Participating Artists Include Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Tashweesh, Mirna Bamieh/Palestine Hosting Society, Ali Chahrour, Rudi Goblen, Emily Jacir, Tania El Khoury, Jason de León, and Emilio Rojas

Live Arts Bard (LAB), the residency and commissioning program of the Fisher Center at Bard, announces Where No Wall Remains, the third edition of the acclaimed LAB Biennial, temporarily reconfiguring the Fisher Center as a site for innovative and interactive performances and installations (November 21-24). Co-curated by Lebanese live artist Tania El Khoury, a 2019 Soros Art Fellow, and Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director for Theater and Dance, this four-day festival considers the subject of borders: political borders, physical borders, historical and contemporary borders, borders seen and unseen, the borders of the body, borders between art forms, between performers and spectators, the borders that divide or define us, borders to be crossed, tested, resisted, destroyed, rebuilt, or transcended. Where No Wall Remains follows The House is Open (2014), which explored the relationship between visual and performing arts, and We’re Watching (2017), which examined contemporary states of surveillance. This third edition of the festival features nine new performances and installations by contemporary artists from the Middle East and Central America, commissioned by Live Arts Bard. Please see below for dates and times for each work.

As curators Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester describe, “We started planning [this edition of the festival] January 2017, in the week that the Trump administration’s ‘Muslim ban’ came into effect, accompanied by increasingly xenophobic rhetoric and the specter of a wall along the US/Mexico line. It was inevitable that the current edition would focus on the subject of borders… The recent near-elimination of the American immigration program, together with an increase of human rights violations on the Mexican border, have made the subject of the festival even more grimly present than we could have imagined in 2017. Current US immigration policy has particularly affected people from the Middle East and Central America, and we therefore invited artists from those regions to join us in creating the festival.”

November 2019, the month of the festival, marks the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. One of the most significant and celebrated events of the 20^th century, at the time it seemed to promise a future of open borders and unification. Three decades later, the heady dreams of 1989 are very far from us; walls are being built up, not torn down. The title Where No Wall Remains, taken from a love poem by Rumi, is an invitation to imagine a utopian state of being—a fully unbordered world.

The festival is sited throughout the Fisher Center and beyond it, at the Bard Farm and in the nearby village of Tivoli, NY. The political potential of each work evokes many ideas and representations of borders: Emily Jacir’s letter to a friend, Rudi Goblen’s FITO, and Tania El Khoury’s Cultural Exchange Rate re-center the political debate around the personal, presenting autobiographical, familial, and neighborhood accounts of border crossing and navigating broader systems of oppression; Ali Chahrour’s Night brings the audience to the most intimate site of alienation, the human body, reminding us that love stories are also stories of borders and how we transcend them.

The entire program responds to the urgency of our political climates, not by merely advancing critique, but by also producing knowledge. Works such as Jason de León’s Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94), Mirna Bamieh/Palestine Hosting Society’s Menu of Dis/appearance, Emilio Rojas’ m(Other)s: Hudson Valley, and At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (part 2) (a site-specific video and sound installation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with a performance by Tashweesh) engage dispossessed bodies, erased cultures, and forgotten artifacts. Rojas’ Naturalized Borders (to Gloria) redraws the Mexico-US border as an imagined line by communities who have historically asserted the intersection between labor rights, land sovereignty, and migration. We are reminded of the everyday price many people pay for borders: the marginalization of indigenous communities, the uncounted and unrecorded deaths at border zones, and the erasure of entire life worlds. The festival’s cover image, Samar Hazboun’s photograph of the wall in her town of Bethlehem, represents a global community of artists who refuse to be imprisoned by racism or cement.

The festival is the culmination of a two-year partnership with many programs at Bard (including Middle Eastern Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Experimental Humanities, and the Human Rights Project), which have included undergraduate courses, public programs, and artist residencies.

The curators write, “We acknowledge the vast production that came before this program by artists and activists who are most affected by discriminatory border politics. We pay homage to them and hope to build on the ongoing discussion and mobilization on borders with this timely and inspiring body of work.”

The themes and artists of Where No Wall Remains are further explored in the digital realm via the festival blog (nowall.bard.edu), which includes a syllabus, interviews with the artists, digital resources, and more.

Where No Wall Remains will take place at the Fisher Center over four days, Thursday, November 21-Sunday, November 24, 2019. Admission to several events and installations is free; tickets prices for paid events are listed below, and are now available for sale. All tickets can be purchased at to fishercenter.bard.edu or 845.758.7900. The Fisher Center at Bard Arts is located at 60 Manor Avenue, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, 12504. A round-trip coach from New York City will be available on November 24.

Where No Wall Remains – Schedule of Events

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Tashweesh
At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (part 2)
LAB Commission / World Premiere
Installation: November 21, 6-9pm; November 22, 7:30-9pm; November 23, 1-4pm, 5:30-7:30pm; November 24, 3-6pm
Performances: November 22, 6:30pm; November 23, 4:30pm; November 24, 2pm & 6:30pm
Resnick Studio, Fisher Center
Tickets: $15

At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (part 2) brings together a site-specific video and sound installation by Palestinian-American artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme and a new performance by Tashweesh, an improvised constellation that brings the artists together with musician/performer Muqata’a. Combining their different practices in a joint performance, using sound, music, and images, the result is an exploration of the collision between returns, erasure, and disruption. 

From the returns of the land and stubborn vegetation that does not die, to artifacts that are reactivated as living matter, figures that return in virtual form, and disruptive bodies that keep reappearing on borders. Both the installation and performance address the intentional erosion of bodies, land, and structures in different forms, but also their re-appearance in and returns to spaces where they “should not be.” These projects invite us to consider the forms of entanglement between the destruction of bodies and the erasure of images, and the conditions under which these same bodies and images might once again reappear.

Mirna Bamieh / Palestine Hosting Society
Menu of Dis/appearance
LAB Commission / World Premiere
November 21-23, 7:30pm
Presented at and in partnership with Murray’s (73 Broadway, Tivoli, NY, 12583)
All performances sold out

In its first dinner performance in the United States, Palestine Hosting Society presents an expanded approach to “Palestinianess” that trespasses borders and geographies. Through a menu that brings together dishes from Palestinian cities and villages, alongside others that were preserved in Palestinian refugee camps outside Palestine, and those that narrate inter-generational food habits and memory of the Palestinian diaspora, especially in the United States. Menu of Dis/appearance narrates stories about time, history, and parts of ourselves that we might have allowed to slip away.

Menu of Dis/appearance is a dinner performance that invites the audience on a journey through a selection of dishes that shares Palestine Hosting Society’s investigation and unearthing of traditional Palestinian cuisine. Some of these dishes have been forgotten, their names rendered mostly abstract to the current generation of Palestinians. Being denied a state of their own, Palestinians use food as a means to express an identity that is constantly undermined. Life under occupation atrophied this connection to food, through imposing restriction policies over food and water resources, inflicting control on wild plant foraging, as well as creating dissonance by showcasing Palestinian dishes as Israeli. Over the years, such measures created a kitchen that is dispossessed, making many Palestinian traditional dishes disappear, or temporarily withdraw.

Ali Chahrour
Night
LAB Commission / US Premiere
November 22, 7:30pm; November 23, 3pm; November 24, 4pm
LUMA Theater, Fisher Center
Tickets: $25

“The Catastrophe is a violent crisis during which the subject, experiencing the amorous situation as a definitive impasse, a trap from which he can never escape, sees himself doomed to total destruction.” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
                                               
Night, from Lebanese choreographer Ali Chahrour, is a dance concert inspired by the dense archive of love and romance in classical Arabic poetry, and from contemporary stories of lovers and their cruel separation. The work references stories from the cultural memory of the Levant and Mesopotamia about the fate of lovers who challenged social and religious systems, and whose bodies were punished and sentenced to suffer the distance of separation as well as the hope of impossible reunions.
                                               
The performance records the vicissitudes of lovers and their resistance, leading up to the moment when they fall and fade away. The exhausted body succumbs, and with it falls every action and instrument/tools that the performers had carried throughout the show. The fall reveals the fragility of the lover/performer, and the frailty of all the methods and tools at his disposal. The stage becomes the battlefield after the battle, where the audience has just witnessed the death, or rather, the birth of its heroes. 

Night is co-commissioned by the Fisher Center, and co-produced by Zoukak Theatre Company, the Arab Arts Focus with the support of Stiftelsen, Studio Emad Eddin and Ford Foundation, Fonds de dotation du Quartz (Brest), and the Zurich Theatre Spektakel, with additional support from Fabrik Potsdam, and Kunstfest Weimar. Night was developed, in part, at the 2018 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab in Morocco with continued support through its Post-Lab Support Initiative.

Rudi Goblen
FITO
LAB Commission / World Premiere
November 23, 9pm; November 24, 7:30pm
Sosnoff Stage Right, Fisher Center
Tickets: $15

After 30 years in the United States, it is the day of Fito’s naturalization ceremony.  As he raises his hand for the Oath of Allegiance, he is transported to a composition of musical snapshots that make up his tapestry in this country.  Some jaded, some moot, some filled with bodies of water, some disheartening—but none ever debilitating enough to keep him from chasing his dream to be the first American citizen in his family. FITO is an interactive concert-play incorporating songs, stories, and spoken word poems that meld to paint a soundscape of what it can take to be accepted in your own home, by your own people—or yourself.

Emily Jacir
letter to a friend
LAB Commission / World Premiere
November 21, 6-9pm; November 22, 6-9:30pm; November 23, 1-9:30pm; November 24, 1-8pm
Sosnoff Stage Left, Fisher Center
Free

The artist asks a friend to start an investigation and recounts in minute detail various aspects of her home and street in Bethlehem—a site marked by movement, migrations, survival, and war. 

Tania El Khoury
Cultural Exchange Rate
LAB Commission / US Premiere
November 21-22, 6pm, 7pm, 8pm; November 23, 1:30pm, 2:30pm, 3:30pm, 4:30pm, 7pm, 8pm; November 24, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm, 5:30pm, 6:30pm
Sosnoff Backstage, Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Tickets: $15

The cruelest of borders are invisible to the eye and present in everyday life: the death traps set within a moving body of water and the concealed militarization of faraway border villages. 

Cultural Exchange Rate is an interactive live art project in which artist Tania El Khoury shares her family memoirs of life in a border village between Lebanon and Syria; marked by war survival, valueless currency collections, brief migration to Mexico, and a river that disregards the colonial and national borders. 

The audience is invited to immerse their heads into one family’s secret boxes to explore the sounds, images, and textures of traces of more than a century of border crossings.
 
Cultural Exchange Rate is based on the artist’s recorded interviews with her late grandmother, oral histories collected in her village in Akkar, the discovery of lost relatives in Mexico City, and the family’s attempt to secure dual citizenship.

Jason de León
Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94)
November 21, 6-9pm; November 22, 6-9:30pm; November 23, 1-9:30pm; November 24, 1-8pm
Weis Atrium
Fisher Center
Free

Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) is a prototype of a participatory political art installation organized by the Undocumented Migration Project that will launch in the fall of 2020 in 150 locations around the globe simultaneously. A 20-foot-long map of the Arizona/Mexico border is populated with 3,117 handwritten toe tags that contain information about those who have died while migrating including name (if known), age, sex, cause of death, condition of body, and location. Some tags contain QR and Augmented-Reality codes that link to content related to migrant stories and visuals connected to immigration that can be accessed via cellphone. HT94 is intended to memorialize and bear witness to the thousands who have died as a result of Prevention Through Deterrence. 
The most crucial (and interactive) aspect of the installation is the act of audience members committing their time and energy to meticulously ll out the death details for all 3,117 toe tags, and then placing these tags in the exact locations on the map where those individuals were found.
 

Emilio Rojas

Naturalized Borders (to Gloria)
LAB Commission / World Premiere
m(Other)s: Hudson Valley
Naturalized Borders Bard Farm Walk: November 21-22, 3:30pm; November 23, 1:30pm
Naturalized Borders Return to the Land Farm Ritual: November 24, 2:30-4:30
Naturalized Borders & m(Other)s (Installation): November 21, 6-9pm; November 22, 6-9:30pm; November 23, 1-9:30pm; November 24, 1-8pm
LAB Commission / World Premiere
Weis Atrium, Fisher Center
and Bard Farm
Free

Naturalized Borders (to Gloria):

“The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” — Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987.
 
Naturalized Borders (to Gloria) is the first iteration of multifaceted, interactive land art and community-based project, including a 72-foot long line of indigenous crops (corn, beans and squash, known as “the three sisters”) planted in the shape of the US/Mexican border line on the Bard Farm; the harvesting, sharing, and clearing of the crop and land; a mobile paleta cart-turned-drawing studio upon which persons of any background are invited to memorialize real or imagined borders; and the documentation and archive from various stages of the project. Continuing the legacy of Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldua, the work seeks to unearth histories of immigration, labor rights, borders, land sovereignty and systemic oppression. 

Naturalized Borders (to Gloria) was created in collaboration with the Bard Farm (Rebecca Yoshino, Farm Coordinator) and The Center for the Study of Land, Air and Water, with the participation of students Mary Elizabeth Klein Meghan Mercier, Kaitlyn McClelland, Gabrielle Reyes, Alexi Piirimae, Midori Barandiaran, and Austin Sumlin.

m(Other)s: Hudson Valley:

m(Other)s: Hudson Valley is a series of video portraits of immigrant women, both documented and undocumented, holding their first-generation children. Inspired by the “hidden mother” photographs common from the advent of photography up until the 1920s, a standard practice requiring the mother to hold the child still while being covered and remaining invisible in the interest of foregrounding the child, these portraits seek to connect the political and social situation of women at the turn of the 20th century with the invisibility of the labor of immigrant women today. 

Reading Room

The Where No Wall Remains Reading Room
Organized by Curatorial Fellows Sukanya Baskar CCS ‘20, Thea Spittle CCS ‘19, and Triston Tolentino ‘18
Fridays, September 27 through November 15, 1 pm-4 pm
New Annandale House 
November 21-24 during Biennial open hours
LUMA Lobby Mezzanine
Free and open to the public

The resources from the Biennial syllabus can be accessed at the Reading Room at the New Annandale House on the Bard College Campus. Open to the public, the Reading Room provides a space for individual and communal engagement with the discourse of Where No Wall Remains.

A schedule of special events at the Reading Room, including public talks, readings, and screenings, will be announced and posted here and on the blog.
 
The Reading Room is presented in association with Bard’s Center for Experimental Humanities.
 
New Annandale House, Home of the Center for Experimental Humanities
1399 Annandale Road
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12571

Funding Credits

Where No Wall Remains is supported by grants from the Ford Foundation; Open Society Foundations; Arab Fund for Arts and Culture; Thendara Foundation; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education; The Vilcek Foundation; and the Institute of International Education.  Live Arts Bard is made possible by generous support from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council and Advisory Board of the Fisher Center at Bard.
 
About Tania El Khoury

Tania El Khoury is a live artist creating installations and performances focused on audience interactivity and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. Her work has been translated and presented in multiple languages in 32 countries across six continents, in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars to the Mediterranean Sea. She is a 2019 Soros Art Fellow and the recipient of the 2017 International Live Art Prize, the 2011 Total Theatre Innovation Award and Arches Brick Award. Tania holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2018, a survey of her work entitled ear-whispered: works by Tania El Khoury took place in Philadelphia organised by Bryn Mawr College and FringeArts Festival and funded by the Pew Centre for Arts and Heritage. Tania is affiliated with Forest Fringe in the UK and is the co-founder of the urban research and performance collective Dictaphone Group in Lebanon. 

About Gideon Lester

Gideon Lester is Artistic Director for Theater & Dance at the Fisher Center at Bard, where he founded Live Arts Bard, the Fisher Center’s residency and commissioning program for the performing arts. A Tony Award-winning artistic director, dramaturg, creative producer, and educator, he is also Director of Bard’s undergraduate Theater and Performance Program. From 2010 till 2018 he was co-curator of Crossing the Line, a cross-disciplinary arts festival in New York City. From 1997 to 2009 he worked at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as Acting Artistic Director, Associate Artistic Director, and Resident Dramaturg. He also chaired Harvard University’s MFA program in dramaturgy at the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, and has taught at Harvard College and Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

About the Artists

At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (part 2)

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b.1983) work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice, largely research based, is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality, and investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances. Solo presentations include Kunstverein Hamburg (Hamburg), Krannert Art Museum (Illinois), Alt Bomonti (Istanbul), ICA (Philadelphia), Office for Contemporary Art (Oslo), Carroll/Fletcher (London), Akademie Der Kuenste Der Welt (Cologne), New Art Exchange (Nottingham) and Delfina Foundation (London). Selected group exhibitions include Kunstgebaude Stuttgart (Stuttgart), Portikus (Frankfurt),  The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), SeMa Biennale (Seoul), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), Museum Of Modern Art (Warsaw), ICA (London), the 12^th Sharjah Biennale, the 31^st São Paulo Biennial; the 10^th Gwangju Biennale; the 13th Istanbul Biennial; the 6th Jerusalem Show; HomeWorks 5 (Beirut); and Palestine c/o Venice at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They were fellows at Akademie der Kunste der Welt in Cologne in 2013 and artists in residence at the Delfina Foundation, London in 2009. They are recipients of the Sharjah Biennale Prize in 2015 and The Abraaj Prize in 2016. Their most recent publication And Yet My Mask Is Powerful is published by Printed Matter in New York. 
Muqata'a is a musician and MC who creates music from sampled material, field recordings and electronic devices. The results range from hip-hop beats to glitch. His albums include Inkanakuntu (2018), Dubt Al-Ghubar (2017), La Lisana Lah(2017) and Hayawan Nateq (2013). Muqata’a is also the co-founder of the Ramallah Underground collective (2003–2009) and Tashweesh, a sound and image performance group in collaboration with artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.  He has composed several international and local film scores, as well as dance theater performances, and is now working on different collaborative and solo projects. Upcoming and recent performances include Sonar Festival (Barcelona), Boiler Room (Ramallah), CTM Festival (Berlin).  His most recent album Inkanakuntu is out on Discrepant records.
Menu of Dis/appearance
Palestine Hosting Society is a live art project that explores traditional food culture in Palestine, especially those that are on the verge of disappearing. The project brings these dishes back to life over dinner tables, walks, and various interventions. Palestine Hosting Society is founded and run by artist and cook Mirna Bamieh, as an extension of her art practice that often looks at the politics of disappearance, and memory production. Mirna creates artworks that unpack social concerns and limitations in contemporary political dilemmas, and reflect on the conditions that characterize Palestinian communities. To date, Palestine Hosting Society has created several projects, including Family Dinners, Our Nabulsi Table, Our Jerusalem Table, A Wondering in Flavors: The Old City of Jerusalem, a table, a tour and a map, The Wheat Feast, The Edible Wild Plants of Palestine Table, Our Gaza Table, and Food Walks. After an intensive research period for each project, the collective creates a menu that is shared over one long table for 40-60 guests, with dishes carefully selected to create spaces of reflection upon socio-political realities, attitudes, and historical practices, and even the suppressed elements of history.
Night

Ali Chahrour is a choreographer, dancer, and a graduate of the theatre department at The Lebanese University. Influenced by techniques from several European countries, he studies contemporary dance in the Arab world and movement that is related to society’s memory and its local circumstances that contribute to creating a research about  a local quality contemporary dance, whose techniques and problematics are inspired by its surroundings and history. His work examines the relationship between dance and the body, and the religion and the sacred, relying on the Islamic and Shiite religious rituals and practices, especially in his recent trilogy: Fatmeh, Leila’s Death and May he rise and smell the fragrance. 

FITO

Rudi Goblen is a writer, dancer, actor, and music producer. He was commissioned by Miami Light Project to create the solo dance theatre performances Insanity Isn’t, Fair Welling, and PET. He is also known as an acclaimed B-Boy. Alongside his award-winning crew Flipside Kings, he has toured internationally, competing, adjudicating, and teaching. Rudi is a member of Teo Castellanos/D-Projects, a contemporary dance/theater company that fuses world arts and culture while examining social issues through performance. With D-Projects, Rudi toured internationally in Scratch & Burn, a meditation on the war in Iraq; and FAT BOY, a project exposing world hunger amid American consumerism and waste. Rudi is a recipient of the Future Aesthetics Artist Re-grant (FAAR) funded by the Ford Foundation in conjunction with the Future Aesthetics Cohort, the Miami-Dade County’s Choreographers Award (2013, 2018), and a FEAST Miami Grant for his book of poems and artwork A Bag of Halos and Horns. He has trained and worked with DV8 Physical Theater, Cirque Du Soleil, and is a founding member of Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre. He has released five instrumental albums, and is currently attending the Yale School of Drama for an MFA in Playwriting.

Andrews "NonMS" Diaz is an Artist (Musician, Music Producer, Dancer, Instructor, and Choreographer) from Miami, Florida. He began his professional career as a dancer, where he had the privilege to grace the global stage with Latin artists such as Gloria Estefan, Diego Torres and Jose Jose. As a member of the musical group ¡MAYDAY!, Andrews has had the privilege to perform as a musician/dancer throughout the U.S. and Canada on multiple national tours since 2011. Also a member of the Bboy Crew Flipside Kings, Andrews has and continues to share his experience with the local community as an instructor and facilitator.  In recent years, he's joined P.A.T.H., an organization focused on Preserving, Archiving, and Teaching Hip Hop culture to the youth.   With experience in many facets of the entertainment industry, Andrews will continue to push ahead in his artistic career with the hopes of not only inspiring others through his passion for dance and music, but of taking these art forms to an entirely new level of excellence.

Felix is a multi-instrumentalist musician, producer, B-Boy, and DJ from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He started his journey into music as a B-Boy coming up in the classic late 90's Florida scene and is a founding member of Unique Styles Crew. Inspired by his surroundings, Felix decided to take music to another level. As a musician Felix founded and is the drummer of the live band Fusik, currently performing at festivals, B-Boy events, clubs, and events around the globe. Joining forces with Miami's own Hip Hop group ¡MAYDAY!, he hit the road performing six national tours as the group’s bassist and DJ. His passion for music continues as a DJ, taking from his experience as a B-Boy and a band leader and pushing it on the wheels of steel. Felix continues to bring quality music to fellow dancers and music lovers alike.

letter to a friend

Emily Jacir’s work— as poetic as it is political and biographical—investigates histories of colonization, exchange, translation, transformation, resistance, and movement. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures, and in-depth research. She has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and deeply invested in creating alternative spaces of knowledge production internationally. She is the Founding Director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research and was recently the curator the Young Artist of the Year Award 2018 at the A. M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah, We Shall Be Monsters. Jacir is the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007); a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague (2007); the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (2008); the Alpert Award (2011) from the Herb Alpert Foundation; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2016-17); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); Darat il Funun, Amman (2014-2015); Beirut Art Center (2010); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009).

Cultural Exchange Rate

Tania El Khoury (See Above)

Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94)

Jason de León is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit research-art-education collective focused on documenting and understanding the violent social process of clandestine movement between Latin America and the United States. He is the co-creator of the exhibition State of Exception/Estado de Excepción that focused on the material traces of undocumented movement across the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. His first book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail was published by the University of California Press in 2015 and was most recently awarded the J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research. De León is currently writing his second book (tentatively titled Soldiers and Kings), a photoethnography about the daily lives of Honduran smugglers crossing Mexico. He is a 2017 MacArthur Fellow.

Naturalized Borders (to Gloria) & m(Other)s: Hudson Valley

Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. He holds an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. Rojas identifies as a NAFTA baby, (born in Mexico City, spent his formative artistic years in Canada, and is currently based in Chicago). As a queer latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His research-based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia, as well as institutions like The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, and The Botin Foundation. He is represented by Jose de la Fuente in Spain, and Gallleriapiu in Italy.

About the Fisher Center at Bard

Named for the late Richard B. Fisher, former chair of Bard’s Board of Trustees, the Fisher Center has become an influential force in performing arts programming, earning critical acclaim for innovative productions of opera, orchestral, chamber, dance, and theater programs. The Center was designed by legendary architect Frank Gehry and distinguished acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, and has received international praise for its breathtaking architecture and superb sound.

The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. At once a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas and perspectives from the past, present, and future.

Opened in 2003, the Fisher Center is the most ambitious capital project in Bard College’s history and embodies the College’s commitment to the arts as a cultural and educational necessity. The Center presents more than 200 world-class events and welcomes 50,000 visitors each year. The Fisher Center support artists at all stages of their careers and employs more than 300 professional artists annually. 

The Fisher Center is a powerful catalyst of art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide. Every year it produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines. Over the past five years, its commissioned productions have been seen in more than 100 communities around the world. During the 2018-19 season, six Fisher Center productions toured nationally and internationally.  In 2019 the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma! which began life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally in the Fisher Center’s SummerScape Festival in 2015 before transferring to New York City.


About Bard College

Founded in 1860, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is an independent, residential, coeducational college offering a four-year BA program in the liberal arts and sciences and a five-year BA/BS degree in economics and finance. The Bard College Conservatory of Music offers a five-year program in which students pursue a dual degree—a BMus and a BA in a field other than music. Bard offers MMus degrees in conjunction with the Conservatory and The Orchestra Now, and at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bard and its affiliated institutions also grant the following degrees: AA at Bard High School Early College, a public school with campuses in New York City, Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.; AA and BA at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at six correctional institutions in New York State; MA in curatorial studies, MS and MA in economic theory and policy, and MS in environmental policy and in climate science and policy at the Annandale campus; MFA and MAT at multiple campuses; MBA in sustainability in New York City; and MA, MPhil, and PhD in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Internationally, Bard confers BA and MAT degrees at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem and American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan; BA degrees at Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University; and BA and MA degrees at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russia (Smolny). Bard offers nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions. Total enrollment for Bard College and its affiliates is approximately 6,000 students. The undergraduate College has an enrollment of about 1,900 and a student-to-faculty ratio of 9:1. In 2016, Bard acquired the Montgomery Place estate, bringing the size of the campus to nearly 1,000 acres. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

Press Contacts

Blake Zidell                                                     
Blake Zidell Associates
718.643.9052                          
[email protected]

Eleanor Davis
Bard College Public Relations
845.758.7512
[email protected]