April 18, 2025

The Foundry, Cambridge MA

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/association-for-asian-american-studies-2025-annual-conference-tickets-923884823377

An enchanting evening bringing together art and scholarship. Spellbound showcases local and national artists staging queer and fantastic performances spanning ritual, remembrance, and re-orientation. Artists include Candace Persuasion, Anh Vo, Feda Eid, payal kumar, Qais Assali, Laurel Nakadate, Midori, and Patricia Nguyen.

Organizing Team: Kareem Khubchandani, Lena Chen, Sung-Min Kim, Evan Sakuma [NAMI], and Wenxuan Xue

Jan 29 – Apr 20, 2025

Tufts University Art Galleries, 230 Fenway, Boston

https://artgalleries.tufts.edu/exhibitions/208-an-archive-and-or-a-repertoire

an archive and/or a repertoire explores the liminal spaces that emerge between archives and ephemeral new media. Featuring the Mobius, Inc. Records —the administrative archive of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group—this exhibition serves as a local laboratory, delving into materials from Mobius’ experimental performances, new media projects, sound works, dances, and installations. Currently housed in Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC), the Mobius, Inc. Records contains organizational records, photographs, and video documentation from c. 1968 to 2009, chronicling the early work of individual members and the artist-run organization founded by artist Marilyn Arsem, who also founded the Performance Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), where she taught for over a quarter century.  

Curator: Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD

Research Fellow: Wenxuan Xue

Design: Marie Otsuka

Break/Down: 1) to cause to fall or collapse 2) to succumb to mental or emotional stress 3) to separate something into parts.
The genre of experimental performance art inspires us with its capaciousness. It can be undisciplined and refined, unwieldy and elegantly concise, aesthetically and affectively unbound. It is thrilling to have such broad and interdisciplinary support that allows us to introduce the Tufts community to the incredible artists Kama La Mackerel, María Rivera-Felizardo, and zavé martohardjono. The work of each performer taking part in Break/Down emerges from specific lived experiences with unique vantages of the world impacted as it is by overlapping crises of racial capitalism, colonialism and its aftershocks, environmental destruction, and queer and trans (hyper)visibility. As we witness the collapses, refigurings, and Break/Downs of these systems, each artist uses the mediums of time, space, and the body to rework pasts, presents, and futures while weaving networks of care and belonging. Experimental performance art is a creative form uniquely equipped for urgent and incisive critique. We hope tonight’s performances live on in the form of conversation in classrooms, critique and scholarship, connections over coffee, and future creative work.

Curator: Mac Irvine

Co-curator: Wenxuan Xue

Poster designed by Jenny Henderson