6pm Doors / 6:30pm Talk
Free

Martine Syms (b. 1988) is an American artist who coined the term “conceptual entrepreneur” in 2007 to describe her area of critical inquiry. Working with digital media, film, and installation, Syms examines the construction and performance of black identity as a response to the experience of surveillance and consumer culture, while operating publication platforms such as Dominica Publishing, a press that has published and distributed work by Laurie Anderson, Diamond Stingily, and Hannah Black.    

Experience It is a conversation series about this work. In close dialogue with visiting artists, the series will examine, among other things, the social and architectural conditions of an exhibition site. The format will include conversations between each artist and the writer and art historian James Voorhies, as well as viewings of film clips, performances, and images of their work to dissect and analyze their multivalent, time-based activity. The series will address questions around the making and reception of this work by looking closely at artists’ practices and processes, their engagement with institutional infrastructures, and discussing how they negotiate the economics of making work. Experience It aims to reveal why artists choose their given artistic approaches, how institutions support them, and how they imagine their audiences as integral to the art, ultimately arriving at a better understanding of the “it” in the work.

Organized by James Voorhies, Dean of Fine Arts and Acting Chair of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts, in partnership with Dena Beard, Director of The Lab.

7:30pm Doors / 8:00pm Performance
$15 Guests / Free for members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

Weight of the world.
We crack.

Atlas presents an urgent sonic experience where silence is as meaningful as the nervous but minimalist vocabulary raining down. Atlas is concerned with the negotiations of burden – who holds what. It teases assumed agreements between performer and audience – using immersive physical sonic states to press weight upon the room. Atlas is a score of disorientation that places the performers at the mercy of their own doing.

Atlas was developed at TAC (Oakland) and Movement Research (NYC).  Atlas premiered at New York Live Arts/Live Ideas 2016 and shortly thereafter was presented at the After the Last Sky Festival (Berlin).  This is the duo’s first bay area appearance. Dominic Cramp’s Lord Tang will open.

Saturday, February 24, 2018; 7-7:30pm
16th and Mission BART Plaza
Free

100 years after the beginnings of the Great Migration, San Francisco's black population, like the black populations in urban cities around the country, has been gutted. Historically, the North and West offered black Americans social and economic opportunities that could not be found in the Southern states our predecessors sought to escape. Now that has shifted to what many are calling a New Great Migration back to the South. Bailey asks, what does it mean for current socio-economic conditions to force black Americans back to the South?

The Lab’s 16th and Mission Project invites artists and the public to use the 16th Street and Mission BART plaza as a public art forum: a site for active social exchange through the medium of constructed situations. Events programmed for the corner’s regulars and passing pedestrians will inspire curiosity, participation, dialogue, and active witnessing. The actions are led by artists working in fields ranging from social practice and dance to mixed visual media and social justice.

Presented in conjunction with Limited Edition. Limited Edition is an Open Space partnership with CounterPulse, The Lab, ODC Theater, Performance at SFMOMA, and Z Space, exploring questions of legacy and lineage through performances, discussions, and gatherings at various locations throughout the city, with commissioned texts appearing regularly online. For more information about the partnership, please visit Open Space. 

7-9pm, readings start promptly at 7:30pm
$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration


George Albon’s most recent books are Fire Break (poetry) and Aspiration (essay), both from 2013. Earlier books include Momentary Songs, Step, and Brief Capital of Disturbances. Fire Break won the NCIBA award for Best Poetry in 2014. Brief Capital was the Book of the Year from Small Press Traffic in 2004. Work of his has appeared in Chicago Review, Hambone, O Anthology 4, New American Writing, Crayon, Poetry Salzburg Review, Talisman, Stonecutter Journal, and elsewhere; and in the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, and Bay Poetics. Pieces on Morton Feldman and Otis Redding have appeared in Shuffle Boil. His essay “The Paradise of Meaning” was the George Oppen Memorial Lecture for 2002. This fall Nightboat Books will bring out a book of essays, Lyric Multiples: Aspiration, Practice, Immanence, Migration. He lives and works in San Francisco.

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giovanni singleton’s debut collection Ascension, informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane, received the California Book Award Gold Medal. Her writing has also been exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum, San Francisco’s first Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. A collection of her visual work entitled AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper is forthcoming in 2018 from Canarium Books. She holds the 2017-18 Holloway Lectureship in Poetry at University of California-Berkeley.

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Julien Poirier has taught poetry in the New York City and San Francisco public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. He was a founding member of the Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse Collective. Some of his book are: Out of Print (City Lights, 2016), Way Too West (Bootstrap, 2015), and El Golpe Chileño (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010).

7:30pm Doors / 8:00pm Performance
$15 Guests / Free for members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

.bury.me.fiercely. derives from the inner workings of Tolentino’s recent residency working one-to one with five local artists. This final iteration of the project offers signature methods: durational performance, movement, exploration of abstraction and minimalism with aims to seduce the project into its barest presentational form.
 
.bury.me.fiercely. aligns temporality with radical peripheral gestures: resistance and the haptic politics of the archive, memory, and dependency. Tolentino's dedication to practice offers the body as a landscape, a container of record, and a living archive through the lens of raced, illegible, and tethered lives.

Presented with support from Hope Mohr Dance’s Bridge Project and in conjunction with Limited Edition. Limited Edition is an Open Space partnership with CounterPulse, The Lab, ODC Theater, Performance at SFMOMA, and Z Space, exploring questions of legacy and lineage through performances, discussions, and gatherings at various locations throughout the city, with commissioned texts appearing regularly online. For more information about the partnership, please visit Open Space. 

8:00pm Doors / 8:30pm Sound
$20 Guests / $12 Members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

Bob Ostertag makes a rare San Francisco appearance playing solo and in duo with longtime collaborator Fred Frith. Ostertag, who has been working with keyboard-less synthesizers since the mid-1970s, will play the latest iterations of his many and varied instruments.

Bob Ostertag's work cannot easily be summarized or pigeon-holed. He has published more than twenty-five CDs of music, two DVDs, and five books. His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages. Electronic instruments of his own design are at the cutting edge of both music and video performance technology. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe. His radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, postmodernist John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, transgender cabaret icon Justin Vivian Bond, and many others. Ostertag first began publishing as a journalist covering the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. His most recent book is Sex Science Self: A Social History of Estrogen, Testosterone, and Identity (U Mass Press 2016). His previous book, Raising expectations (And Raising Hell) (Verso 2012) was about labor union organizing in Las Vegas. Co-authored with Jane McAlevey, The Nation magazine named it the Most Valuable Book of 2012. bobostertag.wordpress.com