Center for Experimental Lectures: Naama Tsabar

Rhode Island School of Design Department of Sculpture, The RISD Museum, and RISD’s Center for Arts & Language collaborate with The Center for Experimental Lectures (CEL) to present three new lecture-performances by Carissa Rodriguez, Naama Tsabar, and Pablo Helguera, whose presentation emerges from his RISD Museum exhibition, Inventarios / Inventories, part of the exhibition Raid the Icebox Now.

Naama Tsabar’s “Borders” takes up the subject of borders in their many iterations: political, gendered, national, concrete, sensory, mental, sonic, and linguistic. Written and performed collaboratively with RISD students Muireann Nic an Bheatha, Ariana Padovano, Teodore Von Baeyer, and Asher White, “Borders” layers content and meaning into a sonic mass that will be composed live into a musical score by the musician FIELDED.

These three pieces are site-specific to the internet, using a variety of online presentation platforms and presented remotely. This series of lecture-performances has been developed throughout the spring with RISD students in the course "Talking Is Dancing: Lecture-Performance As Form," written and taught by CEL founder Gordon Hall who is a 2019-2020 RISD Provost Fellow in Sculpture Department.

Pablo Helguera:  Thursday, May 7, 5 pm
Naama Tsabar:  Tuesday, May 12, 5 pm
Carissa Rodriguez:  Tuesday, May 19, 5 pm

All times Eastern Standard Time. Free.

Naama Tsabar (b. 1982, Israel) lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2010. Solo exhibitions and performances of Tsabar have been presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Museum of Art and Design (New York), The High Line Art (New York), Nasher Museum (Durham, NC), Kunsthuas Baselland (Switzerland), Palais De Tokyo (Paris), Prospect New Orleans, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Herziliya Museum for Contemporary Art in Israel, MARTE-C (El Salvador), CCA Tel Aviv (Israel), Faena Buenos Aires, Frieze Projects New York, Kasmin Gallery (New York), Paramo Gallery (Guadalajara), Dvir Gallery (Israel), Spinello Projects (Miami) Shulamit Nazarian (Los Angeles). Tsabar’s work has been featured in publications including ArtForum, Art In America, ArtReview, ARTnews, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Frieze, Bomb Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Wire, and Whitewall, among others.

The Center for Experimental Lectures was started in 2011 by Gordon Hall, and since then has commissioned 40 new lecture performances at a variety of venues including Recess, MoMA PS1, The Shandaken Project, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Artists Space, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art presenting Seminars with Artists in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Starting in 2016, Joseph Lubitz joined Gordon Hall as an organizing collaborator at the CEL. An archive including transcripts and video documentation of past events can be found at experimentallectures.org