CASETalks: Shimon Attie & Natasha Egan – Night Watch (Virtual)
Saturday, Jan 9, 2021 10 – 11 am
CASETalks: Shimon Attie & Natasha Egan – Night Watch
A discussion about the intersection of art and activism
Saturday, January 9, 2021
10:00 - 11:00 am CT
CASETalks, a monthly web series, debuts every Second Saturday at 10:00 am CT via Zoom. Artists are in conversation with curators, historians & other CASE partners.
CASETalks is sponsored by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.
Night Watch
Shimon Attie [b. 1957, Los Angeles, CA] is a visual artist whose projects engage local communities to find new ways of representing their history, memory, and futures. He is particularly concerned with how the histories of marginalized communities can be introduced into today's’ physical and social landscapes. Attie is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Rome Prize, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Lee Krasner Achievement Award, among others.
Night Watch was a floating media installation that featured a 20’ wide hi-res LED screen aboard a large, slow-moving barge that circled the waterways of New York City during the UN General Assembly Week in Fall 2018. Displayed on the screen were video portraits of twelve New Yorkers, individuals whose lives were saved by being granted political asylum in the United States. The people portrayed came from five continents, are members of the LGBTQI community, or were unaccompanied minors. Both groups fled tremendous violence and discrimination in their homelands. Night Watch speaks to one of the most urgent issues of our time – the need to open our borders to asylum seekers and refugees.
NATASHA EGAN
Since 2011, Natasha Egan has served as the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP), where she was previously the associate director and curator since 2000. She has organized over sixty exhibitions with a focus on contemporary Asian art and artists concerned with societal issues, such as the environment, war, and economics. Egan was a guest curator for the 2010 FotoFest Biennial in Houston; the United States pavilion curator for the 2016 Photo Dubai Exhibition; and a guest curator for the 2019 Lianzhou Photography Biennial in China. Egan has contributed essays to numerous publications and lectures internationally. For over a decade, she taught in the photography and humanities departments at Columbia College Chicago, and holds a BA in Asian studies, MA in museum studies, and MFA in fine art photography