Sunday May 22, 2016
5-7:30 PM
Charge House at 2507 Holman Street, Project Row Houses

Charge is excited to host "Calling in Sick," a workshop on acts of care and empathy, which will be considered in relation to how we talk about the body in states of debility.

Organized by curator Taraneh Fazeli (“Sick Time”/Canaries) in the week following the Drink & Draw Zine-making workshop centered around self-care, participants in "Calling in Sick" will be invited to further think through issues of care through exercises, actions, and discussions that will prompt participants to consider the language we tend to use around the impaired body in various contexts (personal, professional, and all the spaces in between). This workshop will address how we do or do not feel comfortable addressing the social reproduction of our lives in work and "public" contexts. By doing do so, we will work towards building a new language around bodily impairment that does not see illness as the private property of one individual but a collective concern, and find ways to support each other as existence under capitalism becomes impossible.

Fazeli’s ongoing project “Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” brings together artists, disability activists, and other practitioners doing work on the body to consider the states of debility, rest, and disability (particularly their temporalities) as potentially resistive to capitalism and other forces of oppression. Grappling with the off-tempo body that won’t efficiently labor, “Sick Time” considers how the leaky and porous body in states of debility can provide new possibilities for collectivity, privileging interdependency while also negotiating and maintaining difference through radical kinship and forms of care.

As part of “Sick Time,” the Canaries, a group of woman-identified and gender non-conforming creatives with auto-immune diseases and related disorders, have been producing the publication “Notes for the Waiting Room,” which investigates the bifurcation of body and mind in Western bio-medicine and other discourses and links auto-immune diseases to feminized discourses of hysteria and hypochondria. This workshop is rooted in materials from the forthcoming publication.

Access: Please also include any access needs, not limited to but including: wheelchair access, gender-neutral bathrooms, chemical sensitivities, special seating, and language translation (ASL or non-English). We will do our best to support requests.

Taraneh Fazeli, Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying

Taraneh Fazeli is a curator, educator, editor, and researcher from New York. She is currently a critic-in-residence at the Museum of Fine Art Houston’s Core Program (2015-17). Her practice emerges from legacies of institutional critique and pedagogy, witnessed in her work at the New Museum where she served as co-founder of the postgraduate R&D Seminars; editor of Six Degrees; and, as part of the R&D Season’s curatorial staff, co-organizer the 2015 R&D SPECULATION Season (2012-15). Previously she was a Contributing Editor to Triple Canopy (2011-12) and the Managing Director of e-flux (2008-11), where she oversaw publications such as art-agenda and organized exhibitions with artists including Raqs Media Collective, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Mladen Stilinović. She studied at the Cooper Union and CUNY Graduate Center.

Recent curatorial projects such as the “Temporary Center for Translation,” (2014) and “Occupied Territory: A New Museum Trilogy,”(2014) focused on the relationship of pedagogy and language to the ontological status of the postcolonial subject. Fazeli is a member of the Canaries, a collective of artists with auto-immune disorders, and Pedagogy Group, a collective of socially-engaged art educators.