International Pastimes: Emily Harvey Foundation
A project by Bosko Blagojevic and S.C. Squibb

5 November - 26 November 2008
537 Broadway (betw. Prince and Spring) New York NY, 2nd Floor

7pm Monday 10 November 2008
FILM & VIDEO PROGRAM
Running time is aprox. 60 minutes
A conversation will take place after the screening.

7pm Wednesday 12 November 2008
Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes
A lecture by Martin Puchner.

7pm Monday 17 November 2008
In Search of an International
A talk with Bosko Blagojevic and S.C. Squibb

7pm Wednesday 19 November 2008
No Passport: Towards a Pan-American Theatre
A talk with Caridad Svich.

The resurgent American nationalism is a vast and resplendent irony, an incongruity working in two directions. In the first, it is a properly spectacular reduction of an entire nation to the behavior and inhabitants of its federal government. In the second, this reduction becomes a national affection for what is - by all evidence and accounts - an international organization. This new national pride, like so many contemporary nationalist projects today, is a melancholic plague; the afflicted worshiping a coded totem of an absent International in order to posses the thing itself, if only as lost, as a past time. It is in the sediment of this culture that we begin to work again, sifting the lingering particulate. Ours begins as a thinking through culture.

FILM & VIDEO PROGRAM is: Ricardo Valentim, The Exotification of Western Activities, 1982-2005, aprox 20:00, 16mm film and 16mm film transferred to digital video. Tirdad Zolghadr, Tropical Modernism, 2005, aprox 20:00, digital video. Martha Rosler, Flower Fields, 1974, aprox 5:00, Super 8 film transferred to digital video.

Martin Puchner is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of "Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama" (Hopkins, 2002) and "Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes" (Princeton, 2006). He has published or has essays forthcoming in the London Review of Books, Raritan Review, Yale Journal of Criticism, The Drama Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, New Literary History, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Journal among others. His edited books and introductions include Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (Barnes and Noble, 2003), Lionel Abel's Tragedy and Metatheatre (Holmes and Meier, 2003), The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (Barnes and Noble, 2005), and Modern Drama: Critical Concepts (Routledge, forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (Palgrave, 2006) and of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Drama. He has just signed on as the new general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. He also serves as editor of the journal Theatre Survey.

Martha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York, where she now lives, after spending the 1970s in California. Rosler's work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennial of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); Documenta 12 and SkultpturProjekte Münster (2007); as well as many major international survey shows, including several Whitney Biennials. A retrospective of her work, "Positions in the Life World" (1998-2000), was shown in five European cities and at the New Museum and the International Center of Photography, New York, concurrently. Rosler has published fifteen books of photography, art, and writing, most recently Imágines públicas: La funcíon política de la imagen (Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2007). Rosler has been awarded the Spectrum International Prize in Photography for 2005, the Oskar-Kokoschka Prize in 2006, and Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2007. She teaches at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and Rutgers University.

Caridad Svich is a playwright-songwriter-translator and editor of Cuban-Spanish-Argentine-Croatian descent. She is the recipient of New Dramatists' 2007 Whitfield Cook Prize for New Writing for her play Lucinda Caval, and the 2003 National Latino Playwriting Award for Magnificent Waste. She's also received a Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Bunting fellowship, a TCG/Pew National Theatre Artist Grant, and has been short-listed twice for the PEN USA-West Award in Drama. In 2008: her free adaptation of Lope de Vega's erotic comedy The Labyrinth of Desire premieres at Miracle Theatre/OR and her play Twelve Ophelias premieres with Woodshed Theater Collective/NY in a site-responsive production. In 2009: her adaptation of Allende's The House of the Spirits premieres at Repertorio Espanol/NY and her new play Instructions for Breathing premieres at Passage Theatre/NJ.

Ricardo Valentim (born in 1978 in Loulé, Portugal, currently living and working in New York) received his undergraduate degree in anthropology at the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, and his M.F.A. in visual art at the School of Visual Arts, New York. His exhibitions include "Film Festival" at e-flux at unitednationsplaza, New York (2006), "Contrabando" at Luísa Strina Gallery, São Paulo (2006), "Art Statements" at ArtBasel38, Basel (2007) and "Manifesta7", Trentino Alto-Adige, Italy (2008). Valentim has recently started a new series of works comprised of lectures including "Growth and Culture" at Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2008) and is producing a new presentation of "Film Festival" at Le Plateau/ FRAC Ille-de-France in Paris.

Tirdad Zolghadr is a freelance writer and curator based in Berlin. He has curated events in a wide range of venues, writes regularly for frieze magazine and other publications, and is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine. Zolghadr is also a founding member of the Shahrzad Art & Design collective, the co-director of several documentary films, and has published his first novel "Softcore" with Telegram Books London (now available in German and Italian). He is currently teaching at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College NY, and curating the long term project "Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie" with Nav Haq.

Thanks to Xenia Pachikov for tactical support.