UPCOMING/RECENT

 

PAST

Thursday, May 30, 2019 

Screening of documentary short film“Exile,” by Syrian film maker Dellair Youssef and moderated discussion with Marsha Hirsch (Executive Director, Carolina Refugee Resettlement Agency), case wroker & former Bhutanese refugee Thakur Mishra, Rusty Reynolds (Executive Director, International House),  and multi-disciplinary artist MyLoan Dinh.  Moderator: Sonya Pfeiffer

Elder Gallery of Contemporary Art

6:30 – 8pm 

 

Dellair Youssef is a director and writer born in Damascus, Syria, from which he fled in 2011. He has directed several films, including ‘The Princes of the Bees’, ‘Exile’, ‘Banyas: The Beginnings’, and ‘Clothesline’, which have been screened at multiple international film festivals. Youssef is also the author of ‘Tales of this Time’ (2014), which shares his life, travels and reflections on the Syrian revolution. His articles and essays are regularly featured in Arabic blogs and newspapers, as well as in a selection of German newspapers and magazines. Youssef studied Ecology at Damascus University and film studies in Syria and the Netherlands. Alongside his professional work, he has volunteered with NGOs in Syria and Lebanon since 2007. He is now based in Berlin, Germany.


Wednesday, May 22, & Friday May 24, 2019

Conversation/Presentation with Burke Prize Recipient Cannupa Hanska Lugar

Millennial Art Program

Elder Gallery of Contemporary Art

Wed. 6:00 – 8pm & Friday 10:00 - 11:00am

 

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a New Mexico-based, multi-disciplinary artist. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent. Through social collaboration and by responding to timely and site-specific issues, Luger produces multi-pronged projects of many forms. Through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, and cut-paper, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st-century Indigeneity. Luger is the recipient of the NYC Museum of Arts and Design’s 2018 Burke Prize, an inaugural award celebrating ‘highly accomplished work, strong use of materials, innovative processes, and conceptual rigor and relevance’. Luger has exhibited internationally, including the Princeton University Art Museum, Washington Project for the Arts, Art Mûr (Montreal), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR), Orenda Gallery (Paris), Autry Museum of the American West, and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (Atlanta). He lectures and participates in residencies around the globe and his work is collected internationally. Luger holds a BFA in studio arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts.


 

Nov. 12, 2018 (class 1) & May 5, 2019 (class 2)

International House 

Visual Story Telling, POP- UP Book workshop

materials provided, free 

 

 

Bridging our differences through visual story telling. Moving Poets presented a free community Pop up book workshop. Bringing community together through art. Big thanks to our community partners, ASC and our teaching artists Bunny Gregory, Heather Harper and Bree Stallings.

 


April 23 - 27, 2018, Davidson College

Inseparable Stranger: Interactive Map Installation Workshop & Artist Talk

Student Union, room 209

Workshop 4:30-6pm, Artist Talk 7 - 8pm

Sponsored by Davidson Refugee Support - free admission

 

Participate in an interactive map installation addressing the basic questions of identity as it relates to challenges of migration, displacement, identity and home. Join us for a free workshop, as we respond to the dialog questions, build the interactive map and explore our inseparable connection to one another. The installation began in Berlin in 2016 and will migrate and grow to other cities and towns internationally in the years ahead. Thus far, hundreds of people of all ages and backgrounds have participated.  Dialog Questions include:  What is home? What is family? What is a woman? What is a man? What is a child? What do you miss? What do you wish for? What is freedom?


April 21, 2018, Queens University, Duke Auditorium

DREAM America: Arts Advocacy Forum

Curatorial Activism: Panel presentation featuring Sonya Pfeiffer owner/director of Elder Gallery Contemporary Art

& MyLoan Dinh, visual artist & founder of We See Heaven Upside Down

Sponsored by Queens University Stan Greenspon Center for Peace and Social Justice

registration: https://dreamamerica2018.weebly.com


March 17, 2018, Poets Cabin

Community Bead Project and Potluck

materials provided, free 

In collaboration with We See Heaven Upside Down artist//colleague, Cannupa Hanska Luger

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Queer and Trans People BEAD PROJECT

http://www.cannupahanska.com/mmiwqtbeadproject/

Participants organized by Moving Poets Charlotte: Carolina Clay Connections, CPCC - Ceramic Dept. and Friends of Moving Poets.

 

 "The MMIWQT Bead Project is the first social engagement work of an ongoing series titled Counting Coup. An instructional video was launched in January 2018 as a call for collaboration with communities from across the U.S. and Canada to create and send 2” clay beads which were then fired, stained in ink and strung together by Luger to create the monumental sculptural installation Every One; the pixelated image references the photograph Sister (2016) by First Nations photographer Kali Spitzer.

 

This social collaboration re-humanizes large and abstract data through the process of creating handmade objects representing each life in the over 4000 cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada, as sourced from research by the Native Women's Association of Canada in 2016. Luger embeds the queer and trans narrative into Every One to bring awareness to the fact that Indigenous LGBTQ+ community members are not included in data collection around this issue, yet these communities are impacted at comparable alarming rates to that of women.

 

Gratitude to all communities who engaged in this work and supported raising awareness and honoring the Indigenous women, girls, queer and trans community members we have lost in Canada. " - Cannupa HanskaLuger


Wed. May 3, 2017 

ART AND SOCIAL JUSTICE - Artist Talk by Native American Artist & Activist

Cannupa Hanska Luger

Panel discussion with Indigenous Community Leaders, Q & A on contemporary challenges of displacement and Native Americans communities 

 

Panel: Perry Eastman – Chair of All Nations United, Robert Greeson – Chair of American Indian Party, Toni Henderson – Metrolina Native American Association and Cannupa Hanska Luger, artist/activist. 

Moderator: Christina Welsh, artist

 

6:30 - Bryan Hall, CPCC - Central Campus, Charlotte, NC

Reception immediately following at Ross Galleries

free and open to the public


Friday, July 15, 2016, 7pm - at Moving Poets' Novilla, Berlin

Exchange, Presentation & Dialog with Artists from Tepebasi (Eskisehir, Turkey)

free and open to the public


July 6-7, 2016 - at Moving Poets' Novilla

Boundaries -  An unfinished Land Art Installation

 

"As part of We See Heaven Upside Down, a group of neighborhood children mostly from the Rabenhorst Student Club, worked on a interdisciplinary project in the garden of Novilla under the direction of Denise Dröge and Johannes Gérard. The subject was boundaries. The youth where given the possiblity to interpret the subject in the broadest sense.

 

The children decided to use the tall grouped bushes inside the garden. It should be noted that the bushes in the everyday life of children play an important role because they often withdraw into the interior. It is one of their hidden and withdrawal points.

 

The material was limited to rope, strips of wood, branches, tree trunks and earth. The concept was to give the children the opportunity to present themselves, to decide and find out what is creative and technically possible. It is important to mention that the condition was never to present a finished and what art lovers or artists may think is a perfect art installation. Often adults transmit their own ideas and ways of looking at what children creatively made . Had we intervened as project leaders in order to introduce our own artistic interpretations of an installation about boundaries, an academic situation would have arisen, which our concept does not provide for.

 

The children worked together to resolve conflicts to deal with the issues of borders and to find and use their own creativity. At the end they came up with the idea to wrap the group of big bushes with ropes symbolizing borders, and with ropes that divert from the bushes as a symbol of keeping a object in place. They added as well a symbolic door to the installation.

 

At the end, the youth differentiated themselves from the surrounding environment  with the ropes and the door, to create and build a limit or boundary around an area where they can withdraw. Actually working from the outside inward and instead of overcoming borders, drew a symbolic border. During the second session the group had drawn back more and more into the interior of the bushes. "

 

--- A collaboration between Denise Dröge (Drama Teacher) & Johannes Gérard (Visual Artist) and youth

 


Sunday - June 5, 2016, 5pm - at Moving Poets' Novilla

'Climate change > migration > open-source DIY islands' 
artist talk with Joy Lohmann, cocreator of "Open-Island" DIY recycled islands and cofounder of the "makers 4 humanity" collective.
Open Island video, live-3D printing process presentation/demonstration of modules in scale 1:20, artist talk and open discussion
free and open to the public

About Open Island:

The demand for floating islands rises with the sea-levels! The interdisciplinary Maker collective builds floating islands out of globalized trash and shares the benefits through open-source DIY-manuals, participatory events and island-construction camps. Open-Islands are floating platforms for flood prevention, agri- and aquaculture, energy production and sociocultural purposes that can be built everywhere to improve the lifes of the poorest and raise climate change resilience. Through its modular concept, cooperative process and creative aesthetics, the self-made islands and floating common grounds also function as symbols for a sharing-caring community, attracting, networking and training local people and partners to form humanitarian „for-benefit-groups“ within their community and environment. more info contact: Joy Lohmann at joy@joy-art.dehttp://www.open-island.de


July - October 2016 - at Moving Poets' Novilla

Signs and Wonders in Schöneweide

An open interactive community outreach project: creative workshops & gatherings with a lively variety of people, artists, creatives

contact visual artist and coordinator Liz Crossley 

Liz.Crossley@t-online.de for info/dates/times

 

art supplies provided & participation is free

 

Our outreach into the community was simple: a series of casual fun creative gatherings involving artists, neighbors, immigrants and refugees of all ages over food, music, sharing stories/experiences and crafting masks and lanterns. One of the gatherings ended with a "bridge walk" across the Spree River that runs through Berlin.