The Napping Wizard Sessions

On April 02, 2021 I spoke with Farideh Sakhaeifar about her exhibition You are in the War Zone at Trotter and Sholer in New York’s Lower East Side and her residency at Koda Lab in Brooklyn. The presentations introduce several of her visual experiments from the last decade as a kind of survey. Her work explores various themes from the Middle East and her native Iran, and the differences and complexities of living in the United States since 2009. How does the media influence the way we see our position in the world? Having known Farideh since 2013, I take cues from the exhibition as opportunities to go off script into the past and future of her work and how she has handled the remarkable year that 2020 has been. Audio excerpts from Halabja, 1988, with sound design by Sadra Shahab and narration by Maryam Ghoreishiand vocal excerpt by Hussein Smko from the Hekler event The People’s Tribunal.You are in the War Zone was organized jointly by Trotter and Sholer: https://trotterandsholer.com/exhibition/you-are-in-the-war-zone/and Koda Lab: https://www.kodalab.org/with contributions and collaborations from Hekler: https://www.hekler.org/Details about Farideh and her work can also be found here: https://faridehsakhaeifar.com/I recommend you browse the website as we discuss the work and follow along with the images of the titles we introduce.

The following is a transcript from a lecture I delivered at A Night of Philosophy, a free event that hosted 62 international philosophers and 12 artists on April 24, 2015 from 7pm to 7am simultaneously at the French Embassy and The Ukrainian Institute on New York City’s Upper East Side. I was invited as an artist, and I chose the subject of the shape-shifting character Leshonkii, of Ukrainian, Russian and Slavic folklore, to adapt to the site of the Ukrainian Institute. As an artist, the logical shape to shift into was that of a philosopher. I delivered my lecture in a crowded auditorium on The Philosophy of the Comic and Tickling at 03:50 am. I have no audio or video documentation of the event, so this is a post-performance presentation. The laugh tracks and supplemental audio was included in the live performance.

In this reading from The Night of Philosophy in 2019 on October 06 at 03:00 am at the New School for Social Research in New York City, Cia Rinne was listed on the program with a presentation titled softly The Usage of Words. Listening to Cia Rinne’s poems is like channel flipping through international TV stations with the desire to reduce the mass of verbal waste by limiting each channel to just a single word. But infinity is infinity no matter the limits you put on how much fun you’re having with it. Minimalism pretends to seek silence, but it accumulates too much joy along the way. Cia Rinne is a multi-lingual Swedish-born poet and artist based in Berlin. Her publications include zaroum, notes for soloists and l’usage du mot. For 6 years she documented the lives of Roma communities in Hungary, India, Greece, Romania, France, Russia and Finland while she collaborated on a book titled, “The Roma Journeys.” Her visual, literary and acoustic works have been included in various international exhibitions. More can be found below:http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Rinne.phpSamples from: Steve Reich, Different Trains, Electric Counterpoint – 3. After The War; Samuel Becket from Aspen 5&6; and Cia Rinne from Notes for Soloists with sound design by Sebastian Eskildsen, 2011