Hello, I'm Joel.
I develop material narratives, arcing over extraordinary periods of time, and make work that explores our relationship to the Earth to deconstruct an exploitative binary through embracing the complex biological and geological latticework of which we are part. Read a short biography here. Contact me at joelkuennen(@)gmail.com
The Vital Flow of Material (Elective Affinities) consists of an earthen mixture (see materials list on linked page) rammed into aluminum frames and installed on a billboard on the side of New Mexico highway 64. The 18 panels will slowly carbonate over the course of a year as the calcium hydroxide in the mix releases moisture and pulls in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This work will be remade periodically, paying homage to the importance of an ongoing, collaborative relationship with the Earth. [read more]
In the Spring of 2022, artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen invited me to come on a research trip into the mountains of Switzerland to translate the changing Alpine environment into digital spaces, experiences of this increasingly rare environment. We picked Arolla, a (mostly) forgotten village high in the southern alps that has become a beacon for backcountry ski enthusiasts when the snow pack is good. We rented a room in an old Kurhaus that was initially built at the end of the 1800’s as a forest-bath destination. It was believed that the Arolla pines that stubble the mountain sides exude a healing air. That the tree’s scent, its breath, could heal the maladies of the newly industrial person. So the kurhaus was built of this scraggly pine, every aspect: walls, beds, tables, chairs. One could imagine the pinene and limonene-rich atmosphere in those early years. A century later, these terpenes have been shown to possess anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, anti-stress, and antibacterial properties but the scent of Arolla has long since vanished. ...
A small group of strangers and I were led down concrete stairs to a hallway. An industrial light in a metal cage illuminated a set of doors, and we stopped. The guide told us to “follow the lights” and “stay together, you can't get lost if you stay together.” He opened the door to a dark hallway in the basement of Tresor / Kraftwerk Berlin, the former East Berlin power plant turned storied venue run by Dimitri Hegemann on the southern shore of the Spree, and motioned us to enter, “just head towards the light”. We entered carefully, in twos, stepping slowly into the dark. The smell of damp concrete and sudden absence of light focused the senses, which telescoped inward, searching for edges....
LUMA Arles rises above vast Provençal fields and vineyards fed by the Rhône. It's capped with a faceted Frank Gehry tower, the polished steel sides stepping down, reflecting the golds and yellows of the dried fields and parching sun. Prélude, as the name suggests, is one of the inaugural exhibitions of collector Maja Hoffmann's long-standing project in Arles, LUMA. A secondary meaning of the word, to warm up, is appropriate as the work exhibited finds ways of accessing a growing feeling, that something disastrous is coming, things are heating up and this is just the beginning of our collective discombobulation...
v.2 is currently on hold, waiting to be fired due to an early fire season in the Sierra Nevadas and delay in the initial production of the kiln because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of 6 weeks, the organizers were kind enough to offer refuge at CLC for three months. The production of a kiln takes a minimum of 6 weeks to produce though I have found the longer the production time, the more the relations between the physical environment of its site and its eventual form emerge. The Sierra Nevadas of California, where CLC is located, is the gold mining region that spurred California's explosive growth in the mid-nineteenth century. The geology of the site of the kiln is rich in gold and copper ore, its clays glint with golden schist and the promise that drove thousands of people to forever alter this geological region through mining and settlement, that destroyed thousands of Chinese immigrants with indentured servitude, and displaced and killed tens of thousands of indigenous peoples who had maintained the Oak and clay valleys for thousands of years through controlled burns that limited the spread of combustible conifers and nourished an understory of yerba santa, lupines, and california poppies. The minerals that drove this mass disturbance of a way of life present themselves not only in the fired earthen clay of the kiln but as vapor signatures on the inside of the kiln as well as the objects fired within it. It is a heritage deeply connected with the composition of the earth, a history writ in rock.
As Rebecca Solnit in her book River of Shadows notes, it was due to the technological advancements of the transcontinental railroad and its need to rip holes through mountains that spurred the development of modern geology. Layers of the unseen forming new surfaces to examine and imbue with meaning, thereby creating new matrices to understand the observer. The development of the railroad not only altered our ability to change our understanding of present time but to forever change our understanding of the past and the vast lengths of time which form the bedrock of our contemporary moment.
When building the spiral kilns, I collect samples of the clay and geological environment for later analysis. The kilns themselves are built by hand, all tools used in sculpting the works fired in the kilns are fashioned from the environment. The topography is changed by hand. Choosing to intervene with the environment at the scale of a singular person's labor reflects a particular relationship: the one between a person and the complex, resting and living earth. My hands are raw from the grit of hand processed earthen clay squished through fingers, body saturated in the smoke of Canyon Live Oak, muscles sore from pushing earth and breaking shale.
The intellectual labor of physical interaction with the environment is a knowledge increasingly dismissed and disregarded. It is a dance, an endurance performance and saturated with a seemingly ineffable knowledge. Shale and schist flake when struck perpendicularly with a pick axe, clay sieves easiest when in solution, tarantulas migrate in March, scorpions rest on cool rock walls, turkeys fly up to roost in old oaks at a 45 degree angle before nestling amongst burls of mistletoe. What is lost when the majority of human labor is done within the relationship between ones and zeros? What can be regained by engaging with the multivalent realities of the system that created our biological reality? Our consciousness?
Once complete, each kiln ages into its particular environment, it becomes what some call an 'anthrome,' acting as a platform for algae, lichen, and moss to take hold on this vestige of human intervention. The environment folds the work back into itself, completing a cycle of human intervention, abandonment, and naturalization.
I'll be in residence Spring 2020 constructing the next iteration in the Spiral Kiln series as a permanent, in situ geological sculpture. Read the project brief here.
Celestial FutureX explores the unknown body as a site of freedom and imagines space as the terroir of a unifying xenomogrification. This iteration was a one night event I curated at Soft Surplus in Brooklyn. It was comprised of a screening of SuperNova by Canadian-Iranian video artist, Rah, and a performance of A New Women's Space Program: Pilot by Polish performance and new media artists Tusia Dabrowska and Wiktor Podgorski with geometric light sculptures by Brookhart Jonquil. To end the night, Tiffany Shin, Rah and I produced the Xenofuturist Dinner, a sharing of experimental food that explored the boundaries of the other. The dinner was inspired by Rah's Xenofuturist Manifesto, each course pairing with a section of the text. Tiffany Shin produced glassware, biological surfaces, and a makgeolli for the dinner. Menu and take home manifesto were produced with the assistance of Paul Soulelis' Riso Residency.
A catalogue essay on the violence of essentialist obsessions and the need to maintain chance in an increasingly over-determined present and future. At The Temperature of My Body is a reflection of the eponymous exhibition with essays by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and myself. Order here.
In May, 2017, I realized, with finality, that my father would die soon and cried. I took a selfie. I had never felt pain like that — this crack into an interminable void — and needed to see its manifestation pinch and push my face. My father died the following month and for the next two years, I took a selfie whenever I felt the void of loss and cried. A selection of those images is located here.
Radical empathy has emerged as a strategy to reorient a culture of systemic disaffection created by the alienation of capitalism. In general, radical empathy means primacing the experience of other people, other animals, other organisms and plants, internalizing the interplay of complex biological systems in order to place the self within a complex array of dependencies. Morehshin Allahyari's exhibition, She Who Sees the Unknown in Regina, Saskatchewan at The MacKenzie Gallery showcased a different kind of radical empathy, one that empathizes with the marginalized and urges a usurpation of the forces that dissimilate to, as Allahyari says, "colonize the colonizers." ...
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Turner Prize 2019 nominee and member of the research agency Forensic Architecture, renders the experience of silence in his solo exhibition Earwitness Theater at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Comprised of three sections, Abu Hamdan's exhibition lays out, methodically, how sound can be used to reconstruct the invisible and what crimes against humanity exist in unmonitored places. ...
There is a violence around us, within us. Our bodies are a battleground, not just politically, but existentially. Our very existence, a tower built of cells amassed, jostling, exchanging, is a war with intruders to determine the information that will write the next generation of who we are. ...
Alfredo Salazar-Caro premiered the first chapter of Dreams of the Jaguar's Daughter at the Tribeca Film Festival this past spring. The 360° video presented the encounter between a dream and reality. Dreams brings the viewer into a chance encounter with the 2018 Migrant Caravan that moved through Central America last October while exploring the strength necessary to leave one's home in search of a dream. I spoke with Salazar-Caro about the making of this chapter of the film, narrative power, if VR can actually be an empathy machine, and the dangers inherent in such a powerful tool...
A braid of moving blankets flow down the wall and serpentines flush over the floor through Alison O'Daniel's exhibition, Heavy Air, at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. The braid serves both as a path and a barrier, with visitors gingerly stepping on or over composite foam pads. Their purpose in the wild is to be a buffer, to prevent the transfer of the sensory between objects so the jiggle wobble does not damage your coffee table. However, the transfer of the sensory is exactly what Heavy Air explores through a varied set of works that feel like vignettes, short explorations that each add a wobble to sensory experience. This plait of padding, The Changing Ground (2019), leads one into the dissembling of apperception....
Cover feature on Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA)'s exhibition at The Richard H. Driehaus Museum in Chicago that explores the complex cultural remnants of global colonialism...
I am the inaugural Critic-in-Residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. During the week-long residency, I will be conducting studio visits with their Spring 2019 Artists-in-Residence, reviewing the concurrent exhibitions — Alison O'Daniel: Heavy Air and Lui Shtini: Tempos — and giving a talk on interdisciplinary arts writing and production. Thank you to The Seen Journal for supporting my residency...
A review of Caitlin Cherry's solo exhibition Threadripper at Luis De Jesus Gallery in LA. Cherry's work explores an evolving relationship to screens through novel painting and installation techniques all while peering through a prism of race, gender, and sexuality. ...
The Spiral Kiln v.1, On view at Performance Space NY in the exhibition A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN through December 17, 2018.
The third in a series of rudimentary earthen kilns I made during the Summer of 2018 in Detroit redesigns one of humanity's oldest technologies. The spiral form of this kiln not only increases efficiency in the wood-burning process through using radiant, recycled heat, its shape recalls Smithsonian conceptions of time and gestures at the kiln's ability to transform mud into rock, a process that would otherwise take millennia to accomplish. Read about the process in the zine made by Nora Khan, Sondra Perry, American Artist and Caitlin Cherry....
Catalogue essay on filmmaker Doireann O'Malley's three-part series Prototypes on the occasion of her exhibition at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 6/22/2018 - 9/16/2018.
Tony Conrad (1940-2016) rebelled against film, against music, against time. When he lived in New York, he lived as frugally as possible so as to remove himself from the economic order. He bought chicken hearts for $0.12 per pound and lived in an apartment without heat or running water. ...
Food, in aesthetic discourse, has its own apex in the culinary arts. The culinary arts are defined by the processing of raw food stuffs into consumable portions, which are in some way better, according to specific cultural and aesthetic norms. ...
Process Park v.1 was a four week residency I founded. The first iteration was held at chaNorth artist residency in Pine Plains, NY during the month of April, 2018. Critic and writer, Nora Khan, and I co-directed this experimental residency within a residency. Our first group included Santina Amato, Ursula Endlicher, and Jules Litman-Cleper. The goal of the residency was to establish a rhythm of self-reflective critical engagement with our individual practices through reorienting ourselves in time and space.
I've been working in media and cultural criticism since 2005. After college, I worked for a small alt weekly called The Second Supper (08/2005 - 08/2008) as Executive Editor and Art Director. While attending grad school at SAIC (2008-2010), I began writing for SAIC's FNews Magazine and was a contributing writer, designer and artist for Canon, our department's annual publication. In my final year, I began writing for ArtSlant (05/2010 - 05/2018). I held various positions there until I assumed the role of Chief Operations Officer in 2014, leaving in 2018. My writing focuses on technology, identity formation, and radical ecologies. I have been published in Art in America, ArtSlant, Brooklyn Rail, Elephant, Frieze, Mutual Art, THE SEEN and others.
Celestial FutureX explores the unknown body as a site of freedom and imagines space as the terroir of a unifying xenomogrification. Can we eschew the phobias associated with a homeland by losing our collective home? Let's gaze up at the sky and let light shine through the darkness of our unknown bodies.
We see an imagined space where the prefix 'xeno' can be appropriated — with the weight of its history — and used to recenter the Other as the future of humanity. When SpaceX launched a Tesla into space as a photo opp, it became more than clear that the future of space exploration, now driven by a few of the world's richest men, was being financed as an escape plan for billionaires. Conversely, we assert that space is an opportunity for us to reject the systems that have destroyed our home for extractive gain and recenter the peripheral as the site of futurity.
The first iteration of this event was hosted by the design collective Soft Surplus in Brooklyn on November 6, 2019.
SuperNova is a talent show parody that consists of seven characters that Rah performs. The performers are Oreo, Fatimeh, and Coco and each of their acts examine issues of race and ethnic performance. The talent show sets an ideal stage to critically examine race and ethnic performance. The piece also explores ethno futurism. It presents the future as a site to deconstruct and reconstruct history. The audience are aliens that wear hijabs and ululate. Eastern subjects are often represented as frozen in time, seemingly untouched by modernity, therefore, the ululation and hijabs situates this eastern audience in the future. SuperNova examines the socio-political, temporal, linguistic and spatial factors that contribute to the formation of identity.
A woman astronaut is sent on a solo mission to Mars. Haunted by visions of cross-generational trauma, she feels the need to crash her spacecraft. The project mixes pop culture and experimental media aesthetics drawing inspiration from the New York feminist video art scene that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s, and the fantasies of late capitalism present in the art of Eastern Europe under communism and during the Transformation. The goal is to provoke the audience to consider the impact of trauma on their lives and to generate conversation on what liberation means. PILOT is narrative driven and includes abstract video projections, sound-text, object activation, experimental electronic music and live video scenography.
Eating of Xenofuturist Dinner
by Joel Kuennen and Tiffany Shin, in collaboration with Rah's Xenofuturist Manifesto: A Proposal for a Liminal Futurism
Xenofuturist Dinner explores gustatorial and situational expressions of a manifesto written by Rah, Xenofuturist Manifesto: A Proposal for a Liminal Futurism. Five courses were presented that explored the edges of edibility. Food and menu design by Joel Kuennen with ware and biological surfaces by Tiffany Shin.
Course 1: Liminal Melancholy - black sesame and rosewater halva on oyster mushroom mycelial mat
Course 2: Disidentification - poached quince in peppermint tea agar agar
Course 3: Expanding Geographical Imagination - pearled rosewater rice innoculated with aspergillus oryzae, pomegranate molasses and sumac
Course 4: New Language - rosa rugosa vapor with fir salt on your lips
Course 5: Limbo Logic - long egg noodle with wakame and gochugaru in mul kimchi water
Strings: Data and the Self crystallizes the conversations surrounding self representation in the age of Big Data through the work of 5 artists who share a concern for the manner in which data increasingly determines our behavior, our interactions, and our overall relationship to the self. This exhibition approaches the implications of a life determined by data through three questions: How is data extracted? What can become of your data? How is emotional intelligence affected by data?
The work of Branger_Briz (Probe Kit, 2015) exposes the points at which we become data to be exported and extrapolated by companies, organizations and governments, ultimately presenting the viewer with their own lack of choice when participating in a digital world. They ran a workshop at the beginning of the exhibition and led participants on a WiFi Data Safari through the city of Thousand Oaks.
Jennifer Chan (Austerity, 2016) uses footage found online to create heartfelt works about vulnerability that recenter the self as a series of performances in accordance with imagined ideals. Her work forces us to confront the cognitive dissonance of abstract economic systems which dictate personal possibilities.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg (Stranger Visions, 2012-2013) uses genetic data to discover identities from the traces of our lives. The apparent lack of genetic privacy forces a reconsideration of the boundaries of self within a culture rapidly developing cheap, mass-produced genetic technologies as well as their integration into law enforcement and incarceration systems.
Amanda Turner Pohan’s (Linqox Criss on Machines, Living and Otherwise, 2018) work explores the making of self. From digital extensions of selfhood to wholly imagined identities, she provides pathways for a dialectic of personhood to take shape.
Shawné Michaelain Holloway (USER ID : ADD-TAGS-TO-DESCRIBE-YOURSELF.png, PROFILE-PIC.PNG, ABOUT-ME.PNG, 2018) presents a triptych, and accompanying digital essay that reflects on A Personal Project, a video project she began in 2013 while working as a cam girl. Her work interrogates how sexuality, identity and power are expressed online and off.
"Plans are not made with clear and prescribed end points. Plans are made for the journey, and decisions are made along the way." -Theresa Giorza, from the Preface.
Process Park focused on reinserting ourselves into the act of production, to interrupt the paradigm of contemporary alienation.
Communal consumption and response might be a good way to describe the rhythmic activity of Process Park. From the processing and consumption of good food to the processing and consumption of knowledge, we sought to reposition the activity of self in relation to the social as a responsive activity that resists the dominant modality of passive consumption.
What did this look like? We made food together. We ate together. We read together. We worked apart. The nightly communal dinner began each cycle.
See our first open call here to learn more about what we hoped to create.
We began with an educational format outlined by Keleketla Library in Johannesburg, South Africa to serve as a curricular taxonomy:
Space of Conversation
After dinner, while sitting around the table, the food in the pots having lost luster from surffeit, we read aloud 2-4 paragraph selections from theoretical texts, artist texts, poetry, etc. Shortness of length was key. Sometimes, we merely prompted verbally, i.e.: What is an object? Discussion would range from 1-2 hours and circle around the theme of the night.
Space of Consideration
Sleep + work.
Space of Implementation
The work day. Artists had all day in their studios to work on their proposed projects. At dinner that night we would ask how the previous night's discussion had entered into their work. If their thinking had evolved or migrated and in which directions.
Within this framework, we developed a thematic arc of readings to ground our experiences. They were as follows:
Experience > Space > Time > Place > Object > Relationship
Experience
John Dewey, Having an Experience, from Art as Experience (36, 37).
Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living. Under conditions of resistance and conflict, aspects and elements of the self and the world that are implicated in this interaction qualify experience with emotions and ideas so that conscious intent emerges. Oftentimes, however, the experience had is inchoate. Things are experienced but not in such a way that they are composed into an experience. There is distraction and dispersion; what we observe and what we think, what we desire and what we get, are at odds with each other. We put our hands to the plow and turn back; we start and then we stop, not because the experience has reached the end for the sake of which it was initiated but because of extraneous interruptions or of inner lethargy.
Space
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 29-30
In spite of measures taken to repress or conceal it, la perruque (or its equivalent) is infiltrating itself everywhere and becoming more and more common. It is only one case among all the practices which introduce artistic tricks and competitions of accomplices into a system that reproduces and partitions through work or leisure. Sly as a fox and twice as quick: there are countless ways of "making do."
Time
Supplemental reading from AGAINST THE DAY (DIARIES), Yann Chateigné, which opens, "After having produced several fragments that I never had the possibility to assemble a form that would satisfy me, from aborted essays to book projects that never happened..."
The Third Cycle opens with a reflection by Yann on Robert Smithson and Spiral Jetty. The prompt is to get us thinking about process over time, thinking through time, art as a manifestation of thinking process, and the present or future audiences one might make work for.
Non-Place
On the non-urban as a non-place:
"To go "into the woods" is to enter both nightmare and wonderment, chaos and serenity. The woods are the threatening realm of wolves and witches, yet also a space of peace and introspection. They confound and illuminate, disorient and clarify, endanger and protect. The woods are where we "come to our senses," and where we embrace our wilder selves. They are a space of complex life forms and ecological destruction; of growth and decay; of fantasy and ritual; of secrets and control; of hiding and the hidden.
The woods are often framed as a nonurban place; an entity separate from, and opposed to, the city—even the world; an eternal refuge that can smoothly be entered and exited, gone into and back out of. But how much of our woods still remains to go into—and on what terms?
As designers, we encounter the woods as building site, as obstacle, and as resource—territory to be cleared, but also to be preserved, cultivated, tamed, or simulated. Wood itself—along with its products like lumber, wood pulp, silvichemicals, and charcoal—fuel the building industry and feed architecture. In a period of accelerated climate change, the planet's woods are disappearing, burning up, threatening and threatened by human existence. How can we holistically address the woods and its ecosystems, and the life and life-giving power they contain?"
This was our only free-form cycle led by the participants. Each participant explained how they related to objects, how objects determined the places they were in and how they came to make objects as markers of subjective presence.
Relationship
What is a relationship? Is a relationship an object or does its constant state of interdependent flux make it something entirely different? How do we speak of relationships as if they are stable objects?
Me <=> Object
Me <=> You
Me <=> Other
Me <=> Group
Me <=> Society
Grammar presupposes the kinds of relationships we can have (in the above incomplete list one gets a sense of the overlap between relational scenarios and declensions). Each connotes qualities and boundaries of relation. Relationships of course go two ways. They are dialectical in that the forces of their interaction are mutually affective. As one engages with an other, the other engages with you.
How do you think about your interactions with people on these different levels? Is it reactive? Proactive? How do you change given the scenario of interaction, the object with which you interact? What is the art of experiencing an other, experiencing with another?
Relational aesthetics is described by Nicolas Bourriaud as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." Since it's acknowledgment as a mode of practice in contemporary art, it has been excessively dragged.
Why is this? What do you think about relational aesthetics?
An artist residency is fundamentally a social experiment. Even a co-living arrangement is a social experiment. Negotiating needs, desires, boundaries with roommates, creating place together, thinking together, relaxing together, working together - all these relational aspects can be and are subject to artistic intervention.
Labor:
What does it mean to work with someone?
What is the value of co-labor given that much of artistic activity is a solitary one?
How can art reflect on exploitative and extractive labor?
What does labor for the sake of a small community give us? For the sake of a large community?
View the github where we stored notes on process, our readings, and documentation of the residency.
The Place of Gender in Technological Possibility, 2018 // Catalogue essay on filmmaker Doireann O'Malley's three-part series Prototypes on the occasion of her exhibition at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 6/22/2018 - 9/16/2018. Published by Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art and Sternberg Press.
Corita Kent: Transubstantial Matter, 2017 // Catalogue essay for Mass Appeal: The Art of Corita Kent at California Museum of Art Thousand Oaks.
Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline // Ed. James Elkins, Kristi McGuire, Maureen Burns, Alicia Chester and Joel Kuennen. Editorial panel member and contributor, Routledge, 2012. // Contributed: Barthes on Bataille and Augé's Non-Place
Ben Seamons: Close and Deep Spaces, Fall 2012 // Catalogue essay for Afterimage at DePaul Art Museum, Chicago.
Light Farming / Heavy Gardening: Tending the Image, 2012 // Catalogue essay for the 2012 Yale MFA Exhibition.
Archi-Porn: Architecture and the Erotic, Ed. Steven Flemming, Flammarion, 2012. Contributed Constructing the Body in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Saló: 120 Days of Sodom
The Erotic in Context, Ed. Alhadeff, Garcia Sánchez, Kuennen. 2011 // Coeditor and contributor published by ID Press.
I in Space // Thesis for MAVCS degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Dialectics of Desire and Revolution: Viénet's Girls of Kamaré // Lecture and Digital Video presentation of Detourning Viénet at The Erotic: 5 conference in Salzburg, Austria - 11/6/2009
Disruptions: The Political in Art Now Workshop // Workshop participant, presented by MCA Chicago and Open Practice Committee at the University of Chicago. Keynote speaker, Jacques Rancière - 10/24/2008
First Year Seminar Program - SAIC // Internet Society - a course I designed and taught for English, Liberal Arts to introduce freshman and sophomores to critical thinking and cultural analysis applied to the Internet // 09/03/2009 - 12/21/2009
Visual and Critical Studies BA Thesis Course TA with Dr. Karen Morris // 08/28/2008 - 12/15/2008, 01/23/2009 - 05/11/2009, 01/28/2010 - 05/16/2010
Sculpture: Basic Metalsmithing TA with Amy Butts // 01/04/2010 - 01/28/2010, 01/28/2010 - 05/16/2010
Sculpture: Basic Metalsmithing TA with Ronald Lancaster 01/28/2010 - 05/16/2010
Sculpture: Non-Ferrous Metals Fabrication TA with Amy Butts 01/04/2010 - 01/28/2010
Practicum - UW-L // Led a group of Juniors in considering what it takes to manufacture celebrity online. The outcome was entitled the Virtual Celebrity Project. // 01/2007 - 05/2007
Writing Tutor - UW-L // Student mentor and tutor for native and foreign students wishing to improve their English language writing skills. // 09/2006 - 05/2007
Rock Efflorescence, Transfer Gallery in MX, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, 2021
Group Exhibitions
summertime, curated by Marcela Vieira, Andrea Ganuza, Beatriz Toledo, Berfin Ataman, Brice Bischoff, Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas, Edgar Fabián Frías, Isabel Beavers, Janaina Wagner, Joel Kuennen, Lauren Bon, Maurício Chades, Noara Quintana, Sofia Borges, Star Feliz, Wallace Masuko, Brand Library & Art Center, Los Angeles, 2024
World Weather Network, Nina Barnett & Jeremy Bolen, Elmas Deniz, Stavros Gasparatos, Katie Paterson, Jakob Kudsk Steen-sen & Joel Kuennen, Natalia Tsoukala, Derek Tumala, Burcu Yağcoğlu & Ülgen Semerci, Prodromos Zanis, (TOGETH-ER)(TOGETHER), Breath of Weather Collective, Ron Bull & Stefan Marks & Heather Purdie & Janine Randerson & Rachel Shearer, Liam Gillick, Art Sonje Center, 2022
Parallaxie: Ahmed Isam Aldin, Ulrike Buck, Andrea Canepa, Leslie Kulesh, Albin Looström, Paul DD Smith, Anna M. Szaflarski, Daniel von Bothmer, Curated by Kreuzberg Pavilion, Kinderhook & Caracas, The Mycological Twist, Kunstverein Springhornhof, Neuenkirchen, Germany, 2022
The 14th Factory, Simon Birch, artist and the creator of the 14th Factory, chats with Joel Kuennen of ArtSlant about the central themes behind the 14th Factory: Globalism, Collision & Crisis and Transformation, Los Angeles, Apr 26, 2017
Reality and Simulacrum - Perry Bard, Carla Gannis, Joel Kuennen, Jung Hee Mun and Jorge Zuzulich in conversation about video, virtual reality, augmented reality and the relationship between the body and technology. TransBorder Art TV, Episode 16, New York, Apr 8, 2017
New Media Art Now - I gave a tour of Frieze New York to a Taiwanese filmcrew and spoke with artist Hao Ni about his work and the promises of new media art. Episode 7, Taipei, August 13, 2016
Art Fairs and Artists: How to Make it Work for YOU! Panel member with Frits Abell, Heather Darcy Bhandari, Eric Doeringer, and Omar Lopez-Chahoud. Organized by Artists Talk on Art, New York. November, 15, 2013
The Tumblr Arts Summit at ArtPadSF explored the way we share, create, and engage with art on the web. Seven leading art world professionals will discuss how their institutions, brands and associations have benefited from social media and the web, where and how they've found the most success, and the challenges presented with technologically engaging the art world. Panel: Ken Harman, James Salzmann, Jennifer Yin, Joel Kuennen, Kara Q. Smith, Liz Glass, Eric Dyer. San Francisco, May 17, 2013
