TSI/Harland Snodgrass Gallery to host ‘Among Us: Animal Life in Video Work’
“Among Us: Animal Life in Video Work,” an exhibition at the Time Space Interface/Harland Snodgrass Gallery in Alfred University’s Harder Hall, will be on view Oct. 9-28. The exhibition offers a cross-section of the history of video art of the last quarter-century or so by esteemed and emerging practitioners from Turkey which demonstrates a compelling engagement with issues of animal life, in Turkey and beyond.
Deploying a wide variety of modes of use the electronic recording of sound and moving image, this work invites us to rethink the meanings and effects of life and the life-like in a series of contributions to the vital task of rethinking human and non-human animal coexistence.
Lewis Johnson is curator for the exhibition; Gerar Edizel, professor of art history at Alfred University, is exhibition coordinator; and Micah Alhadeff is gallery curator. The exhibition is sponsored by the Divisions of Expanded Media and Art History.
A seminar associated with the exhibition, which includes two panel discussions, with panelists joining from as far away as Turkey, will be held in Nevins Theater, Powell Campus Center, on Oct. 19 at 4:30 p.m.
The first panel is chaired by Lewis Johnson, exhibition curator. Proposing that the work in the show indicates ways of tracking a series of problematics of human and animal coexistence in and beyond Turkey, Johnson will suggest how questions of cultural diversity and biodiversity can be productively linked. Panelists will be Deborah Hardt of İzmir Economics, University in Turkey, who will speak on “Animals and Imagery: The Evolution of our Fascination with Animals,” and Hakan Topal of Purchase College, SUNY, who will speak about his recent installation piece, “The Golden Cage, 2022: Narrating the Intersecting Realities of Refugees, Ecology, and the State Apparatus,” with discussion to follow.
Chaired by New York-based curator and educator Işın Önol, the second panel will include artists who have work included in the exhibition. Ali M. Demirel will speak about working according to “Animal Scale” and Hale Tenger will provide some “reflections on how we can live together.” Mehmet Ali Boran, Ayşe Erkmen, Erkan Özgen and Şener Özmen will also be available via Zoom to take questions and respond to observations about their concerns of form, meanings, effects, and more, in their work with or about animals.