FREE 
Lipsey Auditorium, Knox Building

Eternity: A Cross-Cultural Conversation Through Verse and Vision

ETERNITY is an ekphrastic poetic visual written, performed, and directed by Aitina Fareed-Cooke. A multi-hyphenate artist, creative strategist, and entrepreneur, Fareed-Cooke serves as the Poet Laureate of Buffalo, grounding her practice in the belief that storytelling is a tool for unification, one that breaks down cultural divides and ignites a broader perspective of how we see each other. The piece was created in response to the work of Yayoi Kusama and explores themes of self-reflection, trauma, and transcendence, drawing on Kusama’s visual language of repetition and infinity to examine personal and collective experience. The visual was produced through Get Fokus’d Productions in collaboration with Alex Felix (Earthbound Films), Luqman Muhammad (22Reform), and Kalvin Booker (Through His Lens Photography). 

This screening and artist talk-back invites audiences to find connection across difference. Kusama, a Japanese contemporary artist whose life’s work centers on the philosophy of self-obliteration and the oneness of humanity, and Fareed-Cooke, an American contemporary artist rooted in the ideology of Human First Storytelling, arrive from distinct worlds yet speak the same truth: that beneath our many differences, we are one. Much like Kusama’s polka dots, each distinct yet part of a unified whole, this collaboration uses art as a universal language to expand perspective and affirm our shared humanity.