| | Photography They Won’t Budge:
Africans in Europe 
They Won’t Budge: Africans in Europe currently on view at the Harlem-based Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, is a welcomed wake up call to the myopia of a very American view of the black experience. Dissonant and peaceful, vivacious and lifeless, spiritual and whimsical, the portraits on display both speak across cultures and pinpoint a specificity of migratory moments. Traipsing through local migrant neighborhoods that are affected by global policies; tracing migratory patterns with imperial and colonial undertones; and translating stories of hope for a better life despite harsh current realities are the huge undertakings of They Won’t Budge.
The protest captured here shows an unarmored African migrant unprepared for battle against an Italian legion. The confrontation is symbolic of the meniscus that results between two cultures abruptly placed in close physical proximity. In this case, the African migratory experience is buttressed against a stalwart European ethos that still values colonial ideologies. However, as the Schomburg exhibition displays, these African migrants are equipped with something other than an armor fashioned with material strength; instead it is the armor of hope, resilience, and perseverance that equips them to survive. Curated by New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, They Won’t Budge is a vivid and moving photographic journey of the African Diasporic community in Europe and a compelling presentation of their unique struggles.
– Tanya Watts | On view through July 26
The Schomburg Center
515 Malcolm X Boulevard - Harlem, NYC back to top Open See  In 2003, the Hellenic Cultural Heritage invited twelve Magnum photographers to “share their vision on contemporary Greece” to promote the Olympics. In response, American photographer Jim Goldberg’s “vision” centered on the country’s immigrant population, most of whom live in hiding, without papers and without rights.
Open See, currently on view at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris , is part of Goldberg’s larger project “The New Europeans,” which explores and documents the exodus of refugees, immigrants and victims of human traffic.
Of his focus on this underbelly of our society, Goldberg says, “My work documents the complex ways that people struggle to affirm their dignity and integrity when social circumstances work against them.” Often poignant, the collection includes stunning images where Goldberg actively makes his subject the storyteller by allowing them to write on the photo in their own language—be it Arabic, Ukrainian, Greek, or at times broken English.
The message explicit in Goldberg’s photos is often reflective of the energy, ambition and human will to realize dreams of freedom that are devoid of nationality or social class. – Julien DeBock | On view through July 26
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Impasse Lebouis 75014 - Paris, France back to top Arts Perspectives: Women, Art and Islam  Perspectives: Women, Art and Islam at Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) lives up to its title, providing insight into five disparate lives shaped by Islam, the West, and everything in between. With roots in Bangladesh, Algeria, Pakistan, Morocco, and New York City, the artists utilize family photographs, spiritual poetry, Quranic verses, and personal accessories to shed insight into the personal conflicts of Muslim women who face religious pressures to fulfill social expectations at the expense of personal aspirations.
Terrorism and the treatment of women have largely defined Islam in public discourse in recent years. In response, Perspectives challenges the notion of Islam as a monolithic, misogynist, unimaginative and atavist faith. This is no small task, yet it is achieved with a remarkable fusion—from modern photography, painting, installation and video to traditional Islamic crafts like tilework, ceramics and calligraphy.
While the exhibition space itself, a series of large rooms and intimate corners, provides disparate experiences, the artwork’s power may well be what it does not openly express, but perhaps, quietly hints. Read more. Co-Presented by MoCADA and the Museum for African Art – Mohamed Hassim Keita | On view through September 13
MOCADA , 80 Hanson Place - Brooklyn, NYC back to top Iran Inside Out 
In an era of Cold War hysteria, Sting once sang, “Russians love their children too.” Twenty-five years and some axes of evil later, the artists of the Chelsea Art Museum’s exhibition Iran Inside Out , remind us, if needed, that the Iranians too love, laugh, imagine, create, and rise up just as the rest of us. The featured contemporary artists, living and working in Iran and throughout its Diaspora, prove there is a bubbling creative energy and an equally critical, sometimes scathing, global perspective emanating from this nation.
Even if the number of works can be overwhelming or the quality of the pieces varied, curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath succeed in conveying the mixes and dissonances of exile, as well as the attempts at self-reinvention of a people too often limited by internal religious and political dogmas, or the Western evening news. Saghar Daeeri’s “Shopping Malls of Tehran,” for example, may seem paradoxical at first. But her work, she says, is exactly about “paradox in Iran...[They] are all about showing Tehran’s girls’ connection and communication with each other through fashion...in Iran, the Islamic country.” Iran Inside Out is a breath of fresh air that unapologetically explodes clichés. – Sandrine Colard | On view through September 5
Chelsea Art Museum,
556 West 22nd Street - Chelsea, NYC back to top Theater Ruined  Written by: Lynn Nottage
Directed by: Kate Whoriskey
2009 Pulitzer Prize-Winner for Drama
From the Obie Award-winning playwright Lynn Nottage comes a haunting, probing work about the resilience of the human spirit during times of war. Set in a small mining town in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ruined follows Mama Nadi, a shrewd businesswoman who runs a brothel in a land torn apart by civil war and where rape is the weapon of choice. The production explores the thin line between her protection of and profiteering from the women she shelters—women who’ve been “ruined” by rape.
One of the “ruined,” 18-year-old Sophie, played by Condola Rashad, rarely verbalizes her sex-captive ordeal, yet we are painfully reminded of the inhumanity that scars her with every wince and painful limp she takes. There are no words for the terror materialized on and in her body. But even as you are confronted with the unthinkable, Ruined leaves one hopeful—that even after the unimaginable tragedy and the terror, what is not lost is the opportunity to reclaim and reinvent oneself—as many tries as it takes.
Currently on stage.
back to top Dance Da▪Da▪Dance Project  NYC- and Mexico-based duet repertory company, Da▪Da▪Dance Project presents an evening titled Butter and Fly: intends to walk. Three intense physical works created by three choreographers–Eun Jung Choi-Gonzalez, Guillermo Ortega Tanus and Helena Franzén–are all enhanced by video and original vocal, acoustic and electronic scores. Reflections of multi-cultural backgrounds, education, and experience collide nonsensically throughout the evening, building a parody of universal human behaviors that explores humor, sexuality, tenderness, fear, and obstinacy.
| Starts July 30.
The Joyce Soho, 155 Mercer Street | Soho, NYC back to top Film Sugar  Written & Directed by: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Cast: Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino, Andre Holland,
Michael Gaston, and Jose Rijo
Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) is preparing for the American experience. He’s played baseball in the Dominican Republic since he was eleven. He’s undergone training for the U.S. leagues. His mother, sister, girlfriend, his whole neighborhood in fact, has waited for his call-up to the Minors. Miguel has got the physical tools to make it all the way, but the closer and closer the M.L.B. comes to Miguel, the more disenfranchised he’s bound to become once separated from his own culture.
Directors/writers, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden take us from the heart of Miguel’s family to the heartland of America to create one giant allegory for the Spanish-American experience. While they tend to depict things with a hands-off approach, they, wisely, use “America’s favorite past time” as the backdrop to fuel their feelings on immigration.
To hear it out loud, Miguel’s culture shock sounds more like the experience of a day laborer than a potential sports star. He’s carted out of his country, enticed by the opportunity to make money for his family, exploited for his abilities, forced to better perform his job, and threatened to be replaced/sent back home if he can’t.
Even when the film is not always convincing, it provides something to reflect on. This works in contrast to the formula of many movies in this genre. Plenty of sports flicks spend the bulk of their running time justifying the game to the viewer. From a filmmaking standpoint this makes sense (you want even the uninitiated to grasp your movie), but Sugar is more concerned with showing you an outsider’s perspective. – Troy J. Allen back to top |
