Please join us for the new SCIAME Lecture Series, titled And/Or. “Visceral Disruptions” will feature Camille Norment and Okwui Okpokwasili, hosted by Onome Ekeh, for a discussion of art and architecture.
In this online series, curators Viren Brahmbhatt, Ali C. Höcek, and Martin Stigsgaard argue that the traditional format of a single lecturer speaking to an audience sets up a binary opposite all of its own — speaker/listener, which simply reinforces the power structure between those who “possess” knowledge and those who “consume” it. In its place, the &/Or Online Dialogues will present two speakers in conversation with each other, moderated by a third. The series features prominent artists, activists, and architects from across the globe who will discuss their work and the unique political and environmental challenges they confront.
Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based performance maker. Her work includes two Bessie Award winning productions: Pent-Up: a revenge dance and Bronx Gothic. Other productions include Poor People’s TV Room, and Adaku’s Revolt. Okpokwasili’s recently co-curated the Danspace Project Platform “Utterances From the Chorus”. Her commissions, Residencies and awards: 10th Annual Berlin Biennale Commission, 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award in Contemporary Dance, 2018 USA Artist Fellow, 2018 Princeton Hodder Fellow, 2018 Herb Alpert Award in Dance, LMCC’s Extended Life Program (2013-2016, 2019); The Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Artist Grant in Dance (2014), MOMA, The Young Vic, Tate Modern. Okpokwasili is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.
Camille Norment composes artworks through forms including recorded sound, sculpture, installation, drawing, and live performance, notions of “cultural psychoacoustics” and dissonance are used to investigate sociocultural phenomena through sound and music. In recent years, Norment’s highlights include performances with famed percussionist Hamid Drake (2019), Ryuichi Sakamoto in New York (2018) and Japan (2017), commissioned performances with pianist Craig Taborn at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City (2016), as well as performances and exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art (2017–2018), Bergen International Festival in Norway (2016), and Pushkin Museum in Moscow (2016). Her work has also recently been featured in the Lyon Biennial in France (2017–2018), Kochi-Muziris Biennial in India (2016), and Montréal Biennial (2016). At the 2015 Venice Biennale, Norment represented Norway with a three-part project that included a large-scale sound-and-sculptural installation, a publication series, and a sonic performance series.
Onome Ekeh was born and raised on both sides of the Atlantic. Ekeh started out as a painter, gravitated toward design, and fell in love with cinema. Somewhere in the collusion she went digital. She has produced works for film, theater, and radio and is the recipient of several fellowships including the Jerome Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, and the Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen Fellowship. She is the co-founder and conceptual gear-machinitrix behind Futurezoo, a creative studio providing digital works for artists to diplomatic missions and scientists to NGOs. She has worked as a dramaturge on projects such as Grisha Coleman’s “Echo System,” David Thomson’s “Venus,” Okwui Okpokwasili’s “Bronx Gothic,” Annie Dorsen’s “The Great Outdoors,” as well as collaborated with artists such as Carl Hancock Rux, Knut Asdam, Clarinda Mac Low, Paul Boocock, and downtown experimental theater company Mabou Mines.
The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture