Carolyn Lazard, CRIP TIME, 2018, Digital video, 10 min 20 sec courtesy the artist and Essex Street, New York
To coincide with the launch of their first UK solo exhibition, artist-writer Carolyn Lazard joins us for a special screening programme followed by a discussion with Derica Shields.
The evening begins with screenings of three video works by Lazard. These are broadly engaged with the temporal – either in their structural form, through their use of duration and repetition, or by addressing the complex histories of institutionalised care. The works include the recent Pre-Existing Condition (2019), the title of which is a commonly used phrase in the US healthcare industry that threatens to curtail or pre-determine one’s access to healthcare, while also obscuring the near-universal need for care.
The screening will be followed by a conversation between Lazard and writer-researcher Derica Shields. The discussion will be informed by their overlapping interests in accessibility, state social services and black people's entanglements within these systems across different geopolitical contexts.
This evening coincides with Lazard’s first UK solo exhibition (2 April – 24 May at Cell Project Space, London), which explores their ongoing interest into redefining the margins of politics through care.
Carolyn Lazard is a Philadelphia-based artist and writer. Recent group exhibitions include Colored People Time, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts and ICA, Philadelphia (2020); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019); and The Body Electric, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019). Solo projects and two-person exhibitions include If you can’t share no one gets any, with Collective Text, LUX London & Cinenova (2018); Epigenetic, with Juliana Huxtable, Shoot the Lobster, New York (2018); and a forthcoming solo exhibition at Essex Street, New York (2020). Lazard’s writings include ‘How to Be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity’ (Cluster, 2013) and ‘The World Is Unknown’ (Triple Canopy, 2019).
Derica Shields is an independent writer, researcher and cultural worker based in London. Her arts writing and cultural criticism have appeared in Flash Art, frieze, Girls Like Us, The Live Art Almanac, The New Inquiry, Rookie and elsewhere. She is the author of forthcoming Bad Practice (Book Works, 2020), and her multi-format oral history project centring Black people’s accounts of the UK welfare state is forthcoming from Triple Canopy.
Programme:
Pre-Existing Condition, 2019, digital video, 15 min.
CRIP TIME, 2018, digital video, 10:20 min.
Consensual Healing, 2018, digital video, 14:44 min
