RE—
FEST
April 20–29, 2023
RE—NEW
Bringing artists, activists, and technologists together to explore our role in re-shaping the future.
Bringing artists, activists, and technologists together to explore our role in re-shaping the future.
Re–Fest NYC Opening
Thursday, April 20 (6:30pm ET)
La MaMa Galleria
RSVP
The Enigma Room | Installation & Conversation
Friday, April 21 (7pm ET)
CultureHub NYC
Ed Kashi, Michael Curry, Brenda Bingham
RSVP
Conversation on Art, Ancestrality, and Technology
Tuesday, April 25 (6pm ET)
Hosted on Zoom
Moderated by Carol Sabbadini
With Juan David Reina, Barbara Santos, and María Buenaventura
RSVP
Renewing Traditions: Exploring Nature, Culture, Science, and Textiles
Thursday, April 27 (1pm ET)
Hosted on Zoom
Emma Akmakdjian, Nicole Yi Messier, Pearlyn Lii, Stina Baudin, and Victoria Manganiello
RSVP
Dyad: Two Bodies in Close Proximity
Thursday-Friday, April 27 & 28 (7pm ET)
CultureHub NYC
NUUM Collective with Alexx Shilling and MORAKANA
RSVP
High Desert Soundings | Performance
Friday, April 28 (6pm ET)
La MaMa Galleria
Dominic Coles, Aaron Edgcomb, T.J. Borden
Re-Fest NYC Closing
Saturday, April 29 (6-9pm ET)
La MaMa Galleria
6:00pm ET: Exhibition | New York / Los Angeles Gallery Tour
6:30pm ET: Conversation | Ajani Brannum
7:00pm ET: Conversation | New York / Los Angeles Long Table Discussion
Alvaro Rodríguez Badel, Las memorias del sol sobre las piedras.
Blair Simmons, Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete
Claudix Vanesix, Dance Permit (Denied)
Ed Kashi, Michael Curry, and Brenda Bingham, The Enigma Room
Eva Davidova, Global Mode / Horsewoman Appearing Normal
Joe Diebes, CAD
Jorge Barco, Tiempos de Ruido / Times of Noise
Juan Pablo Pacheco, Blu Dot
Juan Cortés / Atractor Studio, On Vegetal Politics & Botánica Transgénica
Juan M. Villanueva, Impetus:Arrancado
Maria Buenaventura, High River Food
Nicholas DelCastillo, Living Taxidermy
Nicole Yi Messier & Victoria Manganiello (Craftwork Collective), Ancient Futures
Sarah Sweeney, Conversations with My Deepfake Dad
Suzanne Anker, Biota
Tarah Rhoda (SVA Bio Art Lab), Bio Facts and Bio Fictions
Yihe Huang, The Ant Box
The Enigma Room | Installation
Saturday, April 22 (1–4pm PT)
CultureHub LA
Ed Kashi, Michael Curry, Brenda Bingham
RSVP
Conversation on Art, Ancestrality, and Technology
Tuesday, April 25 (3pm PT)
Hosted on Zoom
Moderated by Carol Sabbadini
With Juan David Reina, Barbara Santos, and María Buenaventura
RSVP
Renewing Traditions: Exploring Nature, Culture, Science, and Textiles
Thursday, April 27 (10am PT)
Hosted on Zoom
Emma Akmakdjian, Nicole Yi Messier, Pearlyn Lii, Stina Baudin, and Victoria Manganiello
RSVP
Re–Fest LA Day 1
Friday, April 28 (6-9pm PT)
Hot Shot Muffler
6:00pm PT: Screening of Archetype of Desire by Andrea Kim
7:00pm PT: Performance curated by High Desert Soundings
7:30pm PT: Wókiksuye by Bobby Joe Smith III (Lakota) performed by Laundi Keepseagle (Océti Sakówin)
7:40pm PT: Performance by Heidi Duckler Dance and Jeonghyeon Joo
RSVP
Re–Fest LA Day 2
Saturday, April 29 (1-9pm PT)
Hot Shot Muffler
1:00pm PT: Weaving Demonstration with Emma
1:00pm PT: Live Mural Collaboration with The Pride of Leimert
3:00pm PT: Exhibition | New York / Los Angeles Gallery Tour
3:30pm PT: Conversation | Ajani Brannum
4:15pm PT: Conversation | New York / Los Angeles Long Table Discussion
5:00pm PT: Performance | Two yeah. yeah. to by Alexsa Durrans
6:00pm PT: Performance | Macho Stereo by Marcus Kuiland-Nazario and Paul Donald
9:00pm PT: Exhibition Closes
RSVP
Álvaro Rodríguez Badel, Las Memorias Del Sol (The Sun's Memories)
Blair Simmons, Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete
Bobby Joe Smith III, Wókiksuye
Caco Peguero, FUTURING : Portable Park
Folly Feast Lab (Viviane El Kmati & Yara Feghali), Be.Longing XR
Iman Person, Untitled
Emma Akmakdjian, Four Shaft Cylindrical Loom
Jamison Edgar & Huntrezz Janos, White Man's Foot :))))))
Kate Parsons, Bloom AR
Kira Xonorika, Coral Reef, I am Presence
Laure Michelon, Machinic Reflection
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario & Paul Donald, Macho Stereo
Nicole Yi Messier & Victoria Manganiello (Craftwork Collective), Ancient Futures
Sarah Sweeney, A Conversation with My Deepfake Dad
Virtual Gallery Opening
Thursday, April 20 (6pm ET)
A Curve Becomes a Sphere: Towards Another 'New'
Monday, April 24 (1pm ET / 10am PT)
RSVP
Conversation on Art, Ancestrality, and Technology
Tuesday, April 25 (6pm ET / 3pm PT)
Hosted on Zoom
Moderated by Carol Sabbadini
With Juan David Reina, Barbara Santos, and María Buenaventura
RSVP
Renewing Traditions: Exploring Nature, Culture, Science, and Textiles
Thursday, April 27 (1pm ET / 10am PT)
Hosted on Zoom
Emma Akmakdjian, Nicole Yi Messier, Pearlyn Lii, Stina Baudin, and Victoria Manganiello
RSVP
Dyad: Two Bodies in Close Proximity
Friday, April 28 (7pm ET / 4pm PT)
Livestreaming in Virtual Venue
NUUM Collective with Alexx Shilling and MORAKANA
Re-Fest Closing
Saturday, April 29 (6-9pm ET)
Virtual Venue
6:00pm ET: Exhibition | New York / Los Angeles Gallery Tour
6:30pm ET: Conversation | Ajani Brannum
7:00pm ET: Conversation | New York / Los Angeles Long Table Discussion
A conversation with Isabel Beavers, Suzanne Anker, Juan M. Villanueva, Nicholas DelCastillo, Ivana Dama, Alice Bucknell, and Kira Xonorika.
A conversation with Asher Remy Toledo, Carol Sabbadini, Juan Cortés, Eva Davidova, Jorge Barco, and Álvaro Rodríguez Badel.
A conversation with Emma Akmakdjian, Nicole Yi Messier, Pearlyn Lii, Stina Baudin, and Victoria Manganiello.
A performance by drummer Aaron Edgcomb, electronics operator Dominic Coles, and cellist and festival co-director TJ Borden.
A long table discussion between artists, activists, technologists, and scientists in NYC and LA.
An exhibition closing event with telematic conversations and performances at La MaMa Galleria. RSVP →
An improvised musical performance by High Desert Soundings Artists. MORE →
A series of choreographic studies that explore the ways two bodies relate to each other in space through movement-based sound interaction. RSVP →
A conversation exploring nature, culture, science, and textiles. Register →
A conversation with artists who explore relationships between nature and artificiality through technology. Register →
A conversation with artists who have published research on art, ancestrality, and technology. Register →
A conversation with Claudix Vanesix. Register →
A conversation hosted by Isabel Beavers (SUPERCOLLIDER) and Suzanne Anker (SVA BioArt Lab). Register →
An exhibition opening event at La MaMa Galleria. RSVP →
Re–Fest 2023 is a hybrid festival taking place between physical and virtual spaces.
Physical exhibitions are on the first floor of accessible venues: La MaMa Galleria in New York and Hot Shot Muffler in Los Angeles. Seating is available in both venues and exhibitions are accompanied by text and audio descriptions of artworks accessible by QR code.
The virtual venue is a 3D browser-based space featuring a gallery of video art accessible by mouse controller and key commands.
Conversations held on Zoom will include automatic live transcription.
Please contact access@culturehub.org
with any access questions or further needs.
The Pride of Leimert
A crew of street artists from Leimert Park based out of The Lion Gallery collaborate on a piece to bring the spirit of Leimert to the world. Unyenz, Angie Sircuss, Emily Kirkwood, Paydaveli, Kahil Ansari, and Kesi Ruffin will collaborate on a live mural outside at Hot Shot Muffler.
Live Mural Collaboration in LA on April 29th from 1–4pm PT. RSVP →
Emma Akmakdjian
Four umbrella-like contraptions, known as shafts on a traditional loom, open and close along a 7 ft pole, exposing uniquely colored threads to concoct woven patterns. Akmakdjian chose to create four shafts with 24 threads because DNA has four base characters. For her weavings, Akmakdjian plans to perform DNA by transcribing base characters A,T,C,G into proteins to demonstrate the tension between nature and culture. Akmakdjian will weave the same pattern over and over to show how a mutation in encoding can lead to an entirely new outcome; revealing how genetic mutation is cultural innovation.
Weaving Demonstration in LA on April 29th at 1pm PT. RSVP →
Ajani Brannum (they/them) is an undisciplinary artist who works between performance, writing, digital media, facilitation, and divination. Guided by a commitment to psychospiritual inquiry, Ajani examines the stories that structure our being-in-the-world. Ajani hails from Anchorage, Alaska, and is a graduate of the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities; they hold an AB in English and a Certificate in Dance from Princeton University, and a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA.
Conversation in LA on April 29th at 3:30pm PT. RSVP →
The CultureHub team will connect festival sites in NYC and LA with a telematic gallery tour and long table discussion. Re–Fest artists will share inspirations and demonstrations of their work in the gallery tour and audiences will experience the exhibitions from both coasts. Then, CultureHub will host a Long Table Discussion, an open-source format for non-hierarchical conversations created by Lois Weaver all artists and attendees are welcome to participate.
Gallery tour at 3pm PT / 6pm ET and Long Table Discussion at 4pm PT / 7pm ET on April 29th.
Alexsa Durrans
Two yeah. yeah. to is a soloist’s gesture to space, using choreography generated by a computer’s audio transcriptions of a conversations between choreographer and dancer discussing somatics and the body. This work dissipates through site with the dancer’s choreographed body, evoking the possibilities of mediated encounters with dancing, even in the ephemerality of live performance.
Performance in LA on April 29th at 5pm PT. RSVP →
Blair Simmons
Concrete sculptures composed of a piece of discarded technology (sourced from people in the artist’s life) cast in concrete, then uncovered through hammering and chiseling. These sculptures are portraits of the person that owned and used the piece of technology.
On View in NYC (April 20–29) and LA (April 28–29).
Jamison Edgar
White Man’s Foot is an interactive video essay that choreographs the cultural and technological legacies of one of America’s oldest invasive plant species — Plantago major. The video weaves together performance documentation with found footage, and participatory computer animations to explore the ways in which non-human species have been assembled into technologies of surveillance and colonization throughout American history.
On View in LA (April 28–29).
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario and Paul Donald
MACHO STEREO is a long term interdisciplinary work of Marcus Kuiland-Nazario created in collaboration with the public and male identified artists. The work is inspired by the legendary 1955 Mexican novel Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo and the 1966 film of the same name, which hinges on the reunion of an estranged father and son. The project includes audio interviews conducted during residencies at libraries, video, vintage vinyl, and equipment from his family archive. The durational performance component of the work is created with collaborator Paul Donald.
Performance in LA on April 29th at 6pm PT. RSVP →
Juan M. Villanueva
The piece speaks to the paradigm shift I experienced during the pandemic; by examining memories of my grandmother using traditional ‘Curanderismo’ practices to treat and heal our family. It questions this loss of knowledge, which has been ripped from our culture, partially due to how we label people, practices, & things.
On View in NYC (April 20–29).
Kate Parsons
Commissioned by Standard Vision Studios for national and international screenings, Bloom AR is a lighthearted meditation on springtime and rebirth that utilizes the AR app Artivive to bring new layers of interactivity to a still of the original piece.
On View in LA (April 28–29).
Suzanne Anker
Biota is a porcelain sculptural installation employing the morphology of the sea sponge as a matrix. In the sea, such exoskeleton frameworks signal the degradation of coral reefs throughout the world and their support for diverse species’ habitats. These sculptures act as fossils commemorating the time reefs were living entities. Sea sponges are primal forms of life, arising hundreds of millions of years ago as one of the first multi-cellular animals. While ceramics is an ancient technology, the attached figurines are rapid prototyped sculptures that are coated in silver leaf.
On View in NYC (April 20–29).
Sarah Sweeney
”My father died when he was forty-four and I was seventeen. When I turned forty-four I wanted to talk to him again. I contacted Resemble AI, a company that creates clones of voices using machine learning, and we worked together to create an AI model of my father’s voice. This project is a series of six conversations created through my interactions with the audio deepfake of my father.”
On View in NYC (April 20–29) and LA (April 28–29).
Folly Feast Lab (Viviane El Kmati & Yara Feghali)
Be.Longing XR is a filmic road diary seen through the eyes of Amal, an immigrant woman from Beirut who just Landed in Los Angeles. We join her on a ride through a fictitious reconstructed residential streetscape as she searches for signs of her queer community on the houses’ front yards, porches, and windows.
On View in LA (April 28–29).
Nicholas DelCastillo
Taxidermy and death go hand in hand, but through the use of biomaterials a piece of taxidermy can be grown from scratch. Mycelium forms mimic the commercial polyurethane animal bodies used for the practice and serve as an environmentally friendly, biodegradable alternative. Dried SCOBY mimics the damp animal leather as it is stretched and arranged over the form. From form assembly to the arranging of the skin to be pinned into place, it feels almost identical to the traditional taxidermy process.
On View in NYC (April 20–29).
Nicole Yi Messier and Victoria Manganiello (Craftwork Collective)
Inspired by the textiles that have held humanity’s secrets across time and space, this triple-woven installation is made with soft electronics to collect, store and cumulatively visualize solicited secrets from viewers using sentiment analysis and long term data-textile storage.
On View in NYC (April 20–29) and LA (April 28–29).
Laure Michelon
Machinic Reflection confronts bias in emerging technologies. A camera is placed strategically in the gallery that captures an image of any viewer in close proximity to the work. An algorithm trained on a curated dataset of categories. The proximate items on the vanity, [Mask.01.A] and [Mask.02.A] are AI-generated representations of the artist's face. The masks serve as a type of tool or prosthetic through which the user could disrupt their classification originally deemed by Machinic Reflection.
On View in LA (April 28–29).
Andrea Kim
Archetype of Desire is a biomythography that explores the disavowal of girlhood, symbolic power of motherhood, and the ongoing process of posthuman becoming. A filmmaker journeys into a small village on a peninsula in Northeast Asia and finds herself in front of a 600 year old Zelkova tree where the ancient spirit of Samshin, the goddess of birth and fertility, resides. This film blends documentary footage, 3D renderings, and narration to conjure disparate memories, from within the womb to that of a surrogate avatar, into one story, told through the lens of fate, fortune, and the burning desire for a better future.
Screening in LA on April 28th at 6pm PT. RSVP →
Vinny Golia, Mattie Barbier, Marta Tiesenga, Ethan Marks
In celebration of their annual festival of experimental and improvised music and sound art – scheduled for October 13–14, 2023 – High Desert Soundings presents improvisations featuring instrumentalists from the festival’s history: multi-woodwind specialist Vinny Golia, trombonist Mattie Barbier, saxophonist and hurdy gurdy player Marta Tiesenga, and trumpeter and festival co-director Ethan Marks.
Performance in LA on April 28th at 7:30pm PT. RSVP →
Heidi Duckler Dance & Jeonghyeon Joo
With a voluminous skirt covering a convertible car a dancer (Nadia Maryam) circumnavigates her body around different states of being. The haegeum connects the ancient and the modern, the translucent and the opaque, the body and its desire to both root and rise.
Performance in LA on April 28th at 7:30pm PT. RSVP →
Aaron Edgcomb, Dominic Coles, TJ Borden
In celebration of their annual festival of experimental and improvised music and sound art – scheduled for October 13–14, 2023 – High Desert Soundings presents improvisations featuring instrumentalists from the festival’s history: drummer Aaron Edgcomb, electronics operator Dominic Coles; and cellist and festival co-director TJ Borden.
Performance in NYC on April 28th at 6:30pm ET. More →
María Buenaventura
The piece brings together some documents from the process of searching for the Captain Fish, which the artist has undertaken since 2008. This Bogotá fish, the main food of this place until the 19th century, was completely forgotten by the current inhabitants of the city and its surroundings. This legendary fish - a character, a mythical being for the artist - is a symbol of other relationships with water, of the life of this particular ecosystem today in crisis: a large wetland at an altitude of 2,600 meters and of a fishing village in cold lands, which was silenced by the Spanish invasion, and even more difficult, by the same Creole elite.
On View in NYC (April 20–29).
Joe Diebes
This drawing performance is a riff on the notation systems used for business management and software design. Although those are generally used to represent closed systems, in this work the lines and patterns are improvised by the artist and unpredictably recombined in real-time, resulting in an infinitely expanding diagram.
On View in NYC (April 20–29).
Claudix Vanesix
An immersive film that uses Artificial Intelligence and performance art to challenge gender norms in traditional religious dances in indigenous Peru. It's an autobiographical documentary about the traditional dance of Claudix's family "Los Negrasos de Sipsa", that explores a centennial view on the themes of gender, memory and reinvention of the ancestral.
On View in NYC (April 20–29).
A performance by NUUM Collective.