Arts and Letters

Belly of a Glacier is a film by artist Ohan Breiding that explores glacial bodies as living archives, examining their role as witnesses to planetary history and personal memory. Breiding and performance studies scholar and educator Katie Brewer Ball will discuss how personal narratives intersect with histories of ice in Belly of a Glacier. The conversation will cover their parallel investigations: Breiding's consideration of the Rhône Glacier through childhood memory and family photographs, and Brewer Ball's research on Arctic science through their grandfather's work in Utqiagvik, Alaska.

Seating for this event is limited and reservations are recommended. A reception will follow.

Ohan Breiding works in photography, video, and collaborative practices to explore ecological care, kinship, and landscape as witness through a queer and trans-feminist lens. Their latest film, Belly of a Glacier, examines the relationship between glacial bodies, environmental memory, and collective loss. They have exhibited internationally at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Kunstmuseum Zürich, and IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgium, and will open a solo exhibition at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, in February 2025.

Katie Brewer Ball (KBB) is Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Theater Department at Wesleyan University. Their research focuses on performance, visual culture, Black and Indigenous aesthetics, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. Brewer Ball is the author of The Only Way Out: The Racial & Sexual Performance of Escape (Duke University Press, 2024) and is currently working on Unsettling Art Criticism: Alaska Native Art After 1960, a new project about art criticism, arctic science, and colonialism.