INTERCULTURAL - Celebrating Int'l Women's Day

INTERCULTURAL – An immersive vision and sound art experience by Sheinina Raj and Nelly Furtado.  Celebrating International Women’s Day with an artist lecture, Q&A, and exhibition of photographs and signed posters for sale exploring the varied cultures.  Attendees are encouraged to dress in native heritage clothing or costumes celebrating our cultural ancestry.

A conceptually rigorous portfolio exploring conventions of ethnicity through a series of costumed self-portraiture featuring artist Raj arrayed in the traditional finery of diverse nations with the backdrop of music by Nelly Furtado. Raj uses herself — both her story and her body — as both the intuitive site and narrative touchstone for what is ultimately a deeply personal and generously universal message of peace, acceptance, and beauty. Raj’s own cross-border heritage and intercontinental family history first inspired her to embark on this serial self-transformation. The artists inviting countenance is revealed as ethnically morphic as she successively embodies both the epitome and increasing obsolescence of race-based constructs of identity. The larger than life scale, and the perfect regularity of Raj’s serene gaze and relaxed but formal front-facing pose creates a clean, almost classical structure within which comparisons are encouraged, as both differences and samenesses are celebrated equally, and attention to detail moves the story forward. In these images, audiences see the artist more deeply, and inevitably come to see themselves as well. Sound makes for not only a more complete experience, but saliently provides a new and perhaps unexpected interpretation of the art. Nelly Furtado’s work with INTERCULTURAL is based on her world music sensibility and the fusion of multi-linguistic layering for which she is known.