REFUGE and JOSEPH BEUYS/TRANSFORMER [Film Screening and Director Q & A]

Refuge (2006) Directed by John Halpern
featuring Les Levine, The Dalai Lama (XIV), Martin Scorsese, Melissa Mathison, Oliver Stone.

Filmmaker John Halpern turns his lens toward central Asia to focus on the spiritual developments that have occurred in the West following the 1959 siege on Tibet with this film, which contrasts the Western gravitation toward Buddhism with the journey of Tibetan Buddhists to seek refuge in the West while also highlighting the differences between Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan culture. By placing interviews with such famous filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Oliver Stone alongside interviews with such Buddhist figures as Tibetan meditation master Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, Shambhala leader Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, English Tibetan Buddhist nun Ani Tenzin Palmo, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Halpern underscores the state of Buddhism in the Western world, and looks in on those who have journeyed to the West to see how far they have come in both their spiritual and physical travels.

Joseph Beuys/Transformer (1988) Collaboration between Joseph Beuys and John DiLeva Halpern is a documentary film serving as a unique record of Beuys's ambitious 1979 Guggenheim retrospective. Featuring extensive footage of Beuys himself explaining his theories on art, politics, and social sculpture, focusing on his themes of healing, energy, and transformation, often using materials like fat and felt. It is a vivid illustration of Beuys’ life and work and is the only comprehensive record of his New York Guggenheim exhibition.

Generously hosted in collaboration with Franklin Library, Franklin, NY; Walton Library & Good Taste Epicurean Speakeasy, Walton, NY.

Culture Declares Emergency (CDE) is a growing movement of individuals and organizations involved in arts and culture who are declaring a climate and ecological emergency. This means truth-telling, care-taking, and change-making. Cultural Activism International Project joined CDE in this declaration in the fall of 2023 and will hosted the first CDE Hubs meeting within an online public forum. We welcomed all to join to see what our peer member organization declarers are doing.

A Portrait of Michel [Film Screening and Director Q&A]

A Portrait of Michel is an investigation of Gedeon’s uncle, Dr. Michel Saadé, who was abducted in Damascus in 1978 by the Hafez al-Assad regime and never seen since. After finding a pouch that belonged to Michel containing his miscellaneous objects, documents, and scraps of paper, Gedeon created this film, which combines photographs of these “Objects of Evidence” with voice-over interviews with family members, as well as vintage photographs, music, and archival 8mm family footage. Reconstructing a true-crime mystery that intersects with contemporary politics, A Portrait of Michel reflects Gedeon’s determination to get to the truth, while her creative approach to the sparse material leaves the conclusion for the viewer to decode.

Christine Gedeon, a visual artist, was born in Aleppo, Syria, raised in the US, and lives between Berlin and New York. Since the start of the war, Gedeon’s work has focused on her family history in Syria in various mediums. Her work has been shown worldwide, with recent grants from the Berlin Cultural Senate, the Goethe Institute, and the Harpo Foundation. Her book Aleppo: Deconstruction | Reconstruction was published in 2020 by Kerber Verlag in Germany.

Screenings organized by ICAI and hosted in collaboration with Bushel Gallery, Delhi, NY & Good Taste Epicurean Speakeasy, Franklin, NY.

PUBLIC ART at BIRDSONG by I.C.A.I. – SUMMER 2025 | Regional and International artists for Public Art & Dialogue.
The Series hosts surprising art encounters with the primary focus of stimulating conversation from shared experience.

PUBLIC ART at BIRDSONG by I.C.A.I. – SUMMER 2025 | Regional and International artists for Public Art & Dialogue.
The Series hosts surprising art encounters with the primary focus of stimulating conversation from shared experience.

We are pleased to present [SUN]Flower Plasma & [Alien] Star Dust - Cosmic Encounters in Two Acts by Victoria Vesna The Sun is currently in solar maximum phase. [SUN] Flower Plasma is launched at the peak of the solar maximum, occurring in year of the Dragon (2024) and year of Snake (2025). This period is marked by intensified sunspot activity, powerful solar flares, and magnetic fields disruption. Solar dynamics can disrupt Earth’s magnetosphere, affecting satellites, communications, and power grids. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is closely monitoring this activity to gain deeper insights into the Sun’s behavior and its impact on our planet. As this project emphasizes the convergence of heightened solar activity and human-induced climate change, exploring our interconnected relationship with energy, magnetism, and the environment.

[Alien] Star Dust - Star dust, 1/10th of a width of a human hair. They hold the mystery of our cosmic roots. 100 tons fall on earth daily. Micrometeorite hunters are presented with the challenge of finding a space spherule in the midst of the human made dust, mostly pollution. It is truly as if one was looking for a needle in a hay stack. But this became interesting to the artist – collecting samples of dust in various locations and comparing the composition of dust that we breathe in daily, including possibly a space dust occasionally. As earthly wind and weather move these dust particles around the planet it is more and more complicated to understand and predict the movement or consequence with climate disruptions.


Victoria Vesna is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and is Director of the UCLA Art|Sci center. With her installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation (PhD, University of Wales, 2000). Her work involves long-term collaborations with composers, nano-scientists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists and she brings this experience to students. Victoria has exhibited her work in 20+ solo exhibitions, 70+ group shows, has been published in 20+ papers and gave 100+ invited talks in the last decade.

PRESS RELEASE; TRI-FOLD

PUBLIC ART at BIRDSONG by I.C.A.I. – SUMMER 2025 | Regional and International artists for Public Art & Dialogue.
The Series hosts surprising art encounters with the primary focus of stimulating conversation from shared experience.

SALON D’AMOUR by MARGRET WIBMER
A deeply moving and immersive performance that engages the public as participants to reimagine love as a force of transformation Salon d’Amour invites participants to experience a simultaneity of spaces and narratives through voiced readings and intimate listening. Participants don unique masks created by the artist, which serve as conduits to other worlds. Love letters from writers & artists: James Baldwin, Frida Kahlo, John Cage, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Marianna Maruyama, Ingeborg Bachmann, Banana Yoshimoto and others will be read aloud. Rooted in Wibmer’s ongoing research into socially engaged art, ecology, and transcultural identity, Salon d’Amour asks: how can humans and non-humans navigate shared realms of reciprocity, cooperation, and collaboration?

Recently presented at The Merchant House in Amsterdam, this new edition—staged as a filmic set created especially for Birdsong in collaboration with ICAI —invites participants into a space of intimacy, anonymity, and exchange. Through collective engagement, participation, and a soundscape developed with composer Robert Poss,

Salon d’Amour becomes a poetic ritual— reclaiming a pause in time and evoking a sensual, layered experience of love’s vulnerability, connection, intimacy, distance, abjection, and beauty. Salon D’Amour North American Premiere.

You can find more info about Salon d’Amour on Margret’s website: https://margretwibmer.eu/performances/salon-damour/ And in the recent video document of Salon d’Amour at The Merchant House Amsterdam, Netherlands. (July 4th and 5th 2025) by Anastasia Nefedova https://vimeo.com/1101204318

Margret Wibmer is an internationally renowned visual and performance artist based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work explores the dynamic interplay between bodies, objects, and spaces. After formative years in New York City assisting minimalist artist Sol Lewitt alongside Kazuko Miyamoto, she developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, video, photography, and participatory performance.

To mark the event, Horstman and Meredith M. Andrews, aka. Spacelover, will perform a concert on August 9 at 12 noon; with new and experimental sounds developed with local singer ending with a set of original songs. Playing folk, blues, and bluegrass-inflected acoustic music, the duo infuse their inventive original compositions and carefully chosen covers with harmonies sung over intricate banjo and guitar. This event marks the occasion of placing Fritz Horstman’s sculpture on the grounds of Birdsong Community Garden.

PRESS RELEASE

Artist Fritz Horstman will install his newly built sculpture Shingle Valley at Birdsong Community Garden Gallery in Hamden, NY on August 9, 2025. Part of his U-Shaped Valley series of sculptures, its form references both the glacially formed landscape of the Catskill region and the vernacular style of shingled houses.

Press Release