Devora Neumark

Devora Neumark has been a practicing interdisciplinary artist for more than twenty-five years. Her latest body of work Radical Beauty for Troubled Times includes the collaborative project (with Deborah Margo) entitled: Why Should We Cry? Lamentations in a Winter Garden. Neumark is a faculty member in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Art program at Goddard College (Vermont) and a fellow with the Community University Research Alliance (CURA) project entitled Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations initiated by Concordia University and fifteen Montreal-area community partners. Neumark is also co-director of the LEVIER Project of Engrenage Noir whose most recent initiative In Our Lifetime is intended to stimulate dialogue about healthy interdependence and encourage artistic creation addressing the systemic causes of poverty while affirming diversity of ecosystems, human rights, and ethical responsibility. Neumark entered the Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Cultural Humanities doctoral program in September 2008.

Neumark is exploring the generative possibilities for making home relative to forced displacement and particularly the role that beauty can play in this complex personal and socio-cultural process. At the center of this inquiry into aesthetics, identity, and place is a series of questions about home’s properties, associations, and manifestations (or lack-there-of) in the political, cultural, emotional, and embodied realms. How do individual and collective experiences of home form and inform each other to shape cultural narratives? Once the fracture of home becomes part of individual and communal history how can a new sense of habitation be cultivated with the connection to dwelling affirmed in wellness? What role does beauty play in this process of making home anew? How can community performance intervene culturally to alter the systemic forces that lead to domicide – the willful destruction of habitation that has been and continues to function as a major weapon in the arsenal of cultural, political and economic oppression?

Home/Body was performed in the Matrabox