TEXT 2 SPEECH
Text 2 Speech is a performance series curated by Fadl Fakhouri highlighting artists and poets whose work centers on state borders, interpersonal boundaries, the body and linguistic borders dividing text and image. All borders are intrinsically linked! Suggested donation of $20 available only at door with funds benefiting relief efforts in Gaza and Lebanon. NOTAFLOF
Fadl Fakhouri is an artist and curator whose work centers on positionality and poetic statements of determination. Fadl has exhibited at SFAI, Times Square, The Poetry Project, The Cincinnati Art Museum and The Jewish Museum NY. They hold a BA in Molecular Biology from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.
Teline Trần is a writer from Orange, California or Gabrieleño/Tongva land. Teline is the Membership and Community Engagement Coordinator at Wendy’s Subway. They also work as the Development Manager at Mekong NYC, a Southeast Asian grassroots organization in the Bronx. They write about homeland and interstitial faith via several mediums such as fiction, poetry, film, and ultimately the browser. Teline’s work appears in MONO NO AWARE, diaCRITICS, The Poetry Project, No, Dear, Social Text Online, Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, The Brooklyn Rail, Dia: Chelsea, and elsewhere. Teline's first poetry chapbook is Ad-Học (2023).
E Rady (b. 1996, Sarasota, FL) is a Syrian-American transdisciplinary visual artist who utilizes performance, video, and installation to critically examine Queer identity, ethnicity, and nationalism within the imperial landscape of the United States. Their performance philosophy centers on placing the body into a circumstance which acts as a vessel to explore and challenge notions of truth, agency, power, and the ability to resolve.
Bimbi is an artist, writer, and performer in Brooklyn, NY.
Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of the chapbook Muscle Memory, published by PANK Books in 2022. His recent poems are published in The Yale Review, office magazine, and Split this Rock, and his debut full-length collection PARTY LINE is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2026.
Erik Rodriguez is an artist and mystic based in New York City. His work combs the inner workings between spirit and flesh, posing questions such as -- How do we mediate an existence at the verge of ecological collapse and technologic convergence? What technology do we possess innately and how can it be accessed? Excavating and uncovering these processes through performance, photo, video, drawings, and installation, Erik honors the body and its role in bridging the digital and metaphysical.
Damariz Damken is a multidisciplinary artivist born and raised on the US-Mexico border of South Texas. Her work explores border imaginaries and identity to subvert border constructs. Through rituals of mourning, purging, and meditation as healing practices, she navigates the psycho-geographic connections between memory, spirit, and the land to resignify and reclaim La Frontera (the border) as a sanctuary and ancestrally sacred territory.
Natalia Salas Porras (b. 2001) is a Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist based in Mexico City. Their material experimentation encompasses a wide array of practices, including lighting design, painting, papermaking, metalwork, printmaking, and photography. Raised in Chihuahua, México, Natalia relocated to New York in 2020 to study at The Cooper Union, where they completed their Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 2024. They are currently based in Mexico City.
Slant Rhyme (b.1996) is a research-based artist and anti-disciplinary writer and performer from Southern Louisiana. Her work explores posthumous poetics, object orientations, non-hierarchical systems of interconnectedness, and the body as a site to critique violence within the built environment and the black imaginary. Her words have been featured in Spike Art Magazine, The Whitney Review of New Writing, Writing on Raving, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. She has been commissioned by the Idea Fund, Trans Justice Funding Project, and received support from the The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, UNO gallery and the Blaffer Museum. She’s a party-girl and practicing hedonist. Slant is interested in confectionary chocolate as a modality. Gossip as a typology. Sex as research.
This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.