Vic Brooks and Lumi Tan with artist Sara Magenheimer

Vic Brooks, Senior Curator of Time-Based Visual Art at EMPAC, and Lumi Tan, Curator at The Kitchen, discuss their curatorial practices in conversation with artist Sara Magenheimer. Tan organized Magenheimer's I Collected Neglected Venoms at The Kitchen (2019) and Brooks organized Bloopers #1 at EMPAC (2014). 

Vic Brooks

Vic Brooks is Senior Curator of Time-based Visual Art at EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is co-chair of the Contemporary Curatorial Workshop at the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art, works with the Calder Foundation to commission artists’ films, and is a founding member of moving image research collective 13BC. Brooks has commissioned and produced new works in the expanded field of moving image, visual arts, and performance for institutions, cinemas, festivals, television and radio internationally. Recent productions include Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener’s Tesseract, Martine Syms’s An Evening with Queen White, Laure Prouvost’s They Are Waiting for You, and Moved by the Motion's (Wu Tsang, boychild, Josh Johnson, Patrick Belaga, Asma Maroof) Sudden Rise. 

Lumi Tan

Lumi Tan is curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she has organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists across disciplines and generations since 2010. Most recently, Tan has worked with Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Meriem Bennani, Sibyl Kempson, Sahra Motalebi, and The Racial Imaginary Institute. Previously she curated projects with artists including Ed Atkins, Gretchen Bender, Half Straddle, Liz Magic Laser, George Lewis, Sara Magenheimer, Sondra Perry, Anicka Yi, and Danh Vo and Xiu Xiu. Prior to The Kitchen, Tan was Guest Curator at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, director at Zach Feuer Gallery, and curatorial assistant at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, The Exhibitionist, and numerous exhibition catalogues.

Sara Magenheimer

Working across a range of media including video, sound, performance, sculpture, collage, and installation, New York–based artist Sara Magenheimer disrupts, manipulates, and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image and text. Her videos incorporate traditional filmic editing techniques alongside those inspired by music and collage. In syncopated progressions of pictures and words, Magenheimer pushes against the bounds of narrative, charting circuitous storylines through vernacular associations that invite individual interpretations. Recent solo exhibitions include The New Museum, New York (2018), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2017); The Kitchen, New York (2017); Chapter NY (2017): Art in General in partnership with kim?, Riga, Latvia (2016); the Center for Ongoing Research & Projects (COR&P), Columbus, OH (2016); JOAN, Los Angeles (2015); and Recess, New York (2015). Her videos have been screened at the Flaherty Seminar (2019), International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018), Brooklyn Academy of Music (2017); the New York Film Festival (2017, 2015, 2014); Images Festival, Toronto (2018, 2017, 2016, 2015); Anthology Film Archives, New York (2016); EMPAC, Troy, NY (2016); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015).