Vital Dreams: Neferti Tadiar in Conversation with Rahul Gudipudi

Join us on Friday, August 1 at 7pm for a conversation between interdisciplinary scholar Neferti Tadiar and Rahul Gudipudi, CARA’s Director of Exhibitions and Fellowships. Grounded in Tadiar’s work on value, race, and empire—and themes considered in CARA’s current exhibition Stephanie Comilang: An Apparition, A Song—Tadiar and Gudipudi will come together for an open conversation on infrastructures of survival: not limited to roads or technologies, but extended to poetry, informal markets, para-institutions, kinship webs, laboring bodies, and sonic rituals.

Reflecting upon vital platforms of social practice that emerge in the fractures of capital—informal economies, feminist care networks, migratory soundscapes, intergenerational knowledges—this dialogue will consider how people create the conditions for life even as dominant systems render them disposable.

Prior to the 7pm conversation, Gudipudi will offer a 6pm walkthrough of An Apparition, A Song.

Neferti X. M. Tadiar is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial feminist scholar of Philippine cultural practice, social imagination, and global political economy. She is the author of several books on Philippine culture, literature, and social movements, and globalization, including Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), which was awarded the 2005 Philippine National Book Award for Cultural Criticism. Her most recent books are Life-Times of Becoming Human (2022), which won the 2023 Philippine National Book Award for Philosophy; and Remaindered Life (2022), which was awarded The ASA John Hope Franklin Prize as Best Book in American Studies in 2023. She is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York City. Tadiar is the founding Director of the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, an independent community library, cultural space, and publishing house in San Fernando, La Union, Philippines.

Rahul Gudipudi is Director of Exhibitions and Fellowships at the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), where he contributes to exhibitions, publications, public programs, and fellowships. Gudipudi was recently adjunct curator at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennial 2024 under the artistic direction of Ute Meta Bauer. Before joining CARA, he was a senior curator at Art Jameel, leading exhibitions and discursive-performative programs at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and at Hayy Jameel in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has served on the curatorial, advisory, and editorial boards for The New Alphabet School program at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, Germany, and he is currently on the advisory board of The Story Of, a foundation and transdisciplinary learning platform in Goa, India. He is also a board member of the Anthropocene Commons, a global research and response network organizing education and initiatives on climate change adaptation and collective action.