From Krannert Art Museum’s website:
Antena Artist Residency | October 26–27
Antena is a collaborative project that activates links between social justice work and artistic practice by exploring how critical views on language can help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit. Antena artists Jen Hofer and Gelare Khoshgozaran, both translators, writers, and artists whose solo work centers on cross-language practices and states of “betweenness,” will use their residency at Krannert Art Museum as an opportunity to explore possibilities for new collaborative projects. Gelare and Jen will present their work to the Champaign-Urbana community through artist talks, workshops, studio visits, and public conversations, and will also use their time at KAM to experiment with new processes for cross-pollination and intersection. In the six years since Antena was founded by Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, the collaborative’s work has manifested in exhibitions, publications, performances, translations, organizing, curatorial practice, interpretation, and the creation of bilingual and multilingual spaces. The group expects to expand this list through the artist residency at KAM.
October 26 | La Casa Cultural Latina, 1203 W. Nevada St., Urbana
6 pm | Antena Artist Residency: Conversation at La Casa
Antena is a collaborative project that links social justice work and artistic practice by exploring the ways that examining language can help us reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit. Antena artists Jen Hofer and Gelare Khoshgozaran are translators, writers, and artists who focus on areas of cultural and linguistic intersection—”between-ness.” This La Casa Conversation will be a chance to learn about their collaborations to explore meaning in language and in art. Bring your questions… in any language you like.
October 27 | IPRH Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana
12 noon | Antena Artist Residency: Brown Bag Workshop
Language is embedded in our bodies, circulating and skeletal; at the same time, languages enter from the outside. The languages we speak determine social access and participation, they determine our place in hierarchies of privilege and disempowerment. Language Justice offers a radically different approach to language—democratizing in a multi-lingual, non-hierarchical political and public space.
In this workshop, Antena artists Jen Hofer and Gelare Khoshgozaran will invite discussion about the conceptual and practical strategies we can use to resist single-language dominance and create spaces where everyone present can express themselves fully in their own language. How might cross-language practice become a model for encountering difference in a wide range of contexts? Are we invited to open ourselves to “radical listening” as artists and as human beings?
October 27 | Lower Level, KAM Auditorium (room 62)
5:30 pm | Antena Artist Residency: Artist Talk
Jen Hofer is a poet, translator, bookmaker, social justice interpreter, public letter-writer, knitter, and co-founder of Antena, the language justice and literary activism collaborative. Gelare Khoshgozaran is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and translator working across the mediums of video performance, installation and writing. Together, these artists will talk about their backgrounds, artistic practices, and current work.
