Historias Paralelas

Tamara Rosenblum

February 2 – March 9, 2023

Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY College at Old Westbury

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 2, 2023, 4:00 – 7:00 pm

Closing Reception Wednesday, March 1, 1:00 – 4:00 pm

Performance Program: March 1, 1:00 - 2:00 pm

Tamara Rosenblum (b.1982), a video artist based in New York and Paris, presents the solo show Historias Paralelas (Parallel Stories), a multi-channel installation that compares the work of three women: the artist, her sister, Sofia, and their mother, Sonia. Rosenblum’s sister was the primary caregiver to her two young children for a time; Rosenblum’s mother is Rosenblum’s father’s primary caregiver. The videos contrast their care work with Rosenblum’s work as an artist.

In 1987, Rosenblum’s father, Gregorio Rosenblum, a Chilean stage actor, theater director, and retired professor of theater at SUNY Purchase, produced a radio adaptation of Argentinian playwright Osvaldo Dragún (1929–1999)’s 1957 play The Story of The Man Who Turned into a Dog. Rosenblum’s father voiced the man/dog, while her mother, Sonia Rosenblum, voiced the woman/wife. The man takes the job of a guard dog, eventually turning into a dog. The woman becomes pregnant and is terrified that her baby will be a monster. The play failed to address the exploitation of “women’s work,” both in and outside the home, as Gregorio’s generation of Latinx leftists shared Dragún’s blind spots. Sonia did all the housework, looked after Rosenblum and her sister, and worked fulltime outside the home.

The three-room installation places the viewer inside the physical, emotional, and temporal spaces occupied by Rosenblum, her mother, and her sister. Rosenblum pairs scenes from her parent’s house with scenes from her sister’s house. Sonia and Gregorio are presented on one channel, while Sofia and her children appear on another. Rosenblum’s mother and sister move back and forth between rooms. The children grab their mother’s hair. Rosenblum’s father screams at her mother while she kisses and placates him. In the liminal space between life and whatever comes before and after life, these women play, feed, and fight on a continuous loop. The exhibition asks, “Can the kind of care work these two women perform fit into a wage economy model? And if care work is politically invisible, then how can societies support it?”

Mimicking the structure of a three-act play, Room Three shows a single projection in which Rosenblum appears as herself in her studio engaging in various artistic experiments—roller skating blindfolded in an homage to Chaplin’s Modern Times, playing hide-and-seek with a vacant elevator, strumming the internal mechanism of a piano. The video provides an anchor for the show, asking, “Is making art a kind of care work?”

The exhibition and performance program are sponsored by the Performing Arts Initiative of SUNY Old Westbury, and are co-hosted by El Conuco, the Latinx and Ibero-American Center at SUNY Old Westbury. The performance program will include a complete recording of the original 1987 radio play, as the installation uses only a short excerpt (the entire radio play is 16 minutes long). The broadcast will be followed by a short reading from Silvia Federici (b.1942)’s landmark texts Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004) and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012), which clarify the historic relationship between wage work and women’s work.

Artist Biography

Tamara Rosenblum (b.1982), based in New York and Paris, works in video, performance, installation, and photography. She earned a BA in Latin American History from Amherst College and an MFA in Photography and New Media from the California Institute of the Arts. Rosenblum is currently a professor of Time-Based Media at the New School Parsons Paris.

Rosenblum has exhibited her work at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Echo Park Film Center, Highways Performance Space, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and Vincent Price Art Museum. Her work has been published by Powerhouse Press and The Village Voice, and has been reviewed in Art Forum and Terremoto MX. Rosenblum has been the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant and a Center for Cultural Innovation grant. In 2018, she was a finalist for the Cisneros-Fontanales Emerging Artist grant, and in 2021, she was a finalist for the Creative Capital award. In the summer of 2021, Rosenblum was an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, where she began work on the current exhibition at SUNY Old Westbury.

Rosenblum’s work stems from the role she played in her childhood home. She investigates family dynamics through Freudian and Kleinian paradigms, exploring the impact of political, social, and economic forces on the family. 

Rosenblum’s father, Gregorio Rosenblum, is a Chilean stage actor and theater director who trained at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague during the Prague Spring. Gregorio left Chile at the start of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Tamara is his first daughter born in the US. As a child, Tamara was Gregorio’s studio audience for his fictionalized telling and re-telling of his life in Chile, these stories were a blend of fantasy and reality. 

Rosenblum’s art is driven by the possibilities of aestheticizing existential comedies in domestic spaces. Working in video, performance, installation, and photography, Rosenblum implements improvisation and language borrowed from Absurdist theater, as Absurdist texts are essential to her exploration of family dynamics. Her characters are often ruled by invisible forces outside the home: generations are doomed to repetition, family members fail to recognize each other, violence is neither rational nor consequential, and geographical locations are conflated. An invisible hand menaces the family, and, in turn, the family members menace each other. 

A public reception for Historias Paralelas: Tamara Rosenblum is scheduled for Thursday, February 2, 4:00–7:00 pm. A Closing Reception is scheduled for Wednesday, March 1, 1:00 – 4:00 pm. A Performance Program will take place between 1:00 and 2:00 pm during the closing reception.

The exhibition is organized by Hyewon Yi, Director, Amelie A. Wallace Gallery.

The exhibition and performance program are co-hosted by El Conuco, the Latinx and Ibero-American Center at SUNY Old Westbury. They are generously co-sponsored by funding from SUNY OW Performing Arts Initiative and El Conuco. They are presented with the participation of OWWR, SUNY OW campus radio and WGSS (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Center).