2018.04 TO DRAW A LINE
To Draw a Line:
Perspectives on Inscription and Erasure
Katarina Burin
Shadi Harouni
Lucy Siyao Liu
Daniela Rivera
Keijaun Thomas
Gropius Room
Loeb Library
Harvard GSD
48 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
This panel and workshop will examine the performativity inherent in forms of inscription and erasure through the practices of five artists/designers. Focusing in particular on drawing, the assembled speakers will address the figurative, material, and kinesthetic dimensions of the medium, while collectively tracing personal and political trajectories.
A drawing has a moment of departure, holding a path and releasing a movement. How can this process be read within a drawing? Does it constitute a means or an end, an event or a remnant? What forces determine its shape and authority? Our panel will respond to such questions as they demonstrate multiple ways to draw a line.
Katarina Burin is an artist and a Lecturer in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University. Burin’s work takes variable forms and is profoundly informed by the history of architecture, with a particular emphasis on Modernism, female architects, and historical documentation. Burin executes drawings, models, collages, and installations. She recently published Contribution and Collaboration: The Work of Petra Andrejova-Molnár and Her Contemporaries (Koenig Books, 2016).
Shadi Harouni is an artist and the director of the Undergraduate Program in Studio Art at New York University. Harouni’s practice in visual arts ranges from site-specific interventions, video and sculpture, to photography, printmaking and publishing. Her research centers on marginalized and forgotten histories of dissent and resistance, chiefly in the Middle East. Her works follow the subtle and intricate ways in which power attempts to erase and abolish and the kinds of ingenuity and strategy individuals employ to resist erasure.
Lucy Siyao Liu is a designer, the creator and co-editor of PROPS PAPER, and a Lecturer in the Art, Culture and Technology Program at MIT. Liu’s work addresses contestations and disjunctions that occur in imaging technologies, with an emphasis on on evolving drawing and animation processes for architectural production. Although she works on topics in technology, digitality and computational methods, she is first and foremost concerned with transformative effects of these techniques on politics and poetics. Thus, her tools are constantly changing to stay coherent with her search.
Daniela Rivera is an artist and Associate Professor of Art at Wellesley College. She works at the intersection of disciplines and opposing schools of thought, and her installations often focus on uncanny spatial and material dislocations. Breaking from the traditional mold of painting, she creates fully environmental and immersive experiences that draw from her personal history.
Keijaun Thomas is a New York-based artist and a current Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient. Thomas creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within Black personhood.
To Draw a Line was organized by Kirkland Gallery and GSD Arts Group with the generous support of the Harvard GSD Dean's Office and Student Forum.
