Join MoMA PS1 to celebrate the opening of the exhibitions Huma Bhabha: Unnatural Histories and Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt: Tender Love Among the Junk. The opening celebration includes artist and curator lectures as part of Center for Experimental Lectures; a book launch and conversation with artist Matt Connors; Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem’s album release; a cash bar; and delicious eats provided by M. Wells. The exhibitions Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, New Pictures of Common Objects, and Matt Connors: Impressionism will also be on view.
SCHEDULE
2:00–4:00 p.m. · Center for Experimental Lectures
4:00–5:00 p.m. · Matt Connors in conversation with Curator Peter Eleey
5:00–6:00 p.m. · Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem’s album release
R.E.H. Gordon presents Center for Experimental Lectures, with Edie Fake, Jamillah James and Alexis Blair Penney
2:00–4:00 p.m.
Center for Experimental Lectures is an ongoing project series in which artists, theorists, and other cultural producers experiment with the format of the public lecture. Artist Edie Fake’s lecture The Sexual Life of Patterns explores the concept of “the weave” in relation to textiles, gender, and the trans body. Curator Jamillah James presents a lecture considering comedy and the art world, with discussions of art world representations in popular culture and the comedic personas adopted by art world figures. Drag performer and artist Alexis Blair Penney’s lecture invites the audience inside the performer’s mind, discussing audience/performer dynamics.
Matt Connors in conversation with MoMA PS1 Curator, Peter Eleey
4:00–5:00 p.m.
On the occasion of Matt Connors’ new publication titled A Bell is a Cup, published by Rainoff to coincide with the exhibition Impressionism held at MoMA PS1, the artist holds a conversation with Curator Peter Eleey. Alongside texts by Eleey, Michel Leiris, Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer, the book presents the first comprehensive gathering of Connors’ work to date. In his essay, Eleey writes that Connors’ paintings “bear traces of one another, but they also sometimes prop each other up or lean into each other, as if to physically reinforce, in painterly terms, Jack Spicer’s ideas about the interdependence of poems. ‘There is really no single poem,’ Spicer came to believe; he argued that ‘poems should echo and re-echo against each other.’”
The Album Release of *The Mystery of Heaven*
Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem
5:00–6:00 p.m.
Following their first collaboration Concerning the Entrance into Eternity, released earlier this year, filmmaker-turned-guitar shredder Jim Jarmusch and Dutch lutist Jozef Van Wissem are releasing their second album, The Mystery of Heaven, via Sacred Bones. As was characteristic of their first album, the new material “features van Wissem’s incredible and fragile lute playing, while Jarmusch provides dissonance with his guitar.” The album, recorded in New York, is comprised of only five tracks, two of which, are over 10 minutes long. Actress Tilda Swinton is a guest performer on the album.
Sunday Sessions is a weekly presentation of performance, moving images, dance, music, and discursive programs. Its mission is to embrace live arts as an integral aspect of contemporary practice and ask how art forms, which unfold in the here and now, produce specific ways of thinking and useful means to engage with the broader world. Every Sunday different artists, curators, thinkers and a range of other cultural agents are invited to share their latest projects and ideas with the MoMA PS1 audience.
Sunday Sessions is made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation.
