Tiara Roxanne’s I cannot decolonize my body

Online Screening & Artist Talk | Wednesday, April 15, 8 pm
Free or suggested donation
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To help keep our communities safe and healthy and reduce the spread of COVID-19 this event has moved online. Live Introduction and presentations by the artist begin at 7:10 pm. You will receive an email with information on how to view the event live. Roxanne’s film will be available to view through April 22, 2020, 6:59 pm.

A short film that serves to highlight the disvowal and silencing Indigenous peoples encounter historically, presently and futuristically in social, political and technological paradigms, I cannot decolonize my body, was made as an incantation for recovery and transformation. The short film is accompanied by a new text by the Berlin-based cyberfeminist, scholar and artist titled Data Colonialism: Decolonial Gestures of Storytelling. Following the short film, the artist will be in conversation with writer and curator Nora Khan on her work with the audience invited to participate in the Q&A.

Biographies
Dr. Tiara Roxanne is an Indigenous cyberfeminist, scholar and artist based in Berlin. Her research and artistic practice investigates the encounter between the Indigenous Body and AI. More particularly, she explores the colonial structure embedded within artificial intelligence learning systems in her writing and her performance art through textile. Currently her work is mediated through the color red. She received the Zora Neale Hurston Award from Naropa University in 2013 where she graduated from with her MFA. Under the supervision of Catherine Malabou, Tiara completed her dissertation, “Recovering Indigeneity: Territorial Dehiscence and Digital Immanence” in June 2019. Tiara has presented her work at SOAS (London), SLU (Madrid), Transmediale (Berlin), Duke University (NC), re:publica (Berlin), Tech Open Air (Berlin), AMOQA (Athens), among others. She is currently a Researcher at DeZIM-Institut in Berlin, Germany.

Nora N. Khan is a writer of criticism. Her research practice extends to a large range of artistic collaborations, from librettos to a tiny house. She is a critic on the faculty at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media, teaching critical theory, artistic research, writing for artists and designers, and technological criticism. She has two short books: Seeing, Naming, Knowing (The Brooklyn Rail, 2019), on machine vision, and with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information, 2017). Forthcoming this year is The Artificial and the Real through Art Metropole. She is a longtime editor at Rhizome and publishes in Art in America, Flash Art, Mousse, and California Sunday. She has written commissioned essays for exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale, the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Swiss Institute, and Kunstverein in Hamburg. This year, as The Shed’s first guest curator, she organized the exhibition Manual Override, featuring Sondra Perry, Simon Fujiwara, Morehshin Allahyari, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Martine Syms. Her writing has been supported by a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation (2018), an Eyebeam Research Residency (2017), and a Thoma Foundation 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art.

This event is co-presented with Trinity Square Video, Images Festival, and PLASMA at the Department of Media Study, SUNY University at Buffalo.

Image courtesy of Tiara Roxanne, by Charlotte de Bekker.