We had such a great time at our first exchange of the year earlier this month! Thanks so much to everyone who was able to attend. We are thrilled to announce the speakers for our rapidly approaching second exchange of the season, coming up in early March. We hope to see you there!

Sharmi Basu (they/them) is a multimedia performance artist, curator, composer, and arts organizer born and based in the unceded territories of the Chochenyo Ohlone peoples (Oakland, CA). They create expansive textural sound and performance pieces investigating resistance and organizing strategies through decolonial worldbuilding and interactive sculpture. Sharmi’s performance project, Beast Nest, transmutes experiences of trauma through complex sonic textural layering. Sharmi received their MFA from Mills College and hosts international workshops that center on sound, somatics, decolonization, conflict, and accountability.

Darrin Martin creates video, sculpture, and print-based installations that engage the synesthetic qualities of perception. Influenced by his own experiences with hearing loss, queer ecologies, and sound studies his current projects consider notions of accessibility using tactility, sonic analogies, and audio descriptions. His videos have screened internationally at festivals and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, Impakt Festival, European Media Art Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival and currently in loop at Contemporary Calgary. His installations have exhibited at venues including The Kitchen, Moscow State Vadim Sidur Museum, University of Toronto, Aggregate Space Gallery, SOMArts and, most recently, Saint Joseph’s Art Society. He has held artist residencies at Cite Internationale des Arts, Eyebeam, Experimental Television Center, Signal Culture, Wassaic Project, and Recology Artists in Residence. Martin also occasionally curates video screenings and exhibitions and is a professor and Co-Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at University of California, Davis.

Liz Roberts makes artwork that is often collaborative and rooted in moving image and sound. Her work has shown widely with galleries, museums, alternative spaces, and film festivals. As an educator she held teaching positions in the Cinema Department at Denison University, Film & Video and Graduate Studies at Columbus College of Art & Design, and the Art and Moving Image Production departments at The Ohio State University. From 2015 to 2018 Roberts was a core participant in MINT—a collective, gallery, and multidisciplinary warehouse space in Columbus, Ohio. In 2019 she received a fellowship in sculpture for Vermont Studio Center, in 2022 she was a BAVC (Bay Area Video Coalition) MediaMaker fellow, and in 2023 awarded a Film/Video Studio residency with Wexner Center for the Arts. Her 16mm films are in the collection of the Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York. As a director, she currently has one nonfiction feature film in development and another in production supported by the International Documentary Association, SFFILM, and Berkeley Film Foundation. Roberts lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We are very much looking forward to hosting you all soon!

Where: Address given upon RSVP
When: Sunday March 3rd, 7PM
RSVP: All RSVPs through WithFriends

***Given the current COVID spike and in the spirit of community safety and accessibility, we are strongly encouraging attendees to wear a mask indoors. There will be a large medical grade air filter running in the space as well.

Looking forward to being in exchange with you,

Brian and Kelley