ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the selection of Benedict Nguyen as 2019 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow. Benedict presents soft bodies in hard places, a series of trans-disciplinary events circling planetary events over the 2019 season.
Nguyen notes, “This platform cultivates worlds that don’t exist yet, generating new work in conjunction with these celestial cycles to imagine how fleshy bodies full of water, blood, and bones can remain soft in a building made of stone. To have this work take place on land that has been colonized, gentrified, and refashioned time and time again is not a simple magic of loopholes, but a paradox of sharing space across time.”
In its third year, ISSUE’s Curatorial Fellowship commissions emerging New York curators to organize challenging time-based projects, serving a central role in fulfilling ISSUE’s mission to support and cultivate innovative art within the local community. 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. Benedict Nguyen follows Queer Trash, ISSUE’s current 2018 Fellow, and DeForrest Brown Jr. in 2017.
Named for ISSUE’s visionary founder Suzanne Fiol, the program mentors a Curatorial Fellow by providing them with financial, technical and marketing support as they work to cultivate, incubate and present innovative music and performance projects.
The Curatorial Fellowship complements and builds upon ISSUE’s existing Artists-In-Residence Program (AIR). Both ISSUE’s AIR and Fellowship programs provide artists and curators with an opportunity to develop significant new works in partnership with ISSUE over the course of a year by offering a stipend as well as access to rehearsal space and facilities, equipment, documentation, pr/marketing, Curatorial mentorship and technical expertise.
Suzanne Fiol, who passed away in October, 2009, was an extraordinary spirit, a force of nature and a prominent figure in the visual and performing arts worlds. As both a visionary artist and the founder of ISSUE Project Room, she created one of New York City’s premiere destinations for experimental culture and avant-garde performing arts— a legacy that will resonate for decades to come.
Benedict Nguyen is a writer, dancer, and arts advocate based in the South Bronx, NY. Benedict has written for the Brooklyn Rail, Shondaland, The Establishment, Dance Magazine, and Rest for Resistance, among others. In 2017-18, they were a member of the National Center for Choreography (Akron, OH)’s low-res laboratory on dance writing. In their feature writing, they highlight the labor behind of artists’ processes and address questions of power and equity in the dance field at large. Their fiction writing was supported by an AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship in 2017. They’re revising a novel and generating short stories. Benedict has recently performed with TIN, DapperQ Fashion Week, Nick Mauss' exhibition "Transmissions" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Monstah Black. They're collaborating on new performance projects with Sally Silvers, José Rivera Jr., and Johnnie Cruise Mercer. Their own movement practice researches astrological somatics within their own sound design.
