AFTERWORDS: entanglement - Okwui Okpokwasili, Joshua Lubin-Levy '06, and Noémie Solomon

Tuesday, September 16, 2025 at 4:30pm
Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery

Free and open to the public. Register to attend on Zoom.

The first event in the AFTERWORDS: entanglement series of public programs will feature Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer Okwui Okpokwasili online and Center for the Arts (CFA) Director Joshua Lubin-Levy '06 and writer, teacher, and curator Noémie Solomon, Director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP), in-person.

“Entanglement” is a keyword for studying how human existence is bound up with the more-than-human world, and a call to imagine the web of relations that bind us to each other and the world across space and time. To recognize one’s entanglement complicates one’s sense of agency; to embrace one’s entanglement is to resist the notion of critical distance or objectivity. How do artists and curators navigate their own entanglements? How have they developed practices out of entanglement’s creative possibilities, and in the process transformed traditional ideas of authorship and agency? What work can art do to attune audiences to both the painful and pleasurable ways we are all entangled with each other and the worlds that exist around, before, and after us?

In this initial meeting, we address the question of fields as relationships, drawing on Okpokwasili’s layered history with ICPP while approaching her multifaceted artistic practice blending experiments with sheer generosity to speculate about the current shifts the field of performance is undergoing.

Sweat Variant describes the collaborative practice of Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born who work at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art, making work that reaffirms that which has been deemed marginal as the true center through an exploration of Black interiority. Alongside creating performances, exhibitions, and films, this collaboration has grown to imagine “community entanglements” that include the Artists Supporting Artists Program (ASAP), which provides support and direct funding to contemporary artists to explore and research their own artistry, and the “Threading Residency,” an award that annually recognizes an artist pushing boundaries and honors the late Georgiana Pickett, a pioneer and steadfast contributor to the arts’ scene in New York.

This conversation offers an opportunity to look back at the unique vision of Sam Miller ’75, P’09, who founded ICPP at Wesleyan University, and discuss the ways in which the field has transformed, as cultural epicenters no longer hold and artists are modeling more sustainable ways of working. Using the practice of “radical intimacy” Okpokwasili has developed over the years, we aim to dwell on relationships: relationships as ways of working, as technologies of solidarity and sustainability that can help up better understand and map out the somatic and systemic shifts we are experiencing in common.

AFTERWORDS: entanglement is a series of public programs sponsored by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts and the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. Guest speakers include artists and curators reflecting on their own practice, process, or method while also attending to a shared keyword. All events are hybrid, featuring speakers both in-person and online.

Curated by Joshua Lubin-Levy '06 and Noémie Solomon.

Okwui Okpokwasili (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, and writer. The child of immigrants from Nigeria, Okpokwasili was born and raised in the Bronx, and the histories of these places and the girls and women who inhabit them feature prominently in much of her work. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, a 2018 Herb Alpert Award in Dance, a 2018 Doris Duke Artist Award, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. 

Noémie Solomon works in the field of dance and performance as a writer, teacher, and curator. She edited the collections DANSE (an anthology and a catalogue published by Presses du réel, 2014 and 2015) that translate and present key texts on the somatic and linguistic trades between French and North American choreographic cultures. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies and is Director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance.

About ICPP
The Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance fosters the collective study of art and its histories with a focus on developing new critical methods for curating time-based art. Rather than narrowing in on a single authoritative definition of performance curation, ICPP’s aim has been to create a pluralistic conversation specifically around contemporary performance, providing fundamental tools with which artists and curators can develop their own approaches to the work. ICPP was created in 2011 by Sam Miller ’75, P’09 and Pamela Tatge ’84, MALS ’10, P’16 at Wesleyan University.