Jordan Strafer, No Bag
December 2, 2020–January 10, 2021
participantafterdark.art 

Jordan Strafer in dialogue with Darla Migan
Sunday, December 13, 2020, 7pm EST 
participantafterdark.art
This event includes live ASL interpretation

Jordan Strafer will occupy PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK with No Bag, an interactive multi-media web-based artwork.

For my school project I took a machete and destroyed everyone’s backpacks.
I gave an incoherent speech then gave out my phone number and promised to replace the backpacks.
After it happened, I couldn’t believe I made that promise to return the backpacks.
They must have been expensive. Some may have been sentimental and irreplaceable.
Everyone would be heading home with all their books and no bag!
A fellow student tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’m going to bang your cake in.”
“Shit,” I said, “What a stupid way to die.”
I lay on the ground, with hands outstretched, ready for my punishment. “I love you,” I said. “You’ve misunderstood me,” they said.

Jordan Strafer (b.1990, Miami, FL) is an artist, working primarily in video, based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from The New School in 2016 and her MFA from Bard College in 2019. She has participated in group exhibitions at Red Tracy, Copenhagen, (2020-21); Housing, New York (2020); SculptureCenter, New York (2020). In 2021, she will be participating in a three-person exhibition with Maryam Hoseini and Rindon Johnson at The New Museum in New York and a group exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Her first solo exhibition will be at Participant Inc, New York in 2022. 

Darla Migan is an art critic and culture worker based in New York City. She completed her Ph.D in Philosophy with a dissertation on Adrian Piper’s contributions to B/black aesthetics and will continue her research at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2021. Darla’s essays on contemporary art and visual culture have been published in Artnet News, The Brooklyn Rail, CulturedMag, and Texte zur Kunst.

PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK is a virtual performance, screening, and event space launched by PARTICIPANT INC in October 2020. The site will host artist projects commissioned specifically for the AFTER DARK web platform and remote viewing. PARTICIPANT invited artist Glen Fogel to design and help develop AFTER DARK. Artists will work with Fogel ongoing through the Fall/Spring 2020-21 season, inhabiting the site and fully modifying it for their projects' specific needs. AFTER DARK is conceived of as a blank slate, removing as much institutional framework as possible. The site will only present current projects, and will often go ’dark’ in between events.

Access: Transcripts of audio media available in the site’s index. Strafer’s videos, sparkle and the shining include closed captioning.