Art Buzz: Philosophical Provocations with Carmen Argote, Amanda Sroka, and Rossen Ventzislavov

Carmen Argote (b. 1981, Guadalajara, Mexico; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often points to the body, class, and economic structures in relation to architecture and personal history. She received her MFA in 2007 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also received her BFA in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2022); Primary, Nottingham (2021); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2020); New Museum, New York (2019); and PAOS GDL, Guadalajara (2019). Argote has been featured in group exhibitions at MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); SculptureCenter, New York (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); and Ballroom Marfa (2017). She is the recipient of the Fellows of Contemporary Art Award (2020); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019); Artadia Los Angeles award (2019); an Artist Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2015); and a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013). Argote’s work is in the collections of Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Argote is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, and is co-chair of the Artist Advisory Council at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Amanda Sroka is a curator whose creative work focuses on global histories of contemporary art with an emphasis on interdisciplinary practices and a specialized interest in artwork that operates at the intersections of our personal, political, and material worlds. She is the Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where she has recently organized presentations dedicated to the work of Carmen Argote, Alberta Whittle, Trương Công Tùng, and Christine Sun Kim, and supported with the 2023 exhibition, Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency. From 2014 to 2022, she was the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where she organized solo exhibitions with Martine Syms, Zoe Leonard, Senga Nengudi, Marisa Merz, Yael Bartana, and Jitish Kallat as well as a forthcoming exhibition with Lawrence Abu Hamdan. There, she also curated collaborative group exhibitions including Philadelphia Assembled with artist Jeanne van Heeswijk (2017) and Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia featuring the work of Tanya Goel, Sheela Gowda, Prabhavathi Meppayil, and Zarina (2020). Prior to her time in Philadelphia, Sroka was a curatorial assistant at the New Museum in New York.

Rossen Ventzislavov is a philosopher and cultural critic focusing on aesthetics, architectural theory, literature, popular music, and performance art. His work has appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Deleuze Studies, Contemporary Aesthetics, X-tra and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Rossen is the recipient of a Curriculum Diversification Grant from the American Society for Aesthetics. He has been a member of the Encounter performance art collective since 2014 and is currently Professor of Philosophy at Woodbury University.