On January 10, Aria Dean will be at the Albright-Knox to talk about her work, including the three videos currently on view in the museum's Gallery for New Media.

In her artwork as well as critical essays and curatorial projects, Dean examines the possibilities for and limitations on individual and collective identity created by digital technologies and platforms and their users. She is particularly interested in the definition and maintenance of blackness as a collective form and how, as she has written, the "most concrete location we can find for this collective being of blackness is the digital, on social media platforms in the form of viral content."

These issues come to the fore in her most recent work at the AK: But as One Doesn’t Know Where My Centre Is, One Will With Difficulty Ascertain The Truth . . . Though This Task Has Made Me Ill, It Will Also Make Me Healthy Again (Crowd Index). This eleven-minute supercut of crowd scenes from hip-hop videos of the 1990s and early 2000s tracks how blackness as a socially defined identity has been articulated and disseminated through the popular moving image.

Dean's free talk, presented as part of the Voices in Contemporary Art Lecture Series, will be presented in the museum's Auditorium beginning at 7:15 pm.