SOLO EXHIBITION PROGRAMMING
Join us for an evening with performers and scholars Amber Jamilla Musser, Amelia Bande, and Keijaun Thomas who will engage and unpack some of the central concepts, approaches, and artworks contained in the solo exhibition Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece.
Scholar Amber Jamilla Musser will walk the audience through the video Untitled Fucking, a collaborative work made by Xandra Ibarra and artist Amber Hawk Swanson, weaving together critical analysis and personal anecdotes of lessons learned from Ibarra’s body of work. Writer and performer Amelia Bande will present a combination of song and text based on personal anecdotes that exercise a sidepiece methodology while drawing out strategies of humor as mode of critique within the exhibition. The evening will conclude with performer Keijaun Thomas, who will present a work in progress that resonates with Ibarra’s engagement with embodiment, excess, and material slippages.Knockdown Center is pleased to present Notes from the Sidelines Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece, the first NYC solo exhibition of Oakland-based artist and performer Xandra Ibarra, who also works under the alias La Chica Boom. The exhibition is rooted in Ibarra’s performance practice, extending to sculpture, video, and photographs made between 2012 and 2019, some of which will be on view for the first time. Ibarra deploys a sharp-witted humor in her work to explore and exploit the condition of the “sidepiece”– a term for a woman whose relationships privilege the physical and take place on the periphery. For Ibarra, however, the sidepiece’s position in the margins enables her to sidestep grand narratives; she claims the sidepiece is a charged position from which to act.
THE KNOCKDOWN CENTER, NEW YORK
Oct. 20, 2019
For more information visit:
knockdown.center/event-category/exhibitions/
Sept. 28, 2019 – Jan. 29, 2020
GROUP EXHIBITION – ON OUR BACKS: THE REVOLUTIONARY ART OF SEX WORK
This exhibition is curated by Alexis Heller and explores the history of queer sex work culture, and its intimate ties to art and activism. Coined by bisexual activist, Carol Leigh, aka The Scarlot Harlot in 1978, ‘sex work’ is broadly defined as exchanging sex or erotic services for gain and connotes personal agency and politicized action. More than a portrait of life at the margins, what emerges in this exhibit is a demonstration of queer and transgender sex workers’ deep community building, creative organizing, self-empowerment, identity/desire affirmation and healing and the use of pornography as a deft tool for queer and trans liberation.
IMAGE CREDIT:
Juniper Fleming, Bar at Folies Bergere, 2015/2018, Archival silver gelatin fiber print and oil paint, 34 x 42 in.
Courtesy of the Artist. © Juniper Fleming.
Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York
For more information visit:
leslielohman.org/project/queer-sex-workers
Sept. 14, 2019 –
Oct. 13,
2019
GROUP EXHIBITION – FEEL ME?
There’s a tiny space between feeling and knowing. Worlds of engagement are possible within that space. In the realm of the social, senses can take over, words feel cliché, histories run up against the present-tense. Feel Me? offers up a few feminist approaches to the sensorial contours of the social. These material manifestations — skin sores, saliva, blood and sweat — and take poetic shape in found and made objects that quietly ask us to reconsider the things we feel and the things we leave behind for others to feel.
Participating artists: Sadie Barnette (Oakland/Los Angeles), Xandra Ibarra (Oakland), Dylan Mira (Los Angeles), Kristan Kennedy (Portland), Tina Takemoto (San Francisco). Curator: Sampada Aranke (PhD, Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory.
Iceberg Projects, Chicago
For more information visit:
icebergchicago.com
Aug. 29 – Oct. 27,
2019
SOLO EXHIBITION, XANDRA IBARRA: FOREVER SIDEPIECE
Knockdown Center is pleased to present Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece, the first NYC solo exhibition of Oakland-based artist and performer Xandra Ibarra, who also works under the alias La Chica Boom. The exhibition is rooted in Ibarra’s performance practice, extending to sculpture, video, and photographs made between 2012 and 2019, some of which will be on view for the first time. Ibarra deploys a sharp-witted humor in her work to explore and exploit the condition of the “sidepiece”– a term for a woman whose relationships privilege the physical and take place on the periphery. For Ibarra, however, the sidepiece’s position in the margins enables her to sidestep grand narratives; she claims the sidepiece is a charged position from which to act.
Knockdown Center, NYC
For more information visit:
knockdown.center/event-category/exhibitions/
July 17,
2019
Visiting Artist Lecture Series -School of Art Institute of Chicago
ARTIST LECTURE for SAIC’s Low-Residency MFA: Visiting Artists Series
Ibarra will give an artist lecture to students for SAIC’s low res MFA program.
For more information visit:
www.saic.edu/academics/departments/low-residency/visiting-artists-series
June
22 – 23, 2019
Montpellier Danse, France
DANSE – THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY ASS by Miguel Gutierrez
In This Bridge Called My Ass six Latinx performers – Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Miguel Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, and Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez – map an elusive choreography of obsessive and perverse action within an unstable terrain of bodies, materials and sound. A formal logic binds the group propelling them to create a constantly transforming world where their togetherness retains autonomy to complicate the idea of identity. Clichéd Latin-American songs and the form of the telenovela are exploited to show how familiar structures contain absurdity that reveal and celebrate difference. With Stephanie Acosta as dramaturg/assistant director, Tuçe Yasak as lighting designer and Matt Shalzi on set construction.
For more information visit:
www.montpellierdanse.com/spectacle/this-bridge-called-my-ass
June 14, 2019
ExTeresa Arte Actual, Mexico City
PERFORMANCE: NUDE LAUGHING
Ibarra will perform Nude Laughing as part of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics Encuentro 2019: The World Inside Out: Humor, Noise and Performance. In an endurance-based performance of laughing while nude, Ibarra drags a nylon skin cocoon filled with paradigmatic “white lady accoutrements.” She engages the vexed entanglements that racialized subjects have with whiteness and white womanhood, and she embodies the skein of race, negotiating the joys and pains of subjection, abjection, and personhood.
For more information visit:
hemisphericinstitute.org/en/encuentro-2019-performances/item/2944-xandra-ibarra.html
June 10-14, 2019
Mexico City, Encuentro: the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics
WORKING GROUP Led by Joshua Chambers Letson, Xandra Ibarra, Kelly Chung, Malik Gaines & Hentyle Yapp
This working group examines the work, uses, and limits of Marxism for a world inside out. As retrenched authoritarianism and right-wing nationalism rise alongside and in response to capitalism’s continued (dis)ordering of the contemporary world, what political frameworks and practices do we have to fracture and denounce power and transform the political landscape? Rather than celebrating Marxism and class struggle as the answers to (neo)liberal world orders, this working group aims to queer Marxist commitments by analyzing the work to which minoritarian subjects put socialist and Marxist ideals in the past, present, and future. How, we ask, do the practices of disabled, racialized, queer, indigenous, trans, and feminist communities become occluded by Marxism’s universalism, yet amending its very tenets? What does redistribution look like when it contends not just with a focus on the means of production, but also on the material forces of indigeneity, third/first world divides, and racial liberalism? How does sexuality attend to capitalist production, and how is historical materialism shaped by desires, drives, pleasures, and their reproduction? Rather than prescribing answers to such questions, we turn to aesthetic, activist, and theoretical practices that help us grapple with our longings to build a world to come through the elaboration, praxis, and proliferation of minor Marxisms.
For more information visit:
beta.hemisphericinstitute.org/en/enc19-work-groups/2430-enc19-wg-11.html/
EVERYTHING IS JUST WONDERFUL / BETTER THAN FINE
This exhibition brings together artworks with a shared interest in the complicated relationship between appearances and that which lies below the surface. The included artists -LEX BROWN, RAQUE FORD, DANIEL GORDON, XANDRA IBARRA, JOIRI MINAYA, MACON REED AND KEN TISA- make use of bright color palettes, surreal imagery, humor, and the banal as means of leveling critique as contraband. It is not so much that these artists are looking to keep up appearances, but rather that they recognize that pretty packaging and a smile can often be the sharpest and most disarming of tactics.
Werble Gallery (NYC)
May 28- July 26, 2019
For more information visit:
katewerblegallery.com
May 5, 2019
FILM SCREENING OF EISNER PRIZE AWARDEES
This year Ibarra won the Eisner Prize for Film and Video. The prizewinners and honorable mentions in the film and video category of the Eisner Prize competition will be screened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The Eisner Prize is the highest award for creativity given on the UC Berkeley campus. Expect narratives, documentaries, experimental works, and animations. A handout with written descriptions by the artists will be available at the screening. This annual event, presented at BAMPFA since 1991, provides an opportunity for the filmmakers to meet and share their work with the community; join them!
Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive (Berkeley)
For more information visit:
bampfa.org/event/works-eisner-competition-2019
GROUP EXHIBITION
SYSTEM FAILURE presents work from a diverse group of media artists who explore ideologies of disruption, critique the social and political effects of technological breakdown, and tactically produce errors by building tools that are never meant to function. In responding to contemporary concerns, the works address the strengths and shortcomings of a wide range of local and global technologies. Installations address biases in the data used to build artificial intelligence alongside videos tracking the displacement of San Francisco’s low-income communities. Playful sculptures trick companies that track our every step, while an interactive chatbot indicts police departments’ dubious adoption of body cams. Human and computer-generated paintings demonstrate the inability of facial recognition to parse certain faces and also the playful pleasures of using machine learning to generate portraits. Other artists find pleasure in impossible connections, remix the imagery of corporate pitch culture, and create obfuscated codes and poems only they can understand.
Minnesota Street Gallery (SF)
May 4-25, 2019
For more information visit:
www.facebook.com/events/2351366951751322/
May 3, 2019
CONVERSATION : JAKEYA CARUTHERS AND XANDRA IBARRA
How does one survive and thrive as an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area? The art world is inundated with stories from the community and media about artists being displaced in the face of great wealth disparity, a crushing housing crisis, the lack of sustainable employment in the arts, and a threatening decrease in exhibition and funding sources. Living and Working consists of a multi-author column, a video series, and live events where artists and cultural workers answer the question “How do you live and work in the Bay Area?”
For our live event series, we invited artists to speak to a specific location or site that holds significance to their practice or experience living in the Bay Area. Join Jakeya Caruthers and Xandra Ibarra in the Growlery’s kitchen to commemorate the many conversations had in each other’s kitchens.
The Growlery (SF)
For more information visit:
www.facebook.com/events/2768857693129824/
April 12, 2019
Hammer Theater Center, SJSU
PANEL
Join San José State University on Friday, April 12th, 2019, Noon – 4pm at the SJSU Hammer Theatre Center in downtown San José for the Paseo Prototyping M3 + Deep Humanities & Arts Interdisciplinary Symposium
Cross-fertilizing two interdisciplinary initiatives at SJSU – the SJSU Paseo Prototyping Challenge & the Deep Humanities & Arts – the symposium aims to advance productive conversations about humanity and the digital revolution in the anthropocene era while providing critical frameworks and constructive feedback for emerging Paseo student prototypes.
March 26, 2019
DISCUSSION- PROF. AMBER JAMILLA MUSSER AND ARTIST XANDRA IBARRA
Amber Jamilla Musser, Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University & author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance will be in discussion with performance artist Xandra Ibarra at Princeton University. The discussion/salon is sponsored by the Princeton University Department of English and the Department of African American Studies. The event will be held on March 26 at 4:30pm in Mc Cormick 106.
Princeton University
Feb. 15, 2019
University of California, Berkeley
DISCUSSION- PROF. JUANA MARIA RODRIGUEZ AND ARTIST XANDRA IBARRA
Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Core faculty in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley & author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014). Rodriguez and Ibarra will be in conversation thanks to the sponsorship and support of The Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures at UC Berkeley.
DANCE – THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY ASS by Miguel Gutierrez
In This Bridge Called My Ass six Latinx performers – Alvaro Gonzalez, John Gutierrez, Miguel Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, and Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez – map an elusive choreography of obsessive and perverse action within an unstable terrain of bodies, materials and sound. A formal logic binds the group propelling them to create a constantly transforming world where their togetherness retains autonomy to complicate the idea of identity. Clichéd Latin-American songs and the form of the telenovela are exploited to show how familiar structures contain absurdity that reveal and celebrate difference. With Stephanie Acosta as dramaturg/assistant director, Tuçe Yasak as lighting designer and Matt Shalzi on set construction.
Chocolate Factory, NYC
-
Part of American Realness
Jan. 9 – 19, 2019
Dec. 14 – Feb. 3,
2019
Cuchifritos Gallery, NYC
GROUP SHOW – EXTREMELY ABSORBENT AND INCREASINGLY HOLLOW
The artworks included in the exhibition Extremely absorbent and increasingly hollow complicate the notion of a discrete body as separate from the unruly matter of the physical world and impervious to the penetration of cultural signifiers from the social world. Working across sculpture, performance, and video, artists Xandra Ibarra, Alison Kuo, and Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin forego direct representation, instead employing materials that stand in for the mass of the body and the surface of the skin to consider processes of consumption and anxieties around contamination.