Moderated by Berette Macaulay, this panel brings together three of the Henry’s current artists, A.K. Burns, Lucy Kim, and Tala Madani, whose work challenges and redefines notions of power, control, and agency through contemporary art.

In the multimedia exhibition What is Perverse is Liquid, A.K. Burns explores the dynamics between marginalized communities and the environment. Lucy Kim’s Mutant Optics approaches themes of visual appearance and the social construction of race with a new experimental printing process using genetically modified bacteria cells that produce melanin directly on paper. Be flat by Tala Madani showcases provocative paintings and animations that blend identity, politics, and the absurd, offering a critical yet humorous take on societal norms.

This conversation promises to be both thought-provoking and inspiring. Attendees will have the opportunity to hear firsthand from the artists about their creative processes and the ways in which they confront and subvert control in their work, with time for questions at the end.

Want to join virtually? Use this link to join a live stream of this program on YouTube. Auto captioning will be enabled and the recording will remain available after the program.

Berette S Macaulay is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer with creative and cultural backgrounds in photography, mixed media, video, and performance. She is an Afro-Caribbean Creole woman of multi-im/migrant routes which guide her work interests and discourses in myth and memory work, collaborative organizing, and trans*cultural be/longing. She is also founder/lead organizer for Black Cinema Collective (BCC), a project of the arts incubator, i•ma•gine | e•volve.

A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, City University of New York. Using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and collaboration and working at the nexus of language and materiality, she/they trouble systems that assign value and explore their sociopolitical embodiment. Burns has exhibited internationally, including at 2018’s FRONT International, Cleveland, Ohio; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany; MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; New Museum, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. She/they was a founding member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists in the Greater Economy), a nonprofit artists’ advocacy group. Community Action Center (2010), a video made in collaboration with A.L. Steiner, which re-imagines pornographic cinema for queer womxn, and trans and nonbinary bodies, has screened internationally, including the Tate, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Burns is a 2023 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow; a 2016 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award Recipient.

Lucy Kim is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received the 2022 Creative Capital Award for her project printing images with bacteria that has been genetically modified to produce melanin. Kim is also a recipient of the 2023 Brother Thomas Fellowship, 2019 Mass Cultural Council Grant, 2017 ICA Boston James and Audrey Foster Prize, 2014 Artadia Award, MacDowell Fellowship, Hermitage Fellowship, and Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship. From 2018 to 2021, she was an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Kim has exhibited her work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; the Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA; Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, New York, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA; Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore, Saratoga Springs, NY; Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; among others. She teaches at Boston University, where she works with her scientist colleagues to further develop her experimental technique printing with melanin.

Tala Madani makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Her work is populated by mostly naked, bald, middle-aged men engaged in acts that push their bodies to their limits. Bodily fluids and beams of light emerge from their orifices, generating metaphors for the tactile expressivity of paint. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, reflecting a complex and gut-level vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds. Her approach to figuration combines the radical morphology of a modernist with a contemporary sense of sequencing, movement, and speed. Thus, her work finds some of its most powerful echoes in cartoons, cinema, and other popular durational forms.

Madani has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums worldwide, including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023); Start Museum, Shanghai (2020); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019); Secession, Vienna (2019); Portikus, Frankfurt (2019); La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2017); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2016); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2014); and Moderna Museet, Malmö and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2013). She participated in the 16th Istanbul Biennial: The Seventh Continent, Istanbul, Turkey (2019); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among many other international group exhibitions. Madani’s work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm and Malmö, Sweden; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.