Bergsonist: As If Reality?

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ISSUE's online commissions are FREE to stream. In lieu of purchasing tickets, please consider making a donation of any amount that you feel is meaningful in support of ISSUE's 2022 commissions. Enabling the fullscreen function is recommended. The length of the full presentation is approximately 9 minutes.

Friday, June 10th, 8pm ET & Saturday, June 11th, 3pm ET, ISSUE & Harvestworks are pleased to present two new works from multi-disciplinary artist, musician, designer and 2022 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Selwa Abd (Bergsonist). The June 10th program features the premiere of a new video work streamed on the ISSUE website. The June 11th program is an outdoor performance and soundscape taking place within Harvestworks’ Art and Technology Program at Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island.

Each of these presentations are works-in-progress that reference David Chalmers book “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy,” and follow a creative approach based on intuition & fragment-based systems. According to Chalmers, as the physical world degrades, virtual worlds will provide us with new landscapes and new possibilities. Selwa’s 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.

ISSUE is commissioning artists to produce back-to-back online and physical presentations as a response to the way performance sites have been expanded, contested, flattened, fragmented, disputed, and reimagined throughout the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These commissions ask artists to produce a performance work as a hybrid two-day happening: an outdoor live event paired with an online extension on separate days. ISSUE’s prompt does not state or direct a specific relationship between the two sites and the artist is encouraged to imagine relationships between the “live” physical and the site of online experience. By seeking to contrast, correlate, and contemplate how we experience artists’ work in these two distinct sites, the series attempts to clarify artists’ recent performative tactics and hybrid methods of working amidst shifting contexts.

Selwa Abd’s residency is 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.

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). 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. She holds a BFA in Communication Design from The New School. She has performed at Basilica Hudson, ISSUE Project Room, Fridman Gallery, Dartmouth College and Boston Museum Of Fine Arts to name a few.