Artist bios in the exhibition In the Words, In the Bones curated by Magdalena Moskolewich, at Boston Center for the Arts in 2019.
Nyugen E. Smith (1976) is a first generation Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Jersey City, NJ. Responding to the legacy of European colonial rule in the African diaspora, Smith’s work considers imperialist practices of oppression, violence and intergenerational trauma. He is interested in ritual and sacred practice rooted in African spiritual systems and how they are employed as coping mechanisms and tools for collective empowerment. He holds a BA from Seton Hall University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nyugen E. Smith has conducted public programs, visiting artist lectures and panel discussions at institutions including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA. He was awarded the 2016 Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund, the 2018 Franklin Furnace Fund, and the 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. www.nyugensmith.com
Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi (1976) is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist born in Hungary. Szegedi’s art is influenced by her experience of living through the transition from socialism to post-communist capitalism. She is interested in the conceptual matrix of geo- and chronopolitics concerning issues of identity, place and the construction of narratives. Her works address the critical space of the liminal; positions of change that respond to global concerns of belonging. Embracing sites of transition, Szegedi combines traditional and emerging technologies, integrating video, painting, photography, as well as performance. Szegedi’s research interests include the power of absence and the possibility of reparative histories; she explores these topics through the intersection of absentology, decolonial and posthuman theories and digital humanities. Her recent research travels to the former Eastern bloc examined how absence can produce empowering paradigm shifts. Zsuzsanna Szegedi holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at sübSamsøn, Boston, MA; Montserrat Galleries, Beverly, MA; Modem Museum, Debrecen, and Knoll Galéria, Budapest, Hungary. Her traveling Ghost of Lukacs project will be on view at OSTRALE Biennale O21 from July 1 until October 3, 2021.
www.zsuzsanna.com
Marina Leybishkis (1980) is a New York based multimedia interdisciplinary artist who was born and raised in Uzbekistan. She holds a BA in Justice and Humanities Studies from The City University of New York and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was a recipient of the Fulbright grant for artistic research and resident of Baxter St. Camera Club of New York.
Through use of video, photography, archives, archeology, and text, Leybishkis analyzes the instability of meaning, the construction of visual narratives as locations of self-formation as well as the implications of such narratives into perceptions of identity. In her work, the image becomes a fraught site for examining geopolitical concepts of nationality, cultural memory, and the social body. Through her installations, she tries to transform memory into materiality, challenging viewers to inhabit histories in all their complexity. http://404thepagecannotbefound.com/