Opening Night: Theory of Survival opens at BAN 5 at YBCA!

Join us for the opening night party at
YBCA BAN5
Sat, Jul 19, 8 pm-midnight

Bay Area Now 5, Inside/Outside
http://www.ybca.org/tickets/production/view.aspx?id=7118
This year's visual arts program is the most ambitious iteration of Bay Area Now yet. As in past years, YBCA presents a multi-media gallery-based group exhibition featuring the works of the most promising Bay Area artists active today. Bay Area Now 5 (BAN 5) explores the many ways artists are influenced by their experiences both inside and outside of the Bay Area, and through an additional four guest-curated projects, also goes beyond YBCA's walls to feature artists as musicians, illustrate San Francisco's rich artistic history and connect Bay Area artists with artists from around the globe.

http://www.ybca.org/tickets/production/view.aspx?id=7240

Theory of Survival, guest curated by Iranian-American artist Taraneh Hemami, is a continuation of the CrossConnections project that engages the Iranian and Iranian-American diaspora community in an intergenerational, creative dialogue about issues of cultural identity, preservation, and representation. For its incarnation at YBCA, Theory of Survival brings together a multi-generational and international group of artists of the Iranian Diaspora who have responded to a historical archive belonging to the Iranian Students Association of Northern California, which was active from 1964-1984. The collection, which has been acquired by the Library of Congress, includes theoretical discourse, original essays, political analysis, translations, as well as posters, newspapers, and documents reflecting both Iranian as well as Bay Area history throughout these critical years. The artists that guest curator Taraneh Hemami has chosen to work with collectively investigate the archives of the past while exploring notions of devotion, freedom, survival and loss.
Artists: Reza Aramesh(London), Gita Hashemi(Toronto) and Leila Pazooki(Berlin).


YBCA presents
Bay Area Now 5 Opening Night Party
Sat, Jul 19, 8 pm-midnight
Grand Lobby, Galleries, Screening Room, Forum & Sculpture Court
$12 in advance, $15 at the door
FREE for YBCA Members and a guest
http://www.ybca.org/tickets/production/view.aspx?id=6846
...............................................................

We Remember the Sun
Curated by Mary Ellen Johnson
June 19-September 13, 2008
Walter and McBean Galleries, SFAI
San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut St, SF

We Remember the Sun offers a view of contemporary art practice in California that, though
acknowledging its deep roots in the utopian (and dystopian) ideals of the 60s, contends that it is only through the acceptance of mediated rather than absolutist ideas and practices that the political progressivism of the 60s can remanifest itself under today's extraordinarily different political conditions--conditions that contrast globalization with antiglobalization; multiculturalism with zenophobia; terrorism, initiatory or retaliatory, with negotiation and peace; and environmentalism with corporatism run amok. Put more specifically in terms of We Remember the Sun, an exhibition of the work of Bay Area artists, it is only through the process and labor of yielding to the demands of (artistic) mediums, mixed or singular--it is only through production--that revolutionary ideas and practices can effectually take shape.

Participating artists are Amy Balkin, L. M. Bogad, Andrea Bowers, Deer Fang, David Gurman, Taraneh Hemami, David Maisel, Jill Miller, Shaun O'Dell, Julia Page, Praba Pilar, John Roloff, Pamela Wilson-Ryckman, Jon Winet, and Michael Zheng.

http://waltermcbean.com/current.shtml


Most Wanted, 2007, Bead Curtain
http://waltermcbean.com/werememberthesun/artists/hemami.shtml




Reviewed/approved by Talieh Shahrokhi.