Two photographs side by side: Ahmed Ragheb and Lily Ekimian Ragheb sitting side by side in a black and white photograph. Kathryn Ramey, a white woman in her 50’s with long gray blond hair in a bun wearing a black and white plaid mock turtle-neck blouse and a black cotton blazer and pink glasses sits smiling facing the camera in front of a white picket fence with green trees and blue sky in the background. This photo was taken at Camden Film Festival.
Image descriptions: Two photographs side by side: Ahmed Ragheb and Lily Ekimian Ragheb sitting together in a black and white photograph. Kathryn Ramey, a white woman in her 50’s with long gray blond hair in a bun wearing a black and white plaid mock turtle-neck blouse and a black cotton blazer and pink glasses sits smiling facing the camera in front of a white picket fence with green trees and blue sky in the background. This photo was taken at Camden Film Festival.

Squeaky Wheel announces Summer 2024 Workspace Residents

June 21, 2024

Media Contact: Ekrem Serdar, ekrem@squeaky.org

Ahmed T. Ragheb, Lily Ekimian Ragheb, and Kathryn Ramey will receive support for media arts projects and lead public events and workshops as part of the Workspace Residency

BUFFALO, NY — Squeaky Wheel is pleased to announce three awardees of the summer 2024 Workspace Residency. From Friday, August 16 through Saturday, September 7, 2024, the residency will provide Ahmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb (Pittsburgh, PA) and Kathryn Ramey (Roslindale, MA) with tailored access to equipment, technical and curatorial consultations towards their work on new and ongoing projects at Squeaky Wheel, including public workshops, artist talks, and a concluding event at Silo City.

Ahmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb will be working on Visitor, a short experimental essay film about an Egyptian vampire who travels to America in search of family. The film will pair a fictional voiceover narrative with docu-style video footage of the post-industrial landscapes of Pittsburgh and Buffalo. Consisting of hand-held, point-of-view shots with no on-screen actors, the observational style of Visitor will facilitate an exploration of Arab and Arab-American cultural identity, immigration, family and the changing landscape of the American Rust Belt.

During her residency, Kathryn Ramey will be working on SILVER & earth: Marina A which will be presented to the public on Friday, September 6 at Silo City. The multi-channel digital and 16mm projection performance will highlight environmentally conscious artistic practices within reclaimed post industrial sites such as Silo City. Part of a larger suite of work, SILVER & earth: Marina A, focuses on analogue film, using outdated material that would otherwise find its way to a landfill through a variety of experimental gestures. These include: phytograms in which Vitamin C, plant material and soda or wood ash is used to print onto film; burying film in compost; among other methods. Ramey’s project marks a deepening of Squeaky Wheel’s partnership with Silo City to also support ecological media arts practices.

The public will have the opportunity to attend events and workshops led by the residents on four occasions. Event details will be shared in the coming weeks. Panelists for this session of the residency were Hanae Utamura, Laura Jaramillo, and Rob Cosgrove. Biographies of the residents and panelists can be found below.

Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is supported by the County of Erie and County Executive Mark Poloncarz, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the office of Governor and the New York State Legislature. Launched in 2016, the program has supported projects by over 50 artists, filmmakers, scholars, and curators. Applications for the Spring 2025 session will open this Fall. Learn more here: squeaky.org/workspace-residency

Biographies of the residents

Ahmed T. Ragheb & Lily Ekimian Ragheb are a married experimental filmmaking duo based in Pittsburgh. Lily – American, Russian and Armenian – grew up between Washington, D.C., and Cairo, Egypt. Ahmed – Egyptian, Dutch and American – was born and raised in Cairo. Their films emphasize identity, place, feminism, cultural dislocation and domestic relationships and are noted for their use of voiceover and mixed media. Their work has screened at Oscar-qualifying festivals including Uppsala Short Film Festival (Nominated, Ingmar Bergman Award), Athens Int’l Film & Video Festival and RiverRun, as well as the Arab American National Museum, Pittsburgh Shorts, and the Arab Film and Media Institute’s Arab Film Festival. Together they founded the independent production company Studio Ragheb.

Kathryn Ramey (1967), Vancouver, WA / USA. A Guggenheim and Creative Capital fellow with an MFA in film and a PhD in anthropology who has made over a dozen films and installations, contributed numerous articles to anthologies and journals and written the essential text Experimental Filmmaking: BREAK THE MACHINE (2015). Her films operate at the intersection of experimental analogue processes and ethnographic research and are characterized by hand-processing, optical printing, and animation. She has screened at several festivals such as Toronto, Ann Arbor, TriBeca, Ji.hlava, and 25fps, among others.

Biographies of the panelists

Hanae Utamura is a Japanese interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Her research centers around the questions on modernity, ecology, and technology. Utamura works in video, performance, new media installation, and sculpture. She connects human beings and earth, using the body as a conduit. The negotiation between the human and the non-human, nature and civilization, and how all the varieties of the wills of life manifest, have been the central focus of her practice. Utamura’s work has been exhibited and performed extensively around the world, including Queens Museum, Brooklyn Museum, IJsselbiënnale in the Netherlands, and the Asian Art Biennial at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

Laura Jaramillo is a poet and critic. Born to Colombian parents in Queens, New York, she now lives in Durham, North Carolina. Her books include Material Girl (subpress, 2012) and Making Water (Futurepoem, 2022). She holds a PhD in critical theory from Duke University. She co-runs the North Carolina-based reading and performance series Paradiso.

Rob Cosgrove is a percussionist, composer, and artist interested in creating embodied sounding through intermedia installations and performances. His works explore the feeling of a sound as a tactile, visual, and visceral entity by investigating the peripheries of sonic experience and the ways these contexts affect our perception. Rob has exhibited / performed at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), Harvestworks (Manhattan), Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy), Chicago Design Museum (Chicago), National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Practice Gallery (Philadelphia), Coaxial (Los Angeles), Eastern Bloc (Montréal), DOX Centre for Contemporary Art (Prague), and KM28 (Berlin).