Exhibition:(DE) CONSTRUCTED EXHIBITION BY NOUR BALLOUT
2023-12-01 09:00 - 17:00 (America/Detroit) | North Campus Research Complex Building 18 - Rotunda Gallery
Gallery Hours: Mon-Friday, 9 am- 5pm, or by appointment: serrag@med.umich.edu

Nour Ballout (b. 1993, Beirut) is a Detroit & Chicago based interdisciplinary artist and curator. They received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Wayne State University and an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Nour Ballout’s practice grapples with the ways looking can manifest as both resistance and violence while negotiating the tensions among visibility, documentation and surveillance. Through photography, archive and space making, their work interrogates the ways the naturalization of structures of power manifest within bodies, built environments, and communities.

Nour currently serves on the Detroit Institute of Arts contemporary arts advisory group. They are the recipient of many awards, fellowships and grants that include the 2023 Modern Ancient Brown Fellowship, the ICI EXPO Curatorial Research Fellowship, the 2022 Michigan Arts and Cultural Council Grant, the 2021 Transforming Power Fund Grant, the 2019 Knight Arts Challenge Award, Kresge Arts in Detroit Gilda Award and many more. Nour has exhibited their work nationally and participated in several artist residencies including the Ghana Think Tank in Detroit, Flux Factory in New York and plans to participate in the Kala Arts Institute Residency in 2023.

Workshop / Seminar:Curating Scholarship: A Workshop on the Visual Presentation of Research
2023-12-01 09:00 - 16:00 | 202 S. Thayer - Institute for the Humanities Osterman Common Room, #1022
Visual exhibitions of research have the potential to engage publics beyond the readers of a scholarly monograph. Moving research off the page can take a variety of forms, but always requires careful curation. In this two-day workshop, graduate student and faculty scholars will gain an understanding of the requirements of curation, of the relationship between curation and creation, and of the research potentials opened through collaboration.

Curating Scholarship will be led by Institute for the Humanities Curator Amanda Krugliak, who will address conceptual questions of importance such as visual choices, context, display, and organizational styles. Logistical factors to be covered include planning, strategies, collaborative possibilities, and generating interest and support. Guest presenters will discuss their experience translating research and into exhibition format.

After the workshop, each participant will have the opportunity to meet with the curator for a 30-minute one-on-one session to discuss the exhibition potential of their own work.

Eligibility

Currently enrolled PhD students that have reached candidacy level as of September 1, 2023.
Faculty with an active appointment on any U-M campus as of September 1, 2023. Faculty are defined as tenure track and tenured professors, lecturers, and post-doctoral/research fellows.
Each selected participant will receive $250 in compensation for their time in attending the workshop.

Facilitator and Presenter:
Amanda Krugliak, Artist, Institute for the Humanities Curator, and Arts Administrator whose practice includes performance and conceptual experiential installations.

Presenters TBA

Application and email of endorsement are due Wednesday, October 18, 2023.

Selection Criteria:

Promise, significance, and interdisciplinary scope of the research project
The humanities and arts content of the project
The project’s potential contribution to public humanities scholarship
The quality, significance, and breadth of the applicant’s prior work

To apply, visit https://myumi.ch/qGnwX.

Exhibition:Digital Engrams
2023-12-01 09:00 - 17:00 | 202 S. Thayer - Institute for the Humanities Gallery, #1010
The notion that our brains actually create memories first stored and then revisited has been contemplated since the time of Plato and Aristotle. These units of memory, or engrams, are poetic portals through which we time travel, gaining hindsight and foresight, more meaning and greater wisdom, and hopes for a future less encumbered. Beyond reminiscences of technicolor sunsets, perhaps memories are simply the brain's records of endless repetitions and familiar neural pathways.

In an era of iPhones, Macbooks, Instagram, and Facebook, everything that’s happened to us in recent memory is at our immediate disposal and made to look better than the original … every day of every year, every meal of every trip, every postcard destination. With constant 24/7 access to the newsreel of our own lives, are we losing our innate ability to remember what matters in the process?

In Digital Engrams, L.A. artist Gabriela Ruiz combines sound, video, light and sculpture to create unexpected environments that challenge our sensibilities. The installation considers how images function on and off the screen, and how memories real and curated are the crux of personal and cultural identity. Who do we think we are in this life or the eternal life on the internet hereafter?

Ruiz’s spatial inquiries grapple with the potential erasure of the rituals of memorialization and the richness of material culture so important in her own Latinx heritage and to her sense of self.

–Amanda Krugliak, IH Arts Curator

About the artist:
Gabriela Ruiz is a self-taught artist whose practice blends diverse forms of expression and media, including sculpture, video, painting, and apparel design. Her sculptures incorporate found objects and industrial materials, such as thrift store furniture and insulation foam. Strongly influenced by growing up in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley to immigrant parents from Mexico, Ruiz’s practice is a reflection of the DIY work ethic she was raised under, the vibrancy of Mexican cultural and artistic traditions, and her exposure to subculture and fantasy at a young age as a means to escape the realities of daily life.

One of L.A.’s rising young talents, she presented her solo show Stream at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2022, part of the museum's Outburst project.

*Gabriela Ruiz is the Jean Yokes Woodhead Visiting Artist at the Institute for the Humanities. This exhibition is part of LSA's fall 2023 Art & Resistance theme semester.*
