COMMON GROUND
an international festival on the politics of land and food
ABOUT
The Fisher Center LAB Biennial is a thematic festival that invites and commissions artists to create new works that grapple with some of the most pressing questions of our time. The fourth edition of the Biennial, Common Ground, takes place on four continents, including two four-day festivals at and around the Fisher Center—one at harvest time (October 13–16, 2022), one in the growing season (May 4–7, 2023). Across these seasons, the festival features seven newly commissioned works engaging food sovereignty, climate change, and land rights, that invite us to imagine a more equitable, sustainable, and healthful future.
PEOPLE
COMMON GROUND is curated by Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester as a partnership between the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA). The project coordinators are Caleb Hammons, Senior Producer at Bard’s Fisher Center, and Jason Collins, Associate Producer at Bard’s Fisher Center, with Melina Roise as Curatorial Fellow and Polina Malikin as Network Project Coordinator.
Artists participating in the New York Program include Cooking Sections, Vivien Sansour, Tania El Khoury, Kenyon Adams, Suzanne Kite, and Tara Rodríguez Besosa. Common Ground‘s network projects feature programs in Colombia (curated by Juliana Steiner), Palestine (curated by Emily Jacir), and South Africa (curated by Boyzie Cekwana), in partnership with Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Al Quds Bard in the West Bank, and University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Learn more about the network projects →
That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other… When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
