Season 8: Curator Suzy Halajian

The Politics of Landscape

I’ve known rivers: Carolina Caycedo and Sky Hopinka

as if i was a thing i could do in the dark:
Dylan Mira

We know what it is for, we who have used it: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

The 2018-19 season is led by Curator in Residence Suzy Halajian and will include a series of three exhibitions, related programs, and a publication that builds upon the other, expanding the dialogue throughout the year. The central aim of the season is to present practices that engage with ecological politics and its implications on environmental sustainability by situating discourse in Western histories of gender- and race-based oppression and discrimination. Through the presentation of diverse works by national and international artists, works present counter-perspectives from various contexts to politicized instances of land use, property acquisition, and development.

Suzy Halajian is an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Her work begins at the intersection of art and politics, treating image making as steeped in colonial pasts and modern surveillance states. Additionally, her research interests center on the legacies of trauma and conflict in experimental documentary and performance practices from the Middle East and North Africa and their diaspora. Halajian has curated exhibitions and programs at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Human Resources LA, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (all Los Angeles); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; UKS, Oslo, among others.

Halajian serves on the Programming Committee of Human Resources LA, and is the 2018-19 Curator-in-Residence at Disjecta, Portland. From 2015-16 she co-organized the invitation of sorts talk series in Los Angeles. In 2017 she was granted a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian for the journal Georgia, and in 2014 she received a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her writing has been published by ArtEast, BOMB, X-TRA, and Ibraaz, among others.

Past Curators in Residence Rachel Adams (Season 4), Lucy Cotter (Season 10), Summer Guthery (Season 3), and Suzy Halajian (Season 8) reflect on their CIR seasons in a Zoom panel moderated by Blake Shell. Watch the recording here.