Aliza Shvarts “Hotline”

A.I.R. Gallery

This event has ended.

Hotline is an interactive performance and exhibition by 2019-2020 A.I.R. Fellow Aliza Shvarts that takes on the format of the voicemail tree. The work appropriates the dated, faceless technology of the telephone hotline in order to consider what kinds of things we ask, confess, or create with one another at a mediated distance. Conceived in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the work explores the sorts of intimacies the face precludes yet the voice allows.

Presented in conjunction with the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation’s Performance-in-Place series, Hotline is comprised of nested sites of participation, none of which is primary. Viewers can choose to participate remotely by calling (866) 696-0940, which connects the caller to a “choose your own adventure”-type narrative distributed over a voicemail tree. Viewers can also participate through the physical gallery space, a printed gallery guide, or installation photography by scanning image QR codes, which connect to the ten voicemail boxes where past participants have left anonymous messages in response to various prompts.

Printed on square canvases, the QR codes installed in the exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery reference iconic moments of mediation in pop culture. Also evident is an enduring tension within the history of mediation technologies, as recapitulated in the trajectory of 20th century painting: is the screen or canvas a portal for connection, a window to an elsewhere place? Or does its surface merely reflect the conditions of its own production, functioning as a solid object or mirror that returns the viewer to the space of viewing?

The hotline number is toll-free and able to receive calls 24 hours a day from September 1, 2020—January 23, 2021. New messages will be accessible via the QR codes within 24 hours.

Aliza Shvarts is an artist and theorist who takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her current work focuses on testimony and the circulation of speech in the digital age. Her artwork been shown across Europe, Latin America, and the US at venues including the Tate Modern in London; Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA in Prague; the Athens Biennale; Universidad de los Andes in Bogota; SculptureCenter and Participant Inc in New York; LACE in Los Angeles; and the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Recent solo exhibitions include Off-Scene at Artspace (2018, New Haven); and Purported at Centre of Contemporary Art FUTURA (2019, Prague) and Art in General (2020, NYC), which surveyed the last decade of her practice.

Shvarts’ writing has been published in Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art: Practice, The Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, TDR/The Drama Review, Women & Performance, and The Brooklyn Rail. She has given talks at numerous institutions including The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Harvard University, McGill University, Stanford University, and UCLA. Not content with appearing only at revered seats of learning, she has also written liner notes for the drone metal band SunnO))) and appeared She has also been a guest commentator on MTV.

Aliza Shvarts received her BA summa cum laude in Fine Art and English from Yale University and her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, where her dissertation, The Doom Performative: Aesthetics in the Space of Interdiction, received the Monroe Lippman Memorial Award for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation. In addition, Shvarts was a 2014 recipient of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a 2014-2015 Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, a 2017 Critical Writing Fellow at Recess Art, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015-2019). She is currently a 2019-20 Fellow at A.I.R and a 2020 Artist Fellow at the National Arts Club.