PROVIDENCE, RI, September 11, 2020 [Brown University] - The Brown Arts Initiative (BAI) announced today the programming for Remaking the Real, the three-year theme of the department. Remaking the Real is a series of programs that considers how artists, media-makers and art and media theorists engage with the real: envisioning, re-envisioning, and aesthetically remaking images and narratives of reality so as to bring new possibilities into existence.
The first year of Remaking the Real will kick off with a remote fall festival, starting Monday, September 28. The 2020-21 programs will address issues of social justice, artistic connections and corrections to historical records and archives, and constructing personae as strategies of artistic, authorial, and performative creation.
The Remaking the Real fall festival will be held remotely and will feature events including:
- A keynote address by artist Kent Monkman
- Film screenings including Dawson City: Frozen Time by Bill Morrison and Shulie by Elisabeth Subrin
- A series of artist conversations featuring contemporary artist Lisa Reihana
- State of Urgency, an exhibition of posters from the Print Like You Give a Damn Collective, created during he Summer 2020 protest marches
- Community artist performances
- Plus artist talks, workshops, and more
Ongoing programming will also address subjects as diverse as:
- Imagining and re-imagining “real stories” in the creative space of documentary practice
- Mapping and shaping the both persistent and changing realities of marginalized cultures
- Finding “the real” in mixed, “virtual,” and immersive realities
- Engaging with the fantastical, the dreamlike, the "unreal"
- Connecting and correcting historical records and archives
- Examining news cycles, tactics, fakeries, data-wars, and fractured audiences
- Constructing and embodying personae and avatars as strategies of social, personal, authorial, virtual, or performative intervention
- Exploring the biological, neurological, and psychological versions of experience
- Questioning certainties of authorship, subjectivity, humanity
The BAI concluded its inaugural three-year theme, Arts & Environment, in the spring of 2020. Arts & Environment examined broad interpretation, natural and manmade landscapes, constructed environments, media ecologies, global connections, climate concerns and the like. Within each theme, the BAI sponsors research, symposia, courses, exhibitions, performances, festivals, institutional collaborations and more.
About Remaking the Real
Remaking the Real is a three-year series of programs considering the ways in which artists, media-makers, and art and media theorists engage with the real - envisioning, re-envisioning, and aesthetically remaking images and narratives of reality so as to bring new possibilities into existence. Programming will address subjects as diverse as imagining and re-imagining "real stories" in the creative space of documentary practice; mapping and shaping the both persistent and changing realities of marginalized cultures; artistic connections and corrections to historical records and archives; constructing personae as strategies of artistic, authorial, and performative creation; finding "the real" in mixed, "virtual," and immersive realities; and engaging with the fantastical, the dreamlike, the "unreal."
About Brown Arts Initiative
The Brown Arts Initiative (BAI) at Brown University seeks to cultivate creative expression and foster an interdisciplinary environment where faculty and students learn from one another and from artists and scholars in a wide range of fields across the campus and around the world. A consortium of six arts departments and two programs that encompass the performing, literary and visual arts, the BAI works collaboratively to enhance curricular and co-curricular offerings, directly engage students with prominent artists working in all genres and media, and supports a diverse program of concerts, performances, exhibitions, screenings, lectures and symposia each year. The BAI seeks to build on Brown’s reputation as a destination for arts exploration, contributing to cultural enterprise through the integration of theory, practice, and scholarship with an emphasis on innovation and discovery that results from rigorous artmaking and experimentation. For more information, see arts.brown.edu.
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For more information, please contact Chira DelSesto, Director, Programs and Operations at chira_delsesto@brown.edu.