by Kathie Halfin
This is the eleventh week of quarantine. I am dividing my time between teaching, curating online and working on the ongoing interdisciplinary project and film “Rerooted”. This project entails several aspects as it is comprised of film and sculptural installation. I am working on a smaller scale, sketching, testing and playing with sculptural materials for the installation. The processing of this project is deeply personal as it unravels my experience of immigration and the collective experience of Soviet Collapse.
When working now during the time of crisis, I am drawing lines between the economic collapse that happened in Ukraine and Russia in 90’ and the economic crisis related to the epidemics of Corona Virus.
I am thinking what it takes to heal from such traumatic experiences and what we as artists need to do to support our personal and collective healing. For me personally healing is an ongoing multidisciplinary art practice that I am involved in daily. I make sculptural objects, films, performances, curate, and teach. In doing so, I embody different kinds of selves that I couldn’t be or couldn’t become because of the misogynist culture I grew up in. My healing is making and staying hopeful and active against all the odds.
I recently curated the panel for the Transborder Art TV Series where artists and curators contemplate on the experience related to the COVID 19. I loved how the curator Kyoko Sato mentioned that art is a form of collective healing and curators’ role is to embody this healing by supporting artists. That was a beautiful healing moment in itself and that is why I curate too. We need to listen and support each other and this collective trust is a form of healing.
Kathie Halfin is an artist, performer, independent curator and educator based in New York. She holds MFA in Fine Arts from the School Of Visual Arts. Halfin’s practice spans performance, sculptural installation, a video exploring the experiences of migration, belonging and gender. Her current film “Rerooted” explores the modes of loss, resiliency and acceptance. It examines migration as a personal and cross-cultural experience that transforms histories and systems. Kathie Halfin showed her work at the Satellite Art Fair: Performance Is Alive 2019, Woodstock Artists Association and Museum 2019, NARS Foundation 2019, White Box Performance Series 2019, Immigrant Artist Biennial Soft Launch: Assembly Room 2019, Itinerant Performance Festival: Smack Mellon 2019, Knockdown Center: Sunday Series 2018, Art In Odd Places Performance Festival 2018, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center 2018, Bronx Museum AIM Biennial 2017, and the A.I.R. Gallery 2016 among others. Kathie received fellowships at Wassaic Project Residency, Bronx Museum AIM Program, and Vermont Studio Center.
Follow her on IG: https://www.instagram.com/eclectic_body/
