Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute presents Short Shadows: Bahar Behbahani and Jon Wang. The event focuses on the work of two New York-based artists, Bahar Behbahani and Jon Wang. Both artists are in residence at EMPAC on the lead up to the event to develop new and expanded performance iterations of their pre-existing individual artworks. The evening includes Behbahani’s We Were Missing A Present (2019) and Wang’s From its Mouth Came a River of High-end Appliances (2018).
Bahar Behbahani’s work addresses her long-term conceptual dialogues with memory and loss. Through painting, video, and participatory performance, she revisits Iran’s psychogeographic landscapes. The Persian garden, a contested space marked by colonialism and seductive beauty, is a reoccurring site for reflection and recovery. We Were Missing A Present brings together moving image, brush strokes, water, sound by Maciek Schejbal, and text by Ghazal Mosadeq to re-imagine the historical structure of landscape, botany, migration, and the colonization process.
Jon Wang generates films, sculptures, and performances that question notions of representation and desire. Wang’s treatments of pace—at times drawing on techniques of voice-over narration, tenants of feng shui, and the day-to-day activities of silk worms—gesture towards the ways in which beings and their surroundings are in states of perpetual transition. In this sense, pace, as a techno-sensual material, both grounds and disrupts their atmospheric videos and installations. An updated version of From its Mouth Came a River of High-end Residential Appliances, a moving image work set in the air on the coastline of Hong Kong Island, makes use of fog as a suspended curtain for projection—if only momentarily.
Whether anchored in real or fictional scenarios, each artwork presented in the Short Shadows series stretches beyond a singular moment or place to foreground the political importance of unexpected historical interconnections. Mostly produced within the last decade, the artists’ films, videos, poetry, and performances presented here shine a light on cultural and historical events that may otherwise remain in shadow.
The evening is co-organized by second-year students from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, including Giorgia von Albertini, Drew Broderick, Susannah Faber, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, Serubiri Moses, Suzie Smith, and Thea Spittle, working in collaboration with EMPAC senior curator of time-based visual art Vic Brooks.