Inspired by a collaboration via Zoom through 2020-21 where we developed a series of audience-participatory explorations that used text prompts and immersion in sense and process within the context of Zoom–the corporate technology that has been colonizing our homes, schools, places of worship and other gatherings since Covid began–to disambiguate image from experience, and open up more space for the unresolved. AFK Party is part of our ongoing efforts, through play, to remind ourselves and each other that interfaces are not neutral, and that we don’t have to accept how they frame us. 

At AFK Party, we will facilitate a variety of conversations/activities in a physical format that resembles Zoom to help people adjust to the idea of meeting in person again after so much virtual meeting in the past year or two. IRL Zooming!! At ARoS, we will discuss our projects during Covid lockdown and also have a workshop where people can make wearable analog Zoom backgrounds to use in our IRL Zoom windows.

Artist bios:

Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose practice is shaped by her early somatic experiences as a refugee. Situating the body as a site of knowledge, her immersive works, performances and audience participatory scores implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history, through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. She has exhibited and performed at various institutions including ARoS Kunstmuseum (DK) with Flux Factory (NY), Sotheby’s Institute of Art (NY), Minnesota Street Project (SF), Charlotte Street Foundation (MO), and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (SF). A 2020 California Arts Council grantee for her participatory performance series “Majles,” she is also a recipient of a 2019 Kenneth Rainin Foundation NEW Commissioning grant through Dance Elixir, and recipient of a 2014 Alternative Exposure Grant for curatorial initiatives as Curator and Director of Education and Public Programs at Incline Gallery, where she founded The Project Room. Asgary has participated in numerous residencies, current and most recently including Mass MoCA (2021), Headlands Center for the Arts (2021), Real Time & Space (2021), Wassaic Project (2020), and Kala Art Institute (2020). Currently residing in Oakland, CA, where she is a Lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice, teaching Global Perspectives in Contemporary Art, she received her MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University, and has lectured extensively on photography.

Heather Kapplow (no 3rd person pronouns preferred) is a self-trained conceptual artist based in the United States. Kapplow creates participatory experiences that elicit unexpected intimacies using objects, alternative interpretations of existing environments, installation, performance, writing, audio and video. Kapplow’s work has received government and private grants, and has been commissioned for galleries, film and performance festivals (Ann Arbor Film Festival, ANTI-Festival, AREA Code Art Fair, Datscha Radio Festival, Flesh Crisis Performance Festival, Independent Film Festival of Boston, Illuminus Boston, ISEA International, Kulturmødet Mors Festival, Meetings Festival, MEM Experimental Art Festival, Open Engagement Conference) in the US and internationally. As a part of ensemble projects, Kapplow has performed at the ARoS Kunstmuseum (DK), Guggenheim Museum (US), Institute of Contemporary Art (US), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (US), Museo Arte Moderno (MX), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (US), and the Queens Museum (US), and within works by La Pocha Nostra, Paul Ramirez Jonas, and On Kawara. Kapplow is also an active member of two art communities that produce work collectively: Flux Factory and Mobius Artists Group, and an affiliate artist at metaLAB at Harvard University. In addition to practicing art, Kapplow writes about art for Hyperallergic and others, and recently co-authored an arts-heavy travel guide to Boston for Emons-Verlag GmbH, available Spring of 2021.