The World’s UnFair: Movie Night
Thursday, October 19
7:00 – 9:00PM
Drop in! Advanced registration is not needed.
Join us for a movie night at the powwow grounds featuring acclaimed Abinake filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s Spudwrench – Kahnawake Man (1997, 57 mins), a portrait of Mohawk high steel worker Randy Horne, and filmmakers Bayley Sweitzer and Leila Bordreuil’s Air Rights (2021, 24 mins).
Closing Tour with Jim Fletcher
Sunday, October 22
6:00 PM
Drop in! Advanced registration is not needed.
Join award-winning actor, reformed Native American impersonator, and New Red Order informant Jim Fletcher for a closing tour of The World’s UnFair.
Location
All public programs and gatherings happen at the Pow Wow Stage in The World’s UnFair:
24-17 Jackson Ave.
Long Island City, Queens
Between 23rd St and 45th Ave
Past Programs
The World’s UnFair: After Dark
Friday, September 22, 2023
7-10PM
Featuring:
Dreamcrusher
The New York City-based musician and artist’s work is at once personal and abstract, described as ‘nihilist queer revolt musik,’ with performances and recordings that shift between genres while subjecting the characteristic elements—melodies, beats, instrumentation—to distortion until the point of transformation.
KILT (Raven Chacon + Bob Bellerue)
Diné-American composer, musician and artist Raven Chacon, known for connecting Diné (Navajo) worldviews and relationship models with Western classical, avant-garde, and art-music traditions, performs with KILT group member, Bob Bellerue, a noise composer, experimental musician, and creative technician based in Brooklyn.
Kite
Award winning Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, composer and academic, Dr. Suzanne Kite’s practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration with family and community members.
Uyarakq (Aqqalu Berthelsen)
Born in Nuuk, Greenland and now living in Ottawa, Canada, Berthelsen aka Uyarakq works in the Indigenous circumpolar hip hop and rap scene with a foot in two continents, the North American arctic and the European arctic.
White Boy Scream
Los Angeles vocalist and composer Micaela Tobin uses her classical opera trained voice, dissected and extended through electronics, oscillating between extreme textures of noise, drone, and choral sound walls, in a modern, experimental noise approach, part sonic ritual, part diasporic storytelling. On her latest release, ‘BAKUNAWA’, she pays homage to the pre-colonial mythology of her motherland, the Philippines.
Nathan Young
An artist working in an expanded practice, Young (born 1975, Tahlequah, OK) incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art and experimental music. A founding and former member of the artist collective Postcommodity, his work often draws upon the spiritual and the political to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime.
Give It Back Gathering
October 8, 2023
2:00 – 5:00 PM
At the heart of The World’s UnFair is NRO’s film Give It Back: Crimes Against Realty, introducing a group of elected officials, non-profit leaders, foundation representatives, and individual settlers who have voluntarily given land back to Indigenous people and groups through multiple pathways—a trend with incredible potential to return land as it was taken over time, parcel by parcel. The Give It Back Gathering brings this group together to promote the continued practice of the rematriation of land.
Featuring:
Lulani Arquette, President and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (the NACF)
Mayor Kim Bergel, Eureka, CA
Flint Jamison, co-founder of Yale Union
Libby Schaaf, former Mayor of Oakland, CA
Laura Ortman performs from her new album SMOKE RINGS SHIMMERS ENDLESS BLUR.
River Whittle, Artist and Steward of Lenni Lenapexkweyok
Participant Bios
T. Lulani Arquette is the President and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF), a national organization established in 2009 and dedicated to advancing equity and Native knowledge with a focus on arts and cultural expression that helps strengthen American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian artists and communities. Through NACF’s work centered on transformative creativity and Native resilience, artists have advanced their careers, increased their national and international visibility, and strengthened relationships with their communities and stakeholders. In 2021, Arquette received the 2021 Berresford Prize from United States Artists, an award that honors cultural practitioners who have contributed significantly to the advancement, wellbeing, and care of artists in society.
Flint Jamison (b. Billings, MT, 1979) is an artist and educator. He was the Co-founder and President of the Board of Directors of Yale Union, a contemporary art center in Portland, OR (2008-2021) and was the co-founder of the artist-run center Department of Safety (2002-2010) in Anacortes, WA. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Veneer Magazine and Associate Professor of Art at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. In 2020, the Board of Directors of Yale Union announced that it would transfer the ownership of its large urban property to Native Arts & Cultures Foundation.
Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator who creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with dozens of leading contemporary artists and as part of the trio In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings. Ortman has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, among countless established and DIY venues.
Libby Schaaf served as 50th Mayor of Oakland, California from 2015-2023. She set records in reducing gun violence, fixing roads, and increasing housing. She created The Oakland Promise, which provides every low-income baby a $500 college savings account and pre-school, and every public-school graduate a scholarship and support to complete college. In 2018, Politico named her one of the 50 most influential people in American politics for her leadership in the Trump resistance. Today, she teaches at the Goldman Public Policy School at UC Berkeley and holds Senior Fellowships with Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and Harvard Graduate School of Education.
River Whittle is a Caddo, Lenape, and Irish-American-settler Interdisciplinary artist and youth mentor. River currently lives in occupied Tiwa territory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is versed in photography, printmaking, and experimental video. They are also learning jewelry (silver, bronze, and copper) as well as pottery. River’s work focuses on the fluid and giving relationship between ancestors and futures beyond binary colonial structures.
Indigenous Peoples’ Day
The World’s UnFair will be open on October 9 for Indigenous Peoples’ Day from 2-9pm. Join Creative Time Curator Diya Vij for a tour of the installation at 7pm.
The World’s UnFair: After Dark
Sunday, October 15, 2023
7-10PM
Don’t settle for just one trip to The World’s UnFair! New Red Order and Creative Time invite you back to the fairgrounds after dark to collectively commit crimes against reality at two experimental live events. Weaving together music, films, performances, and lectures, the last iteration of The World’s UnFair: After Dark promises an unreal experience.
Featuring performances by:
Morgan Bassichis
Les Leveque and New Red Order
Oscar Nñ
mirrored fatality
Films by:
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme
Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny
Presentation by:
Joe Whittle
Hosted by Jim Fletcher
Participant Bios
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multimedia installations and live sound/image performances.
Morgan Bassichis is a comedic performer who has been called “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker and “a tall child or, well, a big bird” by The Nation. Their recent shows include Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue, 2022) and Don’t Rain On My Bat Mitzvah (Creative Time, 2021), co-created with Ira Khonen Temple. Morgan’s performances have been presented by Abrons Arts Center, Danspace Project, the Kitchen, the Whitney Museum and others. Their book of to-do lists, The Odd Years, was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2020. Morgan has released two albums: March is for Marches with Ethan Philbrick (Triple Canopy, 2019) and More Protest Songs! Live From St. Mark’s Church (2018).
Les LeVeque is an artist based in New York who works with digital and analog electronic technology. Their work includes single and multi-channel videos, video/computer-based installations and live video synthesizer performances. LeVeque’s work often utilizes algorithmic structures, statistically distributed elements, experimentation with the boundaries of interfaces, the use and misuse of current and obsolete technologies and may provide new views of existing narratives. Their work has been exhibited/screened nationally and internationally.
mirrored fatality remembers wholeness from dismembered flesh and mutates as cross-pollinating perennial terratoids. they intertwine glitch rage webs with corroded resonance and regenerate forsaken spores with their immersive biome: ECOCIDE 3URTH – a live biohacking and transmutation ritual installation performance where mirrored fatality’s techno-bodies internationally activate as multi species of creatures, terratoids, and transhumans. they mobilize their transmedia lore as calls-to-action against transphobia, settler colonialism, climate catastrophe, and surveillance capitalism. they experiment with 3D animation, interactive mixed-reality film, and decolonial regeneration with their voices, movement, and sculptures to simulate a live Kapampangan and Urdu experimental noise score of guitar, bass, and electronics.
Oscar Nñ is a Honduran-American, DJ, producer and artist. Co-founder of Papi Juice, an art collective that aims to affirm and celebrate the lives of queer and trans people of color, Oscar’s practice focuses on building communal spaces through sound and joy.
Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an autonomous space in New York City. In 2014 he completed a feature film on the Tunisian insurrection, Scenes from a Revolt Sustained, with a production grant from the Doha Film Institute. He was a member of the collectives Red Channels and the 16 Beaver Group. His writings have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Death+Taxes, Evergreen Review, Idiom, Jeux Sans Frontières, The L, The New Inquiry, and New York Press.
Malek Rasamny is a researcher and filmmaker based in both New York and Beirut whose writings have been published in The Daily Star and Fuse. He’s worked at the Maysles Documentary Center, and was a founding member of the LERFE space in Harlem, the Ground Floor Collective, and Red Channels. He is currently working on a research project surrounding Druze sovereignty in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, and has presented at the conferences of the American Druze Society.
Joe Whittle is a freelance photographer and writer living in his tribal community at Anadarko, Oklahoma. He is an enrolled tribal member of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, and a descendant of the Delaware Nation of Oklahoma. His photographs and writing can be found in publications such as The Guardian, USA Today, HuffPost, New York Times, Alpinist Magazine, Outside Magazine, Backpacker Magazine, National Geographic Voices, and others. He is a current recipient of the 2023 Creative Capital Award for his project “Landback: The Return of All Federal Lands to Native Americans”, which is a work in progress. You can follow his work on Instagram @joewhittlephotography and at www.joewhittlephotography.com