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Learning to Speak in a Future Tense
March 19, 2015 7:00 - 9:00PM

Learning to Speak in a Future Tense is a one-night workshop of four unfinished projects by Aliza Shvarts, Cassandra Guan, Marisa Williamson, and Thomas Love. The purpose of this workshop is twofold: to at once provide discursive support for long term research or performance based practices, and more specifically to explore the time of the "unfinished" and the figuration of "process" in feminist and queer modes of aesthetic production. The four artists will each present an ongoing project to the other participants in the workshop, who will individually respond to these works and then take part in a general discussion at the end of the presentations. Some overlapping areas of interest among the presenters include feminism and queer politics, utopian imaginary, fractured narrative, historical re-occurrence, social reproduction, performance and popular media. This event is organized by Cassandra Guan and Amanda Parmer in tandem with Cassandra's multimedia installation "Future Perfect" as part of the Abrons Arts Center's year-long collaboration with PARMER. 




Aliza Shvarts received her BA at Yale University in 2008, where her senior thesis in English on Victorian poetry received the Lloyd Mifflin Prize for Excellence, and her senior thesis in Art was the subject of international controversy. Shvarts' artwork had been shown at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, at the MoMA PS1 in New York, and at the Tate Modern in London. She has served as the managing Editor of TDR/The Drama Review, and is a member of the Editorial Board ofWomen & Performance, a journal of feminist theory. For more about Aliza visit alizashvarts.com.



Cassandra Guan is a New York-based film artist working at the intersection of feminism, media, and utopian politics. Her projects in film and other mediums have been exhibited internationally in places including Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, Lisbon International Independent Film Festival, Athens Avant Garde Film Festival, and the Asterisco Festival Internacional de Cine in Buenos Aires. Guan received a BFA from the Cooper Union and subsequently attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. She will begin PhD studies in the fall of 2015.

Marisa Williamson is a New York-based artist, originally from Philadelphia. She received her B.A. in visual art from Harvard University and earned her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 2013. Her project as an artist is to explore and describe through performance, video, objects, and images the ways that soft technologies—“problem solving tools” like narrative, language, and myth, along with hard technologies like the camera, the digital moving image, and the web—facilitate the rendering and surrendering of the physical and psychological body.



Thomas Love is a Chicago-based artist pursuing a PhD in Art History from Northwestern University; he has a BFA from Cooper Union. He is interested in art that changes the parameters of visibility and embodiment within social and cultural fields, especially by highlighting the persistence of ingrained cultural forms, types, and genres. Recently, his practice has focused on animation as a way to conspicuously appropriate images and recontextualize them.

*animated gif image by Thomas Love, 2015