HUMANWATCHING
New Collaborative Work by Conrad Cheung and Anna Hogg
On view: October 3 - November 20, 2024
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 3, 2024 | 5:30 - 8PM
ABOUT
THE EXHIBITION
“What is a human to a pigeon, a person to a rock dove, a homo sapiens to a columbia livia? Humanwatching conceives of humans in the image of pigeons and the process of futuring not as sustaining the Anthropocene but as introducing interspecies possibilities in which the columbiform is the hottest form”
ABOUT THE
ARTISTS
Conrad Cheung is an artist and educator working across installation, performance, architecture, video, VR, and more. Their practice proposes zones of alternative spatiality, sociality, and affect in order to realize anarchic, queer, and interspecies forms of flourishing and communing. In the face of our civic and ecological crises, what material infrastructures and reconfigurations of care, desire, and normativity might allow for the emergence of eclectic new publics, reimaginings of resistance and refusal, and experiments in living differently with others, particularly others who may be politically illegible or other-than-human? Cheung’s practice is driven by tactics of parafiction, participation, and site-specificity, and is committed to transdisciplinary collaboration with practitioners across creative and academic fields. They are currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and affiliate faculty in the Environmental Thought and Practice program at the University of Virginia. They work under the corporate alias The Institute for Improvisational Infrastructures with a rotating cast of collaborations, under several fictional identities for intervention in far-right and conspiracist circles, and as the artist collective nonhumanities with Anna Hogg and Katie Baer Schetlick.
To learn more about Conrad Cheung and his work, visit his website: https://www.conradcheung.com/
Anna Hogg is a teaching artist and filmmaker whose work addresses the relationship between memory and the body archive.
These investigations extend to the collective feminine that gathers memory, its objects and stories, the archive as affected by trauma, the intergenerational archive, as well as the ever-accruing archive of daily media and news sources. Within these contexts, one finds that the act of remembering and forgetting, preserving and refusing—making into refuse—are often intimately connected, and the boundary that divides them more fluid.
Her practice is based in both research and writing, touching upon feminist discourse, queer theory, and phenomenology. The form of each project is determined by the subject and the intersecting frameworks of documentary, narrative, essay, and poetic film practices. Whether re-speaking audio recordings in the style of verbatim theatre, creating a large life-sized camera obscura in which to create long exposure time-lapses of the body in movement, or editing image and sound as a stream-of-consciousness of the archive, the films transgress the easily defined boundaries of genre and discourse, often existing in multiple iterations.
Her films have screened internationally, including the Kasseler DokFest, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. She was awarded the Jury prize for Best International Work at the 2017 WNDX Festival, and nominated for the Golden Key award at the 2017 Kasseler DokFest. She holds an MFA in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts and now teaches Cinematography at the University of Virginia.
To learn more about Anna Hogg and her work, visit her website: https://annahoggfilms.com/
This exhibition is also supported in part by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, which receives support from the Virginia General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
