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Project Third 2025-Present

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Speech Acts

A white silhouette of two people sitting at a table with two microphones between them, directed toward their heads. The text at the top left corner reads in all-caps "SPEECH ACTS" in white and bold. The bottom text in black superimposed over the silhouette of the figures reads left to right the Pratt Institute Fine Arts Department logo and "Project Third," both in black. The background is a perspective radial gradient featuring Pratt Institute's main brand colors of yellow, grey, and black.

Speech Acts is the podcast of Pratt Fine Arts’ Project Third (P3). Each month, a faculty member sits down with artists, curators, and cultural producers whose work engages deeply with social, political, and community-based issues. These conversations explore practices that defy traditional categories, experiment across disciplines, and respond to the urgent conditions of our time.

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Episode 1: Taja Cheek: Sonic Rapture

Portrait of Taja Cheek in front of a waterfall.
Black and grey headshot of Carlos Motta, center of frame and looking straight ahead at the camera.

Associate Professor and artist Carlos Motta speaks with Taja Cheek, a Brooklyn-born curator and musician based in New York City.

Taja Cheek is Artistic Director of Performance Space New York, a radical interdisciplinary performance institution in the East Village, founded in 1980 as PS122, and is also a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who frequently records and performs under the name L’Rain. Taja was guest curator for the 2024 Whitney Biennial performance program and led performance programs at MoMA PS1, including Warm Up, a summer outdoor music series that the museum has hosted in its courtyard since 1998, and Sunday Sessions, an interdisciplinary performance series. As a curator, Taja has championed the creation of new performance works and has worked closely with artists for many years. Experimental and emotive, her music explores composition and structure and addresses themes of grief, identity, emotion and experience.

Carlos Motta is an artist and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice, Fine Arts, Pratt Institute. His multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge normative discourses through acts of self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. His career-survey exhibition Carlos Motta: Pleas of Resistance is on view at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) through October 2025 and will travel to OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria in 2026 and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France in 2027. Motta received a Ruth Arts Award in 2025.  

Photo, left: L’Rain, Fatigue. Album cover, 2021. Courtesy of L’Rain

Photo, right: Cory Rice