Beirut-based artist Haig Aivazian’s lecture-performance examines how professional sports, public space, and the law converge with the history and future of surveillance and weapons systems. In a narrative structured around three explosions that occurred outside France’s national football stadium in 2015, the artist zooms in on the blurred lines between the street and the stadium. Aivazian describes a world and anti-world where our individual and collective selves exist under the watchful eyes of law, capital, and machines.
Introduced by Brett Kashmere and Astria Suparak.
Wear a jersey and get in free!
Screening on Loop in the Bentson Mediatheque
Saturday–Sunday, October 12–13
Torika Bolatagici, Value Form, 2023, 7 min.
Bios
Haig Aivazian is an artist living in Beirut, Lebanon. Working across a range of media and modes of address, he delves into the ways in which power embeds, affects, and moves people, objects, animals, landscape, and architecture. His work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography, the Berlin Biennial, New Museum Triennial, Yokohama Triennial, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2024, he was selected to represent Cyprus at the 60th Venice Biennale. Between 2020 and 2022, Aivazian was the artistic director of the Beirut Art Center, where he was founding editor of thederivative.org.
Astria Suparak’s cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science-fiction movies, rock music, and sports. Her work as an artist has been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and ArtScience Museum, Singapore. She has curated exhibitions, screenings, and performances for the Liverpool Biennial, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Carnegie Museum of Art, The Kitchen, and Expo Chicago, as well as for such unconventional spaces as roller-skating rinks, sports bars, and rock clubs. Based in Oakland, California, Suparak is the winner of the 2022 San Francisco Artadia Award.
Brett Kashmere is a filmmaker, curator, and writer living in Oakland, California. His creative and scholarly practice reframes dominant narratives about sports and illuminates new perspectives and histories. Kashmere’s films and videos have screened at the BFI London Film Festival, Milano Film Festival, Kassel Documentary Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Photography, UnionDocs, CROSSROADS, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. He is executive director of Canyon Cinema Foundation, founding editor of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, and co-editor of Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! Kashmere holds a PhD in film & digital media from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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