthumanist Turns in Theories of Embodied Knowledge A Paul and Irene Hollister Lecture on Glass by Erin E. O’Connor (Marymount Manhattan College) “The first silica mine that I visited had ‘pulled a shot’ that morning; they had dynamited a portion of the mountain, reducing half of the ridge before me to ten tons of rubble. The silica was largely destined for glassmaking factories serving the architecture and automotive industries. Yet, some silica would be shipped to glassmakers serving the contemporary Studio Glass art world.” —Erin E. O’Connor In the mid-twentieth century, American artists turned to glass as a medium of expression, distinguishing themselves from factory glassworkers. Left out of this history—which is rich with artist biographies and aesthetic analyses of glass objects—is the material life of silica mines. In this lecture, Erin E. O’Connor connects the formation of glass objects to the ongoing formation of the earth, seeing them as two sides of one artistic process. Drawing from anthropological fieldwork at mines and a glassmaking facility in Appalachia to explore these intertwined yet unconnected realms, she aims to overcome a deep-seated dualism between human creativity and natural science that polarizes glassmaking (mixing ingredients) and glassblowing (making objects). In doing so, she addresses how the human experience of self-determination and creativity intersects with the living (and dying) ecological world. A conversation with BGC MA RJ Maupin will follow the lecture. Erin E. O’Connor is an associate professor of sociology and affiliate faculty of environmental studies at Marymount Manhattan College. She also contributes to the college’s BFA in art. She is a 2023 recipient of the Rakow Grant for Glass Research at the Corning Museum of Glass and the author of Fire-Craft: Art, Body, and World Among Glassblowers (In Contract, Columbia University Press). A world-recognized expert in craft studies, she offers a symgeologic account of American studio glassblowing from the vantage of mines and minerals in her current book project, The Middle Mineral & the Mine: An Ethnomineraology of Studio Glassblowing.

Constantinopoliad: An interactive installation by Sister Sylvester and Nadah El Shazly In this interactive installation by Sister Sylvester and Nadah El Shazly, audiences read together from handmade books, enveloped in El Shazly’s live score. The work is inspired by the blank and torn out pages of a journal (that the teenaged C. P. Cavafy began when he and his family fled Alexandria); by lost and missing archives through time; and by the ghosts, both erotic and historical, that visit the older Cavafy in his poems. • • Sister Sylvester is a new media artist based in New York and Istanbul. She is a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and the CPH:DOX lab. Her most recent film, Our Ark, codirected with Deniz Tortum, explores the relationship between computational thinking and the climate crisis. It premiered at IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival) ’21 and has screened at international festivals, winning Best Short Film at the Istanbul International Film Festival. With efrin nowar she creates books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. She is currently developing a series of work that uses low-tech means to explore the stakes of new technologies, including synthetic biology and VR. She teaches a bio-art class, “The School of Genetically Modified Theater,” at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Princeton University; University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Columbia University; and Bogazici Istanbul. Since the release of her debut album, Ahwar, the composer and vocalist Nadah El Shazly has become a pillar of the Egyptian underground. In 2018, she appeared on the cover of the British experimental-music magazine The Wire in an issue announcing “Cairo’s New Wave.” The musician’s eclectic background, encompassing choirs, punk rock, and electronic music, prepared her for the electroacoustic reimagining of Arabic classical music that is inherent to Ahwar, exploring new sonic and harmonic frontiers. Backing up her release with extensive worldwide touring, El Shazly has been featured in many local and international festivals. She is currently working on her second album and continues to compose for film and moving image.

Scrolls as Material Artifacts The Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Jewish Material Culture Jonathan Ben-Dov Encounters of Text and Material Culture in Ancient Judea is a three-evening lecture series that engages with Judean and later Jewish material culture during the first millennium BCE, mostly at the latter third of this millennium during the Hellenistic-Roman period. This is not an archeological study surveying pottery assemblages and architectural plans. Instead, Jonathan Ben-Dov focuses on particular types of material objects that lend themselves to interaction with texts. The surveyed materials are widely variegated: from monumental rock reliefs that straddle the borders of nature and culture to handheld devices for time measurement. Special attention is dedicated to scrolls, which posit the text-and-matter encounter in a particularly poignant way, and where new paths are trodden today, in the digital age.

The Material of Apocalypses: Rock Reliefs and the Literary Imagination Encounters of Text and Material Culture in Ancient Judea The Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Jewish Material Culture Jonathan Ben-Dov Encounters of Text and Material Culture in Ancient Judea is a three-evening lecture series that engages with Judean and later Jewish material culture during the first millennium BCE, mostly at the latter third of this millennium during the Hellenistic-Roman period. This is not an archeological study surveying pottery assemblages and architectural plans. Instead, Jonathan Ben-Dov focuses on particular types of material objects that lend themselves to interaction with texts. The surveyed materials are widely variegated: from monumental rock reliefs that straddle the borders of nature and culture to handheld devices for time measurement. Special attention is dedicated to scrolls, which posit the text-and-matter encounter in a particularly poignant way, and where new paths are trodden today, in the digital age.

Encounters of Text and Material Culture in Ancient Judea: Time Machines in Text and Matter Lecture 1 The Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Jewish Material Culture Jonathan Ben-Dov Encounters of Text and Material Culture in Ancient Judea is a three-evening lecture series that engages with Judean and later Jewish material culture during the first millennium BCE, mostly at the latter third of this millennium during the Hellenistic-Roman period. This is not an archeological study surveying pottery assemblages and architectural plans. Instead, Jonathan Ben-Dov focuses on particular types of material objects that lend themselves to interaction with texts. The surveyed materials are widely variegated: from monumental rock reliefs that straddle the borders of nature and culture to handheld devices for time measurement. Special attention is dedicated to scrolls, which posit the text-and-matter encounter in a particularly poignant way, and where new paths are trodden today, in the digital age.

Portable Tombs of Memory: The Ringelblum Archive as a Collection of Objects is a three-part lecture series by Bożena Shallcross. It explores the Ringelblum Archive as a collection of material objects that informs our perception of the “bare everyday” during the Jewish genocide, the question of the material durability and fragility of objects, and the methods of preserving their materiality. Buried like coffins, the unassuming metal containers of what is known as the Oneg Shabbat project were filled with veritable treasure: testimonies, diaries, drawings, photographs, tram tickets, and even candy wrappers secretly collected by a group of dedicated individuals in the Warsaw Ghetto. Unearthed after the war, they have been understood as archives of knowledge with a unique significance for the history of the Holocaust, extending the spatial boundaries of the Warsaw Ghetto to the entire occupied Polish territory. The lectures discuss the protective function of the containers, their own vulnerability, as well as their contents, as both ephemeral and textual objects. In the first lecture, The Hidden Treasure, Shallcross discusses the discovery of the archives in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto and briefly narrates the concept of the Oneg Shabbat as an archival project according to which every object taken “from within” the extreme conditions of the Ghetto under siege has a historical significance. She analyzes how these material paper objects, hidden inside rusty and ugly containers, revealed an enormous testimonial value and she compares this paradox to the ancient Greek habit of keeping precious objects (agalmata) in unassuming containers.