Amy Balkin & Snehal Shingavi Discuss "Art and Power"

"Art and Power"
Speakers: Amy Balkin, Snehal Shingavi

Series:
The New New Masses
Discussions About Art and Politics

Location
San Francisco Art Institute Café
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133

October 6 at 7:00pm
free and open to the public

Everything is for sale. Even free art gets evaluated in the context of a world of price tags. But we need to make art, right? To kick off this series we are going to talk about the function art plays in society and how power has influenced this role historically and continues to affect artists today. Ultimately we’ll ask the questions, “What is going on in the world?” and “can artists be a meaningful part of resistance?”

San Francisco-based artist Amy Balkin’s art practice combines crossdisciplinary research and social critique, focusing on how humans create, interact, and impact the social and material landscapes they inhabit. Her most recent project is Invisible-5, a collaborative critical audio tour of the I-5 corridor between the bay Area and los Angeles. Other projects include This Is the Public Domain (thisisthepublicdomain.org), an attempt to create a permanent international commons from 2.5 acres of land located near Tehachapi, CA, via legal transfer to the global public, and Public Smog (publicsmog.org), which examines the commodification of the atmosphere through the economic mechanism of carbon trading. She received her MFA from Stanford University in 2003.

Snehal Shingavi is a PhD candidate in English Literature at UC Berkeley. His dissertation “The Mahatma, the Marxists, and the Modernists” explores Indian writing in English from the 1930s and 1940s. He is the author of several articles on Palestinian history, literature, and politics, and has recently published a translation of Munshi Premchand’s novel, Sevasadan (1917). Shingavi is a regularly invited speaker on topics that address the intersection of artistic and political movements, and is currently a docent at the Berkeley Art Museum for the exhibition Edge of Desire: Contemporary Art from South Asia.