ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of Lina Azalea Dahbour as 2024 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Next year, the artist will present Blind Date, a series of performances that bring together unlikely pairs of musicians and dancers. Each artist will perform an isolated work they create, based on a newly commissioned score, in synchronous time with another artist and no knowledge of each other’s plans.
Dahbour notes, “Chance operations have little place in modern society. Most aspects of our lives exist in a realm of infinite toggling. To give up control is not just a spiritual tradition but an artistic one that Blind Date seeks to revive. Each program is designed to maximize unlikeliness and to build connections across genre and medium that algorithmic methods would immediately dismiss. By presenting a dance work and a musical work at the same time, in the same space, based on the same score, without knowledge of the other in mind, we open up possibilities of chaos and miracle that our curated consciousness might never dream of. Artistic romances may, as sometimes happens with our personal ones, be found in the places we least expect.”
The Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship supports emerging curators in realizing ambitious new projects that will significantly transform their own artistic practice, move their work in new directions, and enable them to gain exposure to a broader audience. Entering its eighth year, ISSUE’s Curatorial Fellowship commissions emerging New York curators to organize challenging projects, serving a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support and cultivate innovative art within the local community. Dahbour follows evil dentist, ISSUE's 2023 Fellow, Theodore (ted) Kerr (2022), Sami Hopkins (2021), Leyya Tawil (2020), Benedict Nguyen (2019), Queer Trash (2018), and DeForrest Brown Jr. (2017).
The Fellowship is named for ISSUE's visionary founder, Suzanne Fiol, who told The New York Times in July 2009: “We want to be an important space for music and film and literature and poetry and video and sound art...And a little bit of dance.” During Dahbour's Fellowship, she hopes to contribute to ISSUE's "little bit of dance."
Lina Azalea Dahbour is an interdisciplinary artist and event producer based in New York City and the Hudson Valley. She specializes in multimedia movement performance and dance event creation. Her work has been presented at New York Live Arts, ROSEKILL, Glasshouse Project, Rockaway Art Week/The Locker Room, Green Kill, Trans-Pecos, Groundswell Series, Terrain Exhibitions, and DIY venues across the Northeast. She is a 2023 Franklin Furnace FUND Recipient for her work Light Meditations, a series of multimedia dance pieces that seek to develop a novel visual language. She produces BADDANCE, a dance event series she founded in 2017 that upholds the merit of confounding, obscene, strange, and very bad dance works. In 2022, she co-founded Momenta, a monthly dance and performance art event series in residence at Trans-Pecos. She operates a part-time DIY show house in Kingston, NY.
