EventsCommon Ground#893
20 Years of ISSUE Project Room
Featuring Zev Greenfield, BINT, David Farrow and William Corwin, with Theodore Kerr
Thursday, September 7, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.
2023 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence (AIR) BINT, Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow (SFCF) David Farrow of evil dentist, and ISSUE Project Room Executive Director & Chief Curator Zev Greenfield join Rail contributor William Corwin for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Theodore Kerr.
BINT

BINT is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Brooklyn. Working across visual, performance and sound art, BINT applies contemporary methods to the traditional multicultural technologies of her ancestries (Pakistani, Egyptian, American, etc). With a focus on inherited metaphysical tech, her work is interested in the perennial role of the artist-mystic in cultural preservation and liberation work. BINT is founder of The Barzakh, a podcast and educational platform focused on the revival and reclamation of Islam’s rich heritage of the occult and metaphysics. She has shown work internationally including performance art commissions for Black Sabbath, the Copro Gallery, Atelier de Mélusine and visual work at Coachella Music and Arts Festival.
David Farrow

David Farrow is an American sound artist, researcher, and ethnomusicologist based in New York City. Farrow’s artistic work employs noise, synthesis, and field recordings to explore how sound and listening practices construct political space. They are completing their PhD in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University examining the limits of do-it-yourself music scenes’ cultural and economic autonomy within capitalist urban development. Farrow’s writing has appeared in Current Musicology, Tiny Mix Tapes, and zines published by evil dentist. Farrow’s audio/visual installation work has been exhibited at the University of London. They perform experimental electronic music as “certain lives” within New York’s experimental, rave, and independent music scenes.
evil dentist

evil dentist was created by Alice Gerlach and David Farrow as a response to the decline in do-it-yourself venues accelerated by the pandemic. evil dentist seeks to reclaim space for unconventional, artist-run venues prioritizing community building over commerce. Emerging from a series of performances in a haphazardly built East Village loft, evil dentist centers on the notion that performance and place-making are intertwined, politicized acts of care. Curatorially operating at the fringes of experimental, pop, and rave music, evil dentist programs eclectic performances that challenge artists to rethink how they connect to their audience.
Zev Greenfield

In Fall 2015, Zev Greenfield was appointed to lead the ISSUE Project Room administration. Zev brings a strong background in programming, fundraising and finance. He oversees the organization’s programs, staff and operations, with a focus on development & long-term strategic planning. Zev secured the transfer of the deed for 22 Boerum Place theater to ISSUE in 2021, and is assisting the city in managing the current renovation of the space. Zev’s previous positions include Managing Director of the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation, where he oversaw the Artist Residency and educational programs, and the Vice President of Finance & Administration for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s.
William Corwin

Sculptor and journalist William Corwin is from New York. He has exhibited at galleries in New York, London, Hamburg, Beijing and Taipei. He has written regularly for The Brooklyn Rail, Artpapers, Bomb, Artcritical, Raintaxi and Canvas. Most recently he curated and wrote the catalog for Postwar Women at The Art Students League in New York, an exhibition of the school’s alumnae active between 1945-65, and 9th Street Club, and exhibitions of Perle Fine, Helen Frankenthaler, Mercedes Matter, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner and Elaine Dekooning at Gazelli Art House in Mayfair. He is the editor of Formalism; Collected Essays of Saul Ostrow, (2020).
The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.
Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.
We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨