Antena (Jen Hofer and Gelare Khoshgozaran)
Krannert Art Museum
October 2016

Antena is a collaborative project that activates links between social justice work and artistic practice by exploring how critical views on language can help us to reimagine and rearticulate the worlds we inhabit.

Antena artists Jen Hofer and Gelare Khoshgozaran, both translators, writers, and artists whose solo work centers on cross-language practices and states of “betweenness,” will use their residency at Krannert Art Museum as an opportunity to explore possibilities for new collaborative projects. Gelare and Jen will present their work to the Champaign-Urbana community through artist talks, workshops, studio visits, and public conversations, and will also use their time at KAM to experiment with new processes for cross-pollination and intersection. In the six years since Antena was founded by Jen Hofer and John Pluecker, the collaborative’s work has manifested in exhibitions, publications, performances, translations, organizing, curatorial practice, interpretation, and the creation of bilingual and multilingual spaces. The group expects to expand this list through the artist residency at KAM.

October 26, 6 pm at La Casa Cultural Latina, 1203 W. Nevada St., Urbana
This La Casa Conversation will be a chance to learn about Antena’s collaborations and to explore meaning in language and in art. 

October 27, 12 noon at IPRH Levis Faculty Center, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana
Language is embedded in our bodies, circulating and skeletal; at the same time, languages enter from the outside. The languages we speak determine social access and participation, they determine our place in hierarchies of privilege and disempowerment. Language Justice offers a radically different approach to language—democratizing in a multi-lingual, non-hierarchical political and public space. In this workshop, Antena artists Jen Hofer and Gelare Khoshgozaran will invite discussion about the conceptual and practical strategies we can use to resist single-language dominance and create spaces where everyone present can express themselves fully in their own language. How might cross-language practice become a model for encountering difference in a wide range of contexts? Are we invited to open ourselves to “radical listening” as artists and as human beings?

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of both Antena and its sister collective Antena Los Ángeles, dedicated to local language justice advocacy. Her most recent translations are Intervenir/Intervene by Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) and Style / Estilo by Dolores Dorantes (Kenning Editions, 2016). Her poetry books have been published by Atelos, Palm Press, and subpress, and in numerous DIY/DIT editions. Her translations and writings are forthcoming from Cardboard House Press, Litmus Press, and Writ Large Press. In addition to working as a translator, interpreter, and language justice advocate, she teaches poetics, translation and bookmaking at CalArts and at Otis College.

Gelare Khoshgozaran is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and translator working across the mediums of video, performance, installation and writing. Born and raised in Tehran and living in Los Angeles, she envisions the city as an imaginary space between asylum as “the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee” and the more dated meaning of the word, “an institution offering shelter and support to people who are mentally ill.” Gelare is the recipient of the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, the 2015 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and the 2016 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She is the co-founder of The Contemptorary.

Pictured: Jen Hofer, Gelare Khoshgozaran, and Jorge Lucero