For this Artists at Work, ISCP artist-in-residence S Emsaki will be joined by ISCP alum, art historian, and curator Anamaría Garzón Mantilla. Emsaki and Garzón Mantilla’s practices are connected by a shared interest in the effects of Petro-imperialism and the ubiquity of oil and its derivatives in daily life. Emsaki will present on their practice, including bodies of work produced with marine plastic debris and their new film crude education, which will be presented as part of Garzón Mantilla’s upcoming curatorial project at El Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito, Ecuador. A Q&A with the audience will follow.

S Emsaki is an interdisciplinary artist from Isfahan, Iran, living and working bicoastally in the United States. Emsaki engages with material, historical, and ecological narratives of human and non-human Petro-subjects across different media. Emsaki’s work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries and Southern Exposure, California; Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), Massachusetts; Westbeth Gallery, New York; and Gallatin Galleries, New York University, among other venues.

Anamaría Garzón Mantilla is an art historian and professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito and a PhD candidate in Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. She directs the academic journal post(s), and co-edited the award-winning book Estado Fósil. In 2023, Garzón Mantilla was the Jane Farver Curator-in-Residence at ISCP and Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Studies Program.

This in-person event will be live streamed through Instagram: @iscp_nyc.