ArtNow! with Sara Bahermez and Leslie Martinez

Tuesday, March 19, 6pm-7pm
$10 admission, FREE for MOCA members and students (includes light snacks and refreshments)

ArtNow! gives you the opportunity to engage with wildly disparate practices collectively known as “the art of our time” during this playful lecture series. MOCA Tucson artists-in-residence Sara Bahermez and Leslie Martinez will discuss their work.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Sara Bahermez is a Yemeni-Emirati experimental and multidisciplinary designer, director, performer and educator for Abu Dhabi, UAE. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from NYU Abu Dhabi, and an MFA in Theatre from Towson University as a Fulbright Scholar. She is deeply dedicated to creating performance and constructing live images that work towards a queer Islamo-futuristic movement. Her recent works include Masjid Al-Munfaletat (The Mosque of Loose Women), an immersive theatre experience that follows the re-imagined lives of three “martyr” women: Loujain Hathloul, Dina Ali Lasloom and Qandeel Baloch.

Leslie Martinez is a multidisciplinary artist from La Grulla and La Victoria, Texas – small time-warped ghost towns in The Rio Grande Valley of the Texas-Mexican border. They were raised in Dallas, Texas, and travel regularly to and from these towns through one of the country’s deadliest U.S. CBP checkpoints. Through this experience, Leslie formed a critical understanding of xenophobic othering that would later develop into a curiosity in the structural backbone of the border’s poverty, segregation, militarized surveillance, and dehumanizing brutality. Their work currently explores these historical and embodied interests in abstracted notions of belonging and dis-belonging as they relate to shame and silence regarding sexual and gender queerness. Nuanced conceptual and sensorial parallels between these unsettled transitory spaces materialize through viscerally complex relationships to materials and their ability to defy expectations of gravity and tension. In 2018 they received an MFA from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut and in 2008, a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. Recent group shows include Heads/Tails at Next to Nothing Gallery in New York City, Way Out Now at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, California, Kaleidoscope at Kravetz | Wehby Gallery in New York City, and Life and Living presented by Deli Gallery at Hudson Valley LGBTQ Center in Kingston, NY.