Act Up. Sound Out.
Thursday, January 10th
Dinner at 7pm
Presentations at 8pm
Flux Gallery, this location is wheelchair accessible

Roundtable? Join us on the Sofreh, a traditional Iranian backdrop that holds a feast, a gathering, a place to come together. Feast on the community Sofreh with a presentation of work by Yams Collective member Maureen Catbagan, a presentation and surprise Amazon Jungle Gym performance by Jevijoe Vitug, and a Weaponizing Sound presentation and workshop by Sholeh Asgary and Rachel Austin. The central microphone and stage will be open to all for the rest of the evening to pose pressing questions for discussion, to sing a song, or to share a story. What are the parameters that fail our experience today and what does it mean to be an artist within a larger community? How do we act up? Bring a spice or herb to create your own carbonated yogurt beverage. Participation is optional, but we encourage you to Act Up, Sound Out!  

Maureen Catbagan is a Filippino-American, multi-media artist based in Brooklyn whose work engages social collectivity, examines relations between identity and experience, and explores new forms of empowerments.  Collaborative projects include Abang-guard, Flux Factory, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN? collective, and experimental music groups Bloodflames and PXALM. She is currently in post-production for her first feature film Lilly Galaxy.

Jevijoe Vitug’s project-based practice ranges from painting, objects, performance to community engaged work. Drawn from his personal experience as an immigrant who constantly moves from one place to another, his projects are connected to the notion of reinvention amidst diversity of contradictions.

Born in 1977 in the Philippines and currently lives and works in New York, Vitug’s processes focus on how to negotiate hybrid identities in response to constant change by creating a confluence of the past and the future, dream and reality, invisibility and visibility, the local and the global.

Sholeh Asgary and Rachel Austin, Weaponizing Sound
Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian born (1982), American multidisciplinary artist who references lens based media through sculpture, painting, installation and sound. Related to early somatic experiences and traumas of the diasporic condition, her multidisciplinary works address the way objects create disambiguation and break down language and representation. Current artist-in-residence at Flux Factory.

Born in the backwoods of Virginia, and living and working between New York and Belfast, Rachel Austin is an interdisciplinary artist, carving her name as an improviser, songwriter, and electronic composer. Austin’s electronic work exposes the links between sound and narrative — the abstract sounds we hear so often in improvisation and the words that lace the head when filled with sound. She sometimes creates pieces of divided sound and performance art, art that intersects with the personal-political to create momentary space for suspension of auto-prescribed narratives.

Weaponizing Sound is based on the idea that we may lack the vocabulary needed to adequately express self both locally and cross culturally. By becoming closer to our own utterances and vocalizations, one will discover and develop new/alternative ways of communication sans vocabulary based on the verbal. Can this put us in touch with something unknown? Can a sound name a thing we have no name for? Is this enough? Weaponizing sound does not indicate to inflict pain on another. Quite the contrary. “Weaponizing” can be seen as an admittance of vulnerability.