BYO fosters discussion and debate about pressing issues in contemporary culture across Harvard and Boston area communities by bringing to campus emerging figures in contemporary art for informal evening and lunchtime conversations. During the spring semester BYO will host two evening sessions and a lunch session in the Sert Gallery Cafe at the Carpenter Center.

Sert Gallery, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA. 617.495.3251 for information.

MARCH 18
Brownbag Lunch with MICHAEL BLUM
Sert Gallery, 3rd floor, 12-1:30PM
drinks and snacks

Please join us for the first BYO brownbag, a lunchtime forum introducing new artists to the Harvard and Boston communities. (Snacks and drinks provided; please bring your own main course.) This first event will feature a conversation with artist Michael Blum. Born in Israel, raised in France, and now living in Austria, Blum was trained as a historian, and his often biting installations, books, and videos are based in a meticulous but creative research process. From a house museum in Istanbul for a (very) little-known figure in modern Turkish history, to a video documenting the artist's exhaustive, exhausting attempt to meet in Indonesia the workers who made his Nike sneakers, Blum's art provides innovative openings into debates about historical memory, place, and national identity under the conditions of globalization.

APRIL 3
"Dubai: The Post-Critical Landscape?" with NEGAR AZIMI,
JACE CLAYTON, and JOSEPH GRIMA
Sert Gallery, 3rd FLOOR, 7:30 pm
drinks and dinner

In recent years, Dubai has been posited as a spectacularized, almost virtual landscape whose rapid expansion has made it impossible to grasp, much less critique. Rhetoric about Dubai has rendered it "post-critical" and "post-ideological;" beyond critical theory's capacity to adequately engage. Negar Azimi, Jace Clayton, and Joseph Grima will offer strategies for dismantling this disabling rhetoric, using their work in and about Dubai to consider the currency of the "post-critical" and "post-ideological" in Dubai and within the contemporary critical landscape more broadly. Azimi, senior editor of the Middle Eastern arts and culture magazine Bidoun, will discuss Bidoun's reconceptualization of the glossy magazine as a site for criticality. Clayton, a sound artist, DJ, and critic who often writes about and works with North African and Middle Eastern music, will consider sampling and remixing as artistic strategies within and outside of DJ culture. Grima, the director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, will contrast Storefront's interventions in consumerist SoHo with the myriad difficulties Storefront has faced trying to establish an outpost in Dubai.

Negar Azimi is senior editor of Bidoun, an arts and culture magazine based in New York City. She studied international relations at Stanford and government at Harvard and is now pursuing a PhD in anthropology at Columbia. At Harvard, she co-organized a conference--now ongoing--on human rights and media (www.humanrightsandmedia.com). She is a member of the Beirut-based Fondation Arabe pour l'Image, with whom she is working on photographic projects in Iran and the greater Arab region. She's written for COLORS, Flash Art, Frieze, the Nation, the New York Times Magazine, Open Democracy, and Slate among other publications.

Jace Clayton is a writer and musician based in Brooklyn. His essays appear in a number of international publications, including Frieze, the Washington Post, Fader, Bidoun, and Abitare. As DJ /rupture, he has toured in over 25 countries, performed as turntable soloist with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, DJed in a band alongside Norah Jones, and released music on labels such as Soul Jazz. He hosts a syndicated radio show on New York-area FM station WFMU. Jace also runs Soot Records and has just launched Dutty Artz, a hyperactive young media entity. Head to www.negrophonic.com for additional decentertainment.

Joseph Grima is the director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, a nonprofit gallery in New York City committed to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture, art and design. He is a special correspondent for the architecture magazine Abitare, Milan, and the author of the book Instant Asia: Fast Forward through a Changing Continent (Skira, 2008), an overview of the new generation of architects in China, Korea and Japan. His writing has been published in numerous books and international publications including Domus, Icon, Tank, Urban China, Project Russia and others.

APRIL 24
"Transgressive Architecture" with ALEX SCHWEDER and WARD SHELLEY
Sert Gallery, 3rd FLOOR, 6:30 pm
drinks and dinner

Both Alex Schweder, an architect, and Ward Shelley, an artist, move outside of the traditional boundaries of their respective disciplines, working together on projects they call "Performance Architecture." Schweder and Shelley will explore their collaboration and the impact of their expansion of individual authorship on two of their joint projects: Flatland, a installation at the Sculpture Center in 2007 and Stability, a work currently in progress. Both coauthored works consider buildings as performative texts, framing buildings themselves as performances that require the live bodies of the artists to be actualized. Experiencing a "productive discomfort" while bodily manipulating pieces of buildings, participants in Schweder and Shelley's installations are asked to consider buildings as being constructed as much through behavior as they are from bricks, helping to craft an architectural and artistic practice in which bodies are as essential as beams. So doing, their work constructs a more expansive definition of how architecture acts on spaces and bodies, and occasions a reevaluation of the relationship between architect, artist, performance, and public space.

Alex Schweder's art and architecture transgresses the boundaries between the two disciplines, proposing an interdisciplinary hybrid. He is the 2005-2006 Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture—it was here that Schweder and Shelley met and began to collaborate. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Henry Urbach Architecture in New York, the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and the Museo d'Arte Contemporane di Roma. www.alexschweder.com

Ward Shelley lives and works as an artist in New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture, architecture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley's installations examine the mutually formative relationship between subject and object, often in the form of functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment. His work is in the collections of several museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Art Museum. www.wardshelley.com