Thursday, August 20
5 PM

Bringing together perspectives from various fields, the ISLAA Open House invites curators, scholars, and writers to reflect on our current exhibitions. During this special after-hours event, art historians and curators Mariano López Seoane, Elise Chagas, and Ana Luiza de Abreu Claudio will lead gallery talks on artists Ulises Beisso, Yeni and Nan, and Chonon Bensho. They will explore the historical, political, and conceptual frameworks surrounding the artists’ practices, while discussing the works on view in Ulises Beisso: (Hidden) in Plain Sight, Yeni and Nan: Genesis, and Chonon Bensho: Biri biri imaboi / Your fingertips will glow.

The program will be followed by a reception and opportunities to view our Spotlight presentation on Bernardo Krasniansky, purchase discounted publications in our bookshop, and visit the ISLAA Research Center.

The event will take place at ISLAA, located at 142 Franklin Street in Tribeca. The program will be presented in English. Capacity is limited, and advance registration is encouraged.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Elise Y. Chagas is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University specializing in modern and contemporary art from the Americas. Her research brings relationships between aesthetics, politics, and value into focus through analyses of artworks and archives across the hemisphere. Chagas’s writing has appeared in print in Art in America, October, and exhibition catalogues for the Museo de Arte de Lima (Lima, Peru), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and Remai Modern (Saskatoon, Canada), as well as in various online outlets.

Ana Luiza de Abreu Claudio is an independent art curator and a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Her research examines visual authority and the role of art, media, and visual archives in shaping territory, memory, and ecological knowledge in the Amazon. Through contemporary Indigenous, Afro-Amazonian, and queer artistic practices, she investigates how artists challenge colonial visual regimes and create new visual imaginaries for the region.

Mariano López Seoane is the Director of the Graduate Program and ISLAA Fellow in Latin American Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He is a writer, researcher, and curator based in Buenos Aires and New York. He was previously the Director of the Graduate Program on Gender and Sexuality at UNTREF in Argentina. He also taught Latin American literature, cultural studies, and queer studies at the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU. In the past few years, López Seoane has lectured and taught courses and seminars at Northwestern University, Universitat de Barcelona, Universitat de Valencia, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Palacky University, and the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin, among other institutions. López Seoane has curated exhibitions and coordinated public programs for ISLAA, MALBA, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, the Buenos Aires International Book Fair and Art Basel Cities. His latest exhibitions include Eros Rising: Visions of the Erotic in Latin American Art (ISLAA, 2022) and Miguel Ángel Lens. La poesía está en la calle (MUNTREF, 2023). He has written extensively on contemporary Latin American literature and arts, focusing on the cultures of sexual and gender dissidence in the Americas, different local inflections of queer studies and queer activism, and figurations of drug culture and drug related violence in Latin American narratives, film and visual arts. He is the editor of El lugar sin límites, a journal devoted to a critical examination of our current theories and policies on gender and sexuality. His own publications include the volume of essays Donde está el peligro. Estéticas de la disidencia sexual (2022) and the novel El regalo de Virgo (2017).