« S.W.E.A.T. » (Sex/uality. Work. Extraction. Art. Theatr/ics): with Jara Nassar and Joshua Schwebel #21
In this new year and new season of s.w.e.a.t. we will dive more deeply into questions around how we organize, vision and dream new strategies for work care and survival. I'm beginning this year with a conversation with two artists and activists Jara Nassar and Joshua Schwebel, who have been involved in organizing artists in Berlin around the topic of censorship in the arts.
Jara Nassar is a German-Lebanese-US-American writer, performer and anthropologist interested in boundaries and blurring them. She writes poetry, plays, and prose in German and English, interwoven with Levantine Arabic. Her writing haa been published in NEVER WAKE Anthology, Tangle and Fen, and Glitter. She is also the host of the annual memorial to Sarah Hegazi. As Drag King Angelo Dynamo he hosts the show Border Ctrl. You can follow her work on Instagram under the handle @jaramachtsachen and on her blog dasreisekind.wordpress.com.
https://www.instagram.com/jaramachtsachen/ https://www.instagram.com/angelodynamo/ https://www.instagram.com/border_ctrl_show/
Joshua Schwebel is a Canadian conceptual artist based in Montreal and Berlin. Working in conceptual art and institutional critique, Schwebel has presented his work internationally and across Canada. He has held residencies in Paris, Berlin, Beijing, Gdansk, Krakow, Marseille, and Perth, Western Australia. He holds an MFA from NSCAD University (2008), and a BFA from Concordia University (2006). Schwebel’s work has been supported by both the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Joshua Schwebel's artistic practice responds to sites and situations, looking at the neoliberal infrastructures that precondition the exhibition and valorization of art. Schwebel is interested in the art exhibition complex as a productive, material, politically and financially situated context. His work augments the already-ongoing institutional performances that correlate contemporary art and capitalism.
In examining the framing of art as a construct that both confers and protects value, his work reflects what we expect art to be and how these expectations veil systemic problems plaguing contemporary art including the intensely hierarchized and stratified work culture in art institutions; the instrumentalization of artists and art institutions in the gentrification of neighbourhoods; and the effects of austerity politics on cultural funding, which have effectively entrenched institutional dependence on donors and established the already-wealthy as the arbiters of taste and legitimacy in art.
https://joshuaschwebel.com/home.html
Tracks played in this episode are “Bedtime” (14 min) by Karolina Grzywnowicz and "My Fear of Pretending" by Mad Kate featuring Lori Baldwin
We all sweat as we provide care, as we labour, as we perform our work, as we fuck, as we survive and as we sacrifice one choice for the other. How exactly do we define our work and how does that work entangle and circumscribe our sexual identities, our racialized bodies, our creative lives and the ways in which we provide care? How do we perform both tasks and identities within the framework of that which we consider work? These conversations are a means to speak between intersectionalities by anchoring through our (always, already, and ever pervasive) sexualized and racialized bodies, our working bodies, our artistic bodies and our performative bodies. I hope that they contribute to dialogues which normalize sex work as work, and all work as deserving of respect, healthy conditions, and a living wage.
You can find out more https://www.alfabus.us/s-w-e-a-t/
Mad Kate (they/them) is an electronic producer, sound designer, performance artist and writer who began working the Berlin performance and club scene in 2004, expanding their unique identity-queering, genderfcking and sexpositive performative work throughout music, theatre and film. Their explorations of borders between/within bodies, audibility, consent, proximity, and touch as political practice have brought them to theaters, communes, technomansions, prisons, dungeons, squats and galleries around the world.