Monday 20th March KL 13.00
Lecture room 4th floor
KHIB Dept. of Fine Arts
Working with sound and environment as primary media Kianga Ford’s narrative experiments query the psycho-physical dimensions of social identity formation. Her immersive often story-based installations engage the viewer in a participatory exploration of the limits between individual and collective intimate and public given and contingent categorical and particular. In the increasingly considered field of sound art she has worked collaboratively with a range of international composers from Toronto to Berlin as well as recently with the Frankfurt-based Forsythe Company. Her work has been shown at venues including The Studio Museum in Harlem The California African-American Museum The Banff Centre (Alberta Canada) The Museum of Contemporary Art Miami and The Brooklyn Institute for Contemporary Art. Her recent solo shows include presentations of new work at Lisa Dent Gallery San Francisco and Occidental College Los Angeles. Ford is one of 25 artists selected for the 2006 California Biennial. Her explorations with narrative are informed by her studies in English and Theater at Georgetown University where she received her BA in 1994 and post-graduate work in film at NYU. Ford received her MFA in 2003 from UCLA where she studied with Mary Kelly in the Interdisciplinary Studio program. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is completing a dissertation on articulations of race and identity in contemporary exhibition. She lectures frequently on her dual-inquiry into questions of contemporary identity in discourse and practice and has recently spoken at SFAI MIT NYU Stanford and USC. She has published texts and criticism in several anthologies and also for the UCLA Hammer Museum and X-tra Magazine among others. She is currently artist-in-residence at USF Verftet in Bergen Norway. Ford is Assistant Professor in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Boston.
“Why do we have to go over the same set of symptoms twenty times before we understand them? Why does the first statement of a new fact always leave us cold? Because our minds have to take in something which deranges our original set of ideas but we are all like that in this miserable world.”
