Calling in Sick

Saturday, October 15, 2016, 5 - 8pm

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Grounded in acts of care and empathy, this free workshop will ask participants to consider how we speak and feel about the body in states of debility through a series of partnered communication exercises.

Organized by curator and Sick Time with Canaries member Taraneh Fazeli, “Calling in Sick” is co-presented by WOUND and Refuge in the Means, a residency project in the form of a care center by the Canaries collective at Recess Art during the months of September and October. Participants in "Calling in Sick" will be invited to move through a consideration of the temporal shape of care in exercises, actions, and discussions that will prompt participants to consider the language we tend to use around illness in various contexts (personal, professional, and all the spaces in between). Asked to recollect experiences of "calling in sick" (and how you may have felt care in that moment), workshop participants will address how we do or do not feel comfortable addressing the social reproduction of our lives in work and "public" contexts.

Drawing from dialogic exercises structured to explore social group identity, artworks such as Dennis Oppenheim’s Two Way Transfer Drawing and Jesse Cohen’s I is Another, as well as excerpts from illness memoirs and open letters to various communities, “Calling in Sick” will address what has become chronic through haptic encounters that invite intimacy. By doing do so, we will work towards building a new language around bodily impairment that does not see illness as the private property of one individual but a collective concern, and find ways to support each other as existence under capitalism becomes impossible.

This workshop is free, but reservations are required.

Located in the 41 Cooper Gallery, located in 41 Cooper Square, on Third Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets.

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.