MATERIALITY
OF
RESISTANCE
The 2024 CCA@CCA theme, Materiality of Resistance, centered on a two-day symposium (March 7-8, 2024) exploring the artistic deployment of materials as tools to imagine, promote, and enact resistance to the status quo in American art and visual culture. By invoking the word “material,” we throw into relief substances—unique and many, observable and nearly imperceptible—that are marshaled and transformed by makers into things perceived as significant, useful, and of value.
Hosted by the History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) program at California College of the Arts (CCA), and made possible with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the symposium convened writers, artists, designers, curators, and archivists to consider historical and contemporary stories where the materiality of making contributes to socio-cultural change. The symposium comprised lectures, panel discussions, exhibitions of archival materials and new works, as well as hands-on workshops on CCA’s San Francisco campus.
A student leads an art-making workshop within the Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition, March 2024. Photo by Megan Kelly.
FACULTY COORDINATOR
Nil Bayraktar
Nilgun Bayraktar is Associate Professor of Film in the History of Art and Visual Culture Program and Film Program at California College of the Arts. Her work, focusing on migrant and diasporic cinema, contemporary art, and critical border studies, has been published in academic journals including Journal of European Studies, Screen City Biennial Journal and New Cinemas. She is co-editor with Alberto Godioli of Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture (Palgrave 2024) and author of Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe (Routledge 2018), which examines cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe since the 1990s. Her current book project, Border Futurities expands the chronological, geographic, and theoretical scope of her earlier research, looking beyond Europe to the Middle East, Africa, and the US-Latin American context to investigate the multiplication and diffusion of borderlands. She received a B.A. in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University, Istanbul, and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies & Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
CAMPUS ACTIVATION
CCA@CCA Exhibition
The Creative Citizens in Action Exhibition (March 7–8, 2024) featured work by CCA students and faculty that visually complemented The Materiality of Resistance Symposium. Dispersed throughout CCA’s Nave, the installations, project presentations, and workshops were the combined result of an open call for student work and faculty-directed curricular collaborations. Organized by the Creative Citizens in Action initiative (CCA@CCA), in collaboration with the History of Art and Visual Culture program, CCA faculty, students, and staff, this exhibition connected the symposium to the Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series, an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism.
Large-scale installations by CCA students included a sculpture by Sara Cruz (BFA Sculpture), interactive spaces by Benjamin Eckert (BFA Sculpture) and Sean Cullen (BFA Fashion Design), artifacts from a performance by Zedekiah Gonsalves Schild (MFA Fine Arts), and paintings by Cindy Zhang (BFA Painting and Drawing). Each student received $500 in materials, installation support, and professional documentation of their artwork.
SPOTLIGHTED PROJECT
Global Girl Cultures Afternoon Tea
Organized by Dr. Melinda Luisa de Jesús, Associate Professor, Critical Ethnic Studies
In two back-to-back Afternoon Tea sessions on Thursday, March 7, students from the course GIRL CULTURE invited symposium attendees and the CCA community to discuss girl power and the specific challenges facing girls around the world. Reclaiming the idea of the little girls’ tea party, our Afternoon Tea showcased student art and research about global girl cultures. Student organizers offered tea, snacks, and stimulating conversation to foster learning about girls’ studies and girls’ resistance.
CAMPUS ACTIVATION
Rogue Gestures (Excerpts) by Nava Dance Theatre
The closing event of the Materiality of Resistance Symposium was a special performance by the Nava Dance Theatre, a bharatanatyam dance company which uses the south Indian dance form to navigate place, identity, and politics through the lens of lived experience. Rogue Gestures is a bharatanatyam, experimental movement, and live music production that explores the labor and lived experiences of South Asian immigrant women in the US. Inspired by the oral histories of Indian nurses who arrived as a result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, choreographer Nadhi Thekkek, and her collaborators explore the heavy and enduring work of immigrant women and the worlds they traverse between. At CCA, the Nava Dance Theatre presented performance excerpts and interactive discussions exploring how our contemporary immigrant histories can be a source for dancemaking, creative inquiry, and artistic exploration.
