Sold Out! Bergsonist: As If Reality?

Fri 04 Nov, 2022, 8pm
Tickets
Free ($10 suggested donation)
CPR – Center for Performance Research

Friday, November 4th, 8pm ET, ISSUE in partnership with Harvestworks and Center for Performance Research is pleased to present As If Reality?, a new work from multi-disciplinary artist, musician, designer and 2022 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Selwa Abd (Bergsonist). Following her previous work-in-progress presentations of the piece on Governors Island and online in June, 2022, Bergsonist is presenting a new iteration alongside projections of 360 footage and visual fragments captured in Morocco in the summer of 2022.

Selwa Abd’s Bergsonist project follows a creative approach based on intuition & fragment-based systems. Her new works are interested in building worlds (sonic & visual) as simulations set up for extending creative research and speculations on the future that awaits us. Selwa has noted that “I've always been working in fragments, whether in design or music,” and her work often delves into a prolific archive of hours of sonic and visual exploration. Often working with micro-drafts that become essential toward assembling later works, Selwa focuses on a conceptual use of fragments and intuition as ways of altering scales of perception to further understand sonic and visual mediums. These fragments are explorations scaled within the tensions between the actual/virtual that have become a signature of the Bergsonist project.

Read “Elaborate Intuition,” an interview between Bergsonist & Greg Zifcak discussing their collaborative process on BOMB Magazine

Selwa Abd’s ISSUE Project Room residency was supported by Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program for artists (TIP) and is part of an ongoing program collaboration between ISSUE and Harvestworks, two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.

Video production support: Greg Zifcak (Wavdwgs)
https://www.wavdwgs.com
https://www.gzifcak.net

Selwa Abd is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician & designer living in NYC (originally from Morocco). Under the guise of Bergsonist, she uses a variety of media to investigate social resonance through divergent conceptual aesthetics (minimalism and musique concrète to name a few). Selwa’s extended creative practice uses intuition & fragment-based systems as legitimate and only modi operandi. Through her work, she explores notions of identity, memory, and social politics. She is the founder of the community resource Pick Up The Flow. She hosts a monthly music show on NTS Radio and a podcast featuring inspiring creatives from the PUTF community and beyond. In 2020, her first full length album / sonic autobiography: “Middle Ouest” was released via Optimo Music. She also scored the award winning film “Jmar” by Samy Sidali which got featured at the Brooklyn Film Festival in 2022.

Founded by artists in 1977, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center is a leader in the art and technology field, educating, commissioning and producing work by composers, sound, visual and multi-disciplinary artists that reach an ever-expanding and receptive audience.

CPR – Center for Performance Research is dedicated to supporting artists in the development of new work in contemporary dance and performance. CPR focuses its activities in three key areas: creative and professional development support; providing affordable space for artists; and public programming. Curated and open-call programs focus on providing artists with rehearsal, residency, and performance support, which generates time and space for research and dialogue, and creates opportunities to share work in a variety of contexts. CPR’s subsidized space rental program helps to ensure that artists can access CPR’s flexible studios and performance space at affordable rates to create and share their work. By presenting work to the public through performances, work-in-progress showings, salon-style discussions, exhibitions, and festivals, CPR exposes local audiences and its community to contemporary artistic practice and process.

CPR is a fully ADA-compliant and accessible venue located on the ground floor, with two gender-inclusive restrooms and one wheelchair-accessible restroom.

ISSUE Project Room's Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and with the support of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

 

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