Join us for an evening with performers and scholars who will engage and unpack some of the central concepts, approaches, and artworks contained in the exhibition Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece. Through lecture, performance, and song, Amber Jamilla Musser, Amelia Bande, and Keijaun Thomas will expand upon the critical conversations that Ibarra’s dynamic work across mediums brings forward.
Scholar Amber Jamilla Musser will walk the audience through the video Untitled Fucking (2013), 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. 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.
About the Exhibition
Xandra Ibarra: Forever Sidepiece is 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. Charged objects like Tapatío bottles, nipple tassels, and cockroaches reappear throughout her work to confront notions of racialized desire and representations of Latinidad, femininity, and queerness.
About the Presenters
Amelia Bande is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer and performer from Chile. Her work has been shown at Artists Space, The Poetry Project, Storm King Arts Center, Tang Museum, MoMA Library, MIX NYC, Participant, Inc and more. She has been an artist in residence The Shandaken Project, Yaddo and FIAR. Her chapbook The Clothes We Wear was published by Belladonna in 2017. Amelia teaches Spanish at CUNY and NYU.
Amber Jamilla Musser is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU, 2014) and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, which was published by NYU Press in November.
Keijaun Thomas creates live performances and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Thomas examines, deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of the black body in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials — her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within Black personhood. Thomas earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has presented work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles and Palo, Alto, CA; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Chicago, IL; Saugatuck, MI; Steuben, WI; Boston and Cambridge, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Istanbul, Turkey; Beirut, Lebanon; Kuopio, Finland, Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Canada; and the United Kingdom.
