MOCA WINTER SOLSTICE CELEBRATION

Friday, December 21, 8pm-11pm
FREE

In lieu of our monthly THIRD THURSDAYS, MOCA Tucson is hosting a closing party for “Blessed Be: Mysticism, Spirituality, and the Occult in Contemporary Art”. This large community event will feature indoor and outdoor performances and art installations, video screenings and projections, hands-on artmaking activities, tarot readings, music, and a bonfire on the plaza. A cash bar will be available and food trucks will be on site. Performances throughout the evening by Adam Cooper-Terán, Vabianna Santos, Nazafarin Lotfi, and Angèle Lebert. The event will also include special screenings of Kenneth Anger’s “Invocation of My Demon Brother” and “Lucifer Rising”.

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS:

 Alberto Aguilar (Chicago) has shown his work nationally and internationally at: the Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit, MI); El Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales (Havana, Cuba); Palo Alto Art Center (Palo Alto, CA); National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago, IL); Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR); and the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL). His work can be found in public and private collections across the globe.

Madeleine Aguilar (Chicago) was born in Phoenix, AZ in 1998 and currently attends the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a musician and also works in comics, printmaking and fibers. In 2015 she made an album titled Made In which chronicled the life of Joan of Arc which helped her overcome her personal struggles in high school. In 2017 she completed an album entitled Yearlong which is comprised of a song for every month as a record of an entire year of her life. She is a regular contributor to F newsmagazine and has performed at the Queens Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Nazafarin Lotfi (Tucson) received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and her BA from the University of Tehran in 2007. Lotfi’s practice explores interior and negative spaces and their implications for subjectivity, experience, and identity. She examines representation of space in connection with time, weight, balance, collapse, and the dialectics of inside and outside.

Part 2: a procession, a ritual, a funeral

Four Actions: to welcome, to feed, to fill gaps, to end

 Through our actions we call for repetition; to repeat.

Through our actions we call to the past; to traditions.

Through our actions we call for companionship; community.

Through our actions we call for the end of all actions;

The end of the performance; the end of the exhibition.

——–

 Adam Cooper-Terán (Tucson) has garnered praise for his multidisciplinary art and music practice from the MAP Fund, NEA, National Hispanic Cultural Center, and International Sonoran Desert Alliance. A self-described psychonaut, Adam’s majik becomes a strange mutation of technology and organics, through the scanning of bodily fluids, bones, and other ephemera collected from the Sonoran Desert.

All of the Answers are in the Earth

—-

 Vabianna Santos’ (San Diego) interdisciplinary work is populated by sudden transformations, interwoven gender, mischievously updated metaphysical themes and encounters pushed out to the unthinkable. S(he) is interested in demonstrating how we live in our bodies is a vital source of knowledge. Santos has exhibited and performed at MOCA North Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, Vox Populi Philadelphia, and Headlands Center for the Arts.

Headless Love

Performance alternates between passages of singing and holding breath under water, exalting the potentials of queer intimacy while testing endurance and offering the body as a site of knowledge. The repeated passages become a ritual of survival, elation and dark humor.

—-

Angèle Lebert (Phoenix) is a French artist whose work is inspired by her intimate and sexual life as a woman. Between solitude and encounters with men, her work is an emotional and interpersonal account of a contemporary woman’s life.

Meditation II

This live piece is an interpersonal experimentation. Let yourself be carried away and let’s cross together the borders of time and space, peace and hostility, craziness and silence, from consciousness to the semi-awake state of the dream…