A.I.R. Gallery Present Aliza Shvarts: Hotline, Begins 10/16

[Image description: Photograph of a red telephone on a black background. The text on the image is top to bottom: “Aliza Shvarts: Hotline,” then “I don’t know, you don’t know,” then “but it knows” and “(866) 696-0940.”]

October 16 — November 15, 2020

Hotline is an interactive performance by 2019-2020 A.I.R. Fellow Aliza Shvarts that takes on the format of the voicemail tree. Call (866) 696-0940 to participate.

Building on Shvarts’ current practice, which focuses on the power of testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age, Hotline explores the voice as both a metonym of the body and metaphor for political agency. Beginning with a toll-free phone number that can be dialed from any phone, this asynchronous performance allows participants to choose from set options to advance a “choose your own adventure”-type narrative. At the very end of the experience, participants have the option of leaving an anonymous message—which will be made public as documentation of the performance.

Presented in conjunction with the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation’s Performance-in-Place series, the phone number will be live and able to receive calls 24-hours a day from Tuesday, September 1, 2020 to Saturday, January 23, 2021. The physical exhibition featuring the voicemail documentation from the ongoing interactive performance, will be on view at A.I.R. Gallery from Friday, October 16 to Sunday, November 15, 2020.

The gallery is open by appointment only. A link to schedule an appointment will be posted soon.

View the Press Release here.
View Shvarts' page here.

Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her current work focuses on testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age. Her artwork been shown across Europe, Latin America, and the US at venues including the Tate Modern in London; Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA in Prague; the Athens Biennale; Universidad de los Andes in Bogota; Sculpture Center and Participant Inc  in New York; LACE in Los Angeles; and the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Recent solo exhibitions include Off-Scene at Artspace (2018, New Haven); and Purported at Centre of Contemporary Art FUTURA (2019, Prague) and Art in General (2020, NYC), which surveyed the last decade of her practice.

Shvarts’ writing has been published in Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art: Practice, The Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, TDR/The Drama Review, Women & Performance, and The Brooklyn Rail. She has given talks at numerous institutions including The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Harvard University, McGill University, Stanford University, and UCLA. Not content with appearing only at revered seats of learning, she has also written liner notes for the drone metal band SunnO))) and appeared She has also been a guest commentator on MTV.

Aliza Shvarts received her BA summa cum laude in Fine Art and English from Yale University and her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, where her dissertation, The Doom Performative: Aesthetics in the Space of Interdiction, received the Monroe Lippman Memorial Award for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation. In addition, Shvarts was a 2014 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2014-2015 Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2017 Critical Writing Fellow at Recess Art, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015-2019). She is currently a 2019-20 Fellow at A.I.R and a 2020 Artist Fellow at the National Arts Club.

You can find out more about A.I.R. here.