The Anembassy is Open with Karen Fiss
Session 1: The Anembassy is Open 5pm With Karen Fiss, professor of visual studies at California College of the Arts; Maxim Gvinjia, the former foreign minister of Abkhazia; and artist Eric Baudelaire. Abkhazia is something of a paradox: a country that exists, in the physical sense of the word (a territory with borders, a government, a flag and a language), yet it has no legal existence because for almost twenty years it was not recognized by any other nation state. And so Abkhazia exists without existing, caught in a liminal space, a space in between realities. Maxim Gvinjia, former Foreign Minister of the Republic of Abkhazia, and currently its Anambassador in San Francisco, will be present in his temporary office at Kadist Art Foundation each day for two weeks, engaging in open discussions with the citizens of a country with which Abkhazia has no formal relationship. Gvinjia’s inaugural Anembassy appointment will be with Karen Fiss, and it will be open to the public. Following their conversation, Gvinjia and Fiss will be joined by Eric Baudelaire, Apsara DiQuinzio, and Joseph del Pesco for a discussion about The Secession Sessions and Baudelaire’s film 2014 Letters to Max . Follows a screening of Eric Baudelaire’s 2014 film Letters to Max at 3 p.m. Karen Fiss is a professor of visual studies, fine arts, and design at the California College of the Arts. Her current research examines the history of “nation branding” in the production of visual culture, from the rise of the nation-state to its contemporary role in shaping the social, artistic, and built environment of postcolonial emerging economies. Her book project , From Nation Building to Nation Branding, relates global branding practices to the mechanisms of globalization in the contemporary art world and its accompanying exhibition economies.