Contractions: Practicing Refusal

At Incite, the worlds of scholarship, community engagement, the arts, and other specialties unite to ask ambitious questions and understand and engage the social world in surprising new ways.

Incite Institute at Columbia University

Dawn Weleski discusses their role as co-founder and co-director of Conflict Kitchen, followed by a Q&A.

OHMA Spring 2025 Workshop Series

In this series, we highlight the work of artists, scholars, and knowledge-keepers whose works attend to what Toni Morrison describes as the “pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” (Morrison 2019).

Part of the 2024-25 ReMemory: Experiments in Listening, Authorship and Knowledge-Keeping Series:Contractions: Practicing Refusal [Virtual Event]Weleski co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that served cuisine from countries with which the U.S. government is in conflict. Operating seven days a week for 7 years, Conflict Kitchen’s food was offered in custom-designed wrappers, upon which were printed interviews with those living in the nation-state of focus and the diasporas around the world. Highlighting past and current socially engaged projects that privilege first-person perspectives, Weleski will present several artworks that employ variations of speech shadowing, a translation and psycholinguistic method that they have utilized towards a fugitive, living archive of transgression, re-cognition, and re-memberment.Dawn Weleski’s art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by repurposing underground wrestling matches, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Their practice is rooted in the dramaturgy of care work, investigating the material artifacts and dramaturgy of hospitality as an agent of hostility within the imperialist project, including Three Views of a Mountain, where a South Korean guide led hikers through the Gwanak Mountains of Anyang, South Korea to climb and meet North Korean defectors at the summit who recount the architecture and stories of their homes via narrative and pantomime, and The Foreigner, where Conflict Kitchen customers could enjoy their lunch with a resident of our nation-state of focus through an actor-avatar connected live via Phone. Weleski has worked in hospitality and food service for over 25 years, and their current wage work as bartender/baker/line cook, house cleaner, landscaper, adjunct professor, and Emergency Medical Technician, among other gigs, informs their collective stewardship of emergentCNY, a Central New York mutual aid network that exchanges goods and services during times of ever-present crisis through reciprocal care, repair, and regeneration. They are a recipient of a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow, a 2023 Anonymous was a Woman Environmental Art Grant, a 2023 Harpo Foundation Grant Award, a 2023 New York State Traditional and Rural Artist Fellow, and a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts Grant. Weleski currently serves as the 2023-25 University of Michigan Student Life Sustainability Artist in Residence, where they co-initiated Noon at Night, a wandering classroom that prototypes creative adaptation to crisis. About Incite at Columbia UniversityIncite is an interdisciplinary social science research institute at Columbia University.Our mission is to create knowledge for public action—to catalyze conversations that lead to more just, equitable, and democratic societies.For more information, <a href="https://incite.columbia.edu" title="https://incite.columbia.edu" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">visit our site</a>.

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