Closing Celebration | Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
4800 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles CA 90029
Sunday, January 5, 2024 from 11:30 AM–3 PM
Curator Walkthroughs | 11:30 AM, 12:30 PM, 1:30 PM, 2:30 PM
Join LACE for the closing celebration of our PST ART exhibition, Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics. This is your last chance to explore da Costa’s deep reflections on life, chronic illness, socio-political autonomy, and interspecies collaboration. Gain deeper insights into the exhibition through 30-min curator walkthroughs with Daniela Lieja Quintanar and Ana Briz offered at 11:30 AM, 12:30 PM, 1:30 PM, and 2:30 PM.
Light refreshments will be provided.
About the Exhibition
Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics revisits the collaborative artistic practice of the late Beatriz da Costa (1974-2012) as an investigation into technoscientific experimentation, politics, activism, and art-making, contextualized for our contemporary moment. da Costa’s unique models of inter- and un-disciplinary public interventions, workshops, and critical writing foreground and amplify the ongoing social struggles for sustaining life. Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics explores how da Costa’s deep reflections on life and extinction, health and wellness, environmental issues, cancer and chronic illness, socio-political autonomy, and interspecies cohabitation remain relevant to our societal issues at hand today. da Costa’s research and art-making addresses art and technoscience alongside ancient and non-academic forms of knowledge. In that spirit, this project weaves together an exhibition, publication, public programming, performances, educational workshops, and study groups as an evocation of da Costa’s approach to the theory of tactical biopolitics. Tactical biopolitics engages technoscience, everyday life, history, culture, the academy, and the public to distribute collective knowledge while challenging societal norms and capitalist structures. This radical methodology reclaims collective power to ensure and maintain life through tactics as a form of resistance to hegemonic powers.
This exhibition is complemented by a publication surveying da Costa’s entire artistic career with curatorial essays, reflections from previous collaborators including Donna Haraway and Robert F. Nideffer, and more. The exhibition publication is the most extensive analysis of da Costa’s practice to date, and is distributed by MIT Press. Publications are available for purchase at this link and at Skylight Books.
About the Curators
Daniela Lieja Quintanar is Chief Curator and Director of Programming at REDCAT Gallery (former Chief Curator and Director of Programming at LACE Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). She works between Los Angeles and Mexico, emphasizing contemporary art and curatorial practices that explore the politics and social issues of everyday life. In 2018, Lieja Quintanar was awarded the Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She was part of the curatorial team of MexiCali Biennial 2018-19. She served as Project Coordinator and Contributing Curatorial Advisor for Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in the 1990s Mexico at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Getty PST:LA/LA initiative. In 2016, she worked with artist Teresa Margolles for her contribution La Sombra to the Public Art Biennial CURRENT: LA Water. She organized with LACE La Pista de Baile by Colectivo am, as part of the Getty/REDCAT PST: Live Art LA/LA Performance Festival. Lieja Quintanar curated Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento (2021), Unraveling Collective Forms (2019); CAVERNOUS: Young Joon Kwak & Mutant Salon (2018) and Emory Douglas: Bold Visual Language (2018 co-curated with Essence Harden); home away from by Jimena Sarno (2017), El Teatro Campesino (1965-1975), (2017 co-curated with Samantha Gregg) at LACE. Lieja Quintanar holds a BA in Ciencias de la Cultura from the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, Mexico City, and an MA in Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California.
Ana Briz is a researcher, writer, and curator in Los Angeles, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Tongva peoples. In 2021, she joined the LACE team as curatorial assistant to (un)disciplinary tactics. Her research is situated in the field of performance, art, and visual culture in the United States with an emphasis on queer, feminist, and anti-racist work by BIPOC in California. She is broadly interested in issues of displacement, gentrification, mourning, and resistance in contemporary art and culture. The abolitionist imaginary informs her curatorial practice and research interests. Briz is currently a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and holds an M.A. in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Art History from Florida International University.
