Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer

Bahaar Ahsan is a writer, artist, and translator based in the Bay Area, with familial origins in the port city of Abadan in the south of Iran. Like any other tgirl, Bahaar’s work is both speculative and deeply embedded in lineage(s) and aims to interrogate ontologies which separate the ideological from the somatic, the aural from the visual, rage from softness, homeland from host-land, past from present from future. Bahaar serves as a Contributing Editor and Resource Coordinator at The Operating System. Her writing appears in Tagvverk, Apogee, and elsewhere.

Taté Walker (they/them) is a Lakota citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota and an award-winning Two Spirit storyteller. Their first full-length poetry book, “The Trickster Riots,” was published in 2022, by Abalone Mountain Press. Taté, a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, has written, photographed, and/or edited for various outlets, including The Nation, Yellow Medicine Review, Pipe Wrench, Apartment Therapy, Everyday Feminism, Native Peoples, Indian Country Today, Subaru Drive, December, and ANMLY. Taté has 20 years of experience in print/digital...

Vito Acconci was a contemporary American poet, performance artist, and architect—a founder of the Performance Art movement. He has been immortalized in the canon of art history for his seminal works, including the infamous Seedbed (1971), which Marina Abramovic re-performed in 2005. In the original performance, Acconci positioned himself beneath a wooden ramp in New York’s Sonnabend Gallery, where he masturbated for eight hours a day over a three-...