Talk | Notes in the Margins: “Why I Don’t Talk About ‘The Body'”

About the Presenters

Mariana Fernández is a writer and curator. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications like Artforum, BOMB, e-flux Criticism, frieze, Momus, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and in several exhibition catalogues. She is currently co-editing a bilingual book with Vic Brooks and Jennifer Burris about Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1954) in Caracas, Venezuela, titled Tuning Calder’s Clouds / Sintonizando las nubes de Calder. She has held previous curatorial positions at Performa, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), and the Clark Art Institute.

Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York who makes sculptures and performances. Hall has had solo presentations at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Renaissance Society, EMPAC, and Temple Contemporary, and has been in group exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Hessel Museum, Art in General, White Columns, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Dia Art Foundation, among many other venues. They are currently working on a solo exhibition of new work at The Kitchen in 2025. Since 2011, Hall has also directed the Center for Experimental Lectures, an itinerant performance series that engages with the lecture as a creative form. Co-organized with Zoey Lubitz since 2016, the Center for Experimental Lectures has commissioned 46 new lectures from a wide variety of artists and thinkers at venues including Recess, MoMA PS1, Storm King, BAM, Artists Space, RISD Museum, Kunsthaus Glarus, Kunstalle Wein, and Kunstalle Kevin Space, as well as at the Whitney Museum of American Art where they presented Seminars with Artists in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Hall’s writing and interviews have been published widely including in Art Journal, Artforum, Art in America, and BOMB, as well as the Walker Art Center’s Artist Op-Ed Series, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (published by SculptureCenter), Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer (published by Whitechapel and MIT Press), and Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge). OVER-BELIEFS, a volume of Hall’s collected essays, interviews, and performance scripts was published by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in 2019. Hall is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Vassar College and was 2022 resident faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Hall is represented by DOCUMENT (Chicago) and Hua International (Berlin/Beijing).

B. Ingrid Olson is an artist who lives and works in Chicago. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 2010. Olson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; fluent, Santander, Spain; Soccer Club Club, Chicago; The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge; Secession, Vienna; Aspen Art Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Her work is represented by i8 Gallery in Reykjavík, Iceland.

Olson’s practice engages the reciprocities between photography, sculpture, and architecture, each gesture staging a manifold approach to materiality, gender, plurality, and power. In her studio-based practice the artist works intuitively, often using apertures, thresholds, reflections, transparency, opacity, light, and shadow as layered devices that collapse image, support, and frame. The results—whether captured with a camera, machine carved, cast, or found—are multidimensional image-forms that test the capacities of the artist’s body, viewers’ bodies, and the structuring of the space around them.

Aliza Shvarts is an artist, writer, and scholar who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Tate Modern, Athens Biennale, Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Galeria Municipal do Porto, Galerie Maria Bernheim, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Participant Inc, Art in General, and SculptureCenter. Her writing and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, The Cut, e-flux, October, TDR/The Drama Review, Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art: Practice, and Women & Performance, among other publications. She was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP), Recess Critical Writing Fellow, A.I.R. Artist Fellow, and Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grantee.

In addition to her artistic practice and scholarship, Shvarts has over a decade of leadership experience focused on reimagining artist education and cultural intuitions. She served as Director of Artist Initiatives at Creative Capital, overseeing their grantmaking, educational, and community programs; co-founded the Arts Research Collective (ARC), an incubator for experimental and socially engaged arts education; and developed queer theory curriculum as faculty for the Leslie-Lohman Museum Queer Artist Fellowship. Shvarts has lectured and taught at institutions including Barnard College, Brown University, Columbia University, Harvard University, New York University, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art–New York, and was a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is currently Director of the Low-Residency MFA Program and Assistant Professor of Performance at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

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Video Documentation

Video produced by the MCA, 2024.