A Grammar Built with Rocks Convening
About the event
Wendy’s Subway presents a three-day convening celebrating the recent publication of A Grammar Built with Rocks, edited by Shoghig Halajian and Suzy Halajian.
In the introduction to the publication, the editors write, “violence is never totalizing, but rather leaves marks of collective action and insurgent refusal.” Taking up this proposition, this convening centers histories of resilience and collective struggle while tracing how artistic practices respond to conditions of dispossession and ecological harm, alongside the narratives of crisis and development that shape material and symbolic forms of erasure.
Bringing together contributors and new interlocutors, the program expands on, and offers multiple points of entry into, the syntax of A Grammar Built with Rocks, foregrounding artistic and activist practices that engage questions of colonialism, ecology, and resistance. Composed of a screening, reading group, conversation, performance, and listening session, the weekend’s multilayered format honors the interdisciplinarity of the publication.
Screening: The Trace of the Land
Anthology Film Archives
Friday, January 23, 7pm
The Trace of the Land presents short moving-image works by artists working across disparate histories of dispossession and violence, from redlining in Chicago to French colonial rule in Algeria, the settler-colonial destruction of the Gaza Strip, Brazil’s military oppression of Indigenous communities, and more. With films by Basma al-Sharif, Julien Creuzet, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Christine Rebet, Cauleen Smith, and Ana Vaz.
More information, and tickets here.
Reading Group, Conversation, and Performances
Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA)
Saturday, January 24, 1–6pm
Inspired by Édouard Glissant’s theory of relational belonging, this program emphasizes interconnectivity among liberation struggles while remaining attentive to the specificity of place and history. Across disciplines and forms, the publication and program reflect a shared commitment to relational, cross-disciplinary exchange and collective modes of inquiry.
The day begins with a reading group facilitated by Amber Jamilla Musser that focuses on key concepts across the writings of Édouard Glissant and Suzanne Césaire. A conversation between Laura al-Tibi, Adam HajYahia, and Fawz Kabra then considers place-based methodologies developed by artists engaging landscapes shaped by ongoing colonial and ecological harm. The program concludes with a reading by Ryan C. Clarke, followed by a performance by Muyassar Kurdi. Throughout the day, a playlist of audio recordings selected by A Grammar Built with Rocks contributors can be experienced in the listening room.
More information, and RSVP here.
After Hours Fim School
Workshop with Basma al-Sharif
Wendy’s Subway (online, via Zoom)
Sunday, January 25, 11–12:30pm
In this workshop, artist and filmmaker Basma al-Sharif reflects on recent and earlier work, including her 2025 short film, Morgenkreis (Morning Circle) (2025). Centered on themes of invisible violence, dehumanization, and displacement, the workshop considers how domestic and civic architectures encode both historical legacies and present conditions. Al-Sharif examines how built environments register power, exclusion, and belonging, and how Western cultural frameworks often fail to recognize immigrants as integral to the societies they inhabit.
More information, and register here.
We Met in the Channel
Listening Session with Esra Canoğulları (8ULENTINA)
Wendy's Subway
Sunday, January 25, 5–6:30pm
This listening session attunes participants to improvisation and collaboration in sonic practices beyond the Western canon. Through collective listening to selected performances from Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey, alongside excerpts from Esra's own collaborative work, the session explores how these methods reshape our understanding of sound and experimentation.
More information, and RSVP here.
About the book
Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis, highlighting how creative research methodologies can serve as radically new place-making practices. The publication brings together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions that explore how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.
More about the book here.
About the editors
Shoghig Halajian is a curator and writer who serves on the Board of Directors at Human Resources LA, and previously was Assistant Director at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, in collaboration with Anthony Carfello and Suzy Halajian, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. She has presented curatorial and artistic projects at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Redcat, Los Angeles; Kunsthaus Zurich; Le Magasin-Centre National d'art Contemporain, Grenoble; among other venues. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from University of California San Diego in 2024.
Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, critically engaging with the intersections of art, politics, and social histories. She explores strategies of image-making through the lens of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum, and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). She also serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and has worked with nonprofit organizations including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut). Her curatorial work and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant—for Georgia, a journal she co-founded and co-edits with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Halajian’s writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.