Artists Unite Creative Venues: OUTdoor Projection Show Amir Parsa

Artists Unite Presents Creative Venues: Projection Show
Amir Parsa
December 28 & 29, 2009 7PM
On the outside wall of the
Coliseum Theater on 181st. St. & Broadway

Allá (There...) December 28
Photographs of the Dominican Republic are projected while conversations and discussions in the street are quickly relayed and projected alongside the images. The impressions, memories, meditations, dialogues and polylogues between passersby fashion the textual narratives that will simultaneously unfold.

Ayuda! (Help!) December 29
The poet at the bottom of the hill preparing for the journey, in despair, seeks advice from the passersby, who will help write, edit, revise, rewrite and go through multiple drafts and flows of his text.

Allá, a segment of an unfolding phototextual narrative (Fotonama), and Ayuda, a fragment of a literary epic (canto II), engage the viewers and the passersby into the creation and consumption of the work. Narrative conventions are challenged, and poetic, stylistic and performative operations activate innovative literary and photographic experiences. Orchestrated through the creation of ephemeral events with lasting artifacts concocted by strangers, both works independently and on successive nights explore and exploit the registers and parameters unique to literature on the one hand, and to photography on the other, engaging with traditional modalities of publication, exhibition, commodification, dissemination and interaction.

Amir Parsa: An internationally acclaimed writer, poet, and photographer, Amir Parsa is the author of more than ten books. An uncategorizable body of work, Mr. Parsa’s oeuvre has been presented and debated in galleries and museums, in streets and on rooftops, in broad daylight and in hiding, and at various festivals, events and curated venues around the world. He currently lives in NY, where he directs creative education projects at the Museum of Modern Art and is a Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute.

The Coliseum Theater, established in 1920, is the oldest continuously operating movie house in New York City.

www.artistsunite-ny.org Creative Venues is made possible in part with public funds from the Fund for Creative Communities and the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, both supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Artists Unite LIVE! is funded in part by a discretionary grant from Councilmember Robert Jackson. Artists Unite receives support from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, Medical Center Neighborhood Fund and the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone.