TENDER BODIES: HYBRID MEDIA + VERDANT KIN
Isabel Beavers (they/she) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles working at the intersections of new media, ecology, and collective action. Across artistic production, curatorial practice and teaching, their research challenges us to imagine adaptive climate futures–ones that rely on alternative modes of knowing as structures for living. Embodied and site-specific research are central to their practice through which they have explored Arctic sea ice melt, plant and human adaptation to wildfire in the American west, deep sea mining, the ethics of artificial intelligence, and eco-feminist re-imaginings of Western mythologies.
Beavers’ work on deep sea mining was recently included in Getty’s 2024 PST Art + Science Collide as part of Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean. Beavers is the Artistic Director of Supercollider LA, and the Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in STS at Harvey Mudd University. Through artistic practice, teaching, and curating, they foster communities of care and experimentation, inviting audiences to sense the unseen and imagine new eco-futures.
Responders
VERA PETUKHOVA is an independent curator from Minsk, Belarus, currently based in Los Angeles. She is the co-founder of RIP Space, a project space in Downtown LA dedicated to new media, future-oriented practices, and emergent art forms. Her curatorial work focuses on performance, media, experimental practices, futurity, food, and research around sensory and immersion in artistic practice.
She has curated exhibitions at The Bronx Museum, CalArts, Young Curators: New Ideas V at Detroit Art Week, AC Institute, CP Projects Space, and the SVA Gramercy Gallery. She received her MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts in 2017 and has worked with the curatorial teams at Visions2030, Performa, The Kitchen, Northwest Film Forum, and the Tribeca Film Festival. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Hyperallergic and The Art Newspaper, and her writing has appeared in Blouin Artinfo, OnCurating Magazine, and Performa Magazine
MARCELA VIEIRA is cofounder and curator of the art website aarea (www.aarea.co), a curatorial platform founded in 2017 that commissions and exhibits artworks designed especially for the internet. aarea’s activities also extend into a public program of curatorial projects, courses and seminars.
The first internet native art institution in Brazil, aarea has been developing projects in collaboration with other institutions such as Jeu de Paume, São Paulo Biennial, CCA Wattis Institute, Pivô, Macba, Sesc, Pro Helvetia, Salón Nacional de Bogotá, NT2, among others.
With multidisciplinary interests, Marcela is also one of the editors of Revista Rosa and a literary translator (French-Portuguese). She has a PhD in semiotics at the University of Paris 8, in partnership with the University of São Paulo.
