Stanya Kahn

November 7, 2014, 5:30 Visual Arts Graduate Research Lab, room 119, 1231 N. Fremont Ave., Tucson, AZ 85721

Lecture: The Landscape And Things In The Way

Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video, with a practice that includes performance, writing, sound design, drawing, animation and digital media. Kahn’s hybrid media practice re-works pop vernacular, narrativity and notions of document so that the uncanny and the hyper real, in improvisational proximity to one another, create new psychological terrain.
The work often inhabits spaces between fiction and document and stems from an extensive background in live performance. Integrating the scripted with the candid, the visceral with the symbolic, Kahn addresses issues like agency, distress, joking and the uses and failings of language.

Recent solo shows include the New Museum in New York, Pigna Projectspace in Rome, and Cornerhouse in Manchester (a survey of her solo works from 2008 to 2012) with an accompanying book. Kahn is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. In addition to her solo work, she has been in collaborative teams with artist Harry Dodge and with the performance company CORE. Her solo and collaborative works have shown in numerous venues nationally and internationally including The Whitney Biennial (08); The California Biennial (10); MoMA/NY; MOCA/LA; The Getty Center/LA, the Hammer Museum/LA; the Sundance Film Festival; Migrating Forms Film Festival; the Center for Art and Media/Karlsrühe; PS1 Museum of Contemporary Art/NY; Contemporary Center for Art/Vilnius, Lithuania; MIT, Cambridge; ICA, Philadelphia; Kunstalle, Bonn, GDR; The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Hayward Gallery, London; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles and Elizabeth Dee Gallery/NY, among many others.