Xirin, Hope Eats the Soul, 2019. Photo by Antonio Barrera.

In Longing
Curated by Anna Cahn
Mentor: Legacy Russell
June 3 – July 14, 2021

Rouge Gorge Screening
A new performance film by Marie Ségolène
June 3rd - June 5th, 2021

Taste Test: Dinner Banquet
A performance by Xirin and Sebastian Chacon
Saturday, June 26 at 7pm ET

what is left, if I am earth
A performance by Raymond Pinto and Fana Fraser
Wednesday, July 14 at 2pm ET

Closing Reception with Anna Cahn
Wednesday, July 14 at 5pm ET

CUE Art Foundation is pleased to present In Longing, a group exhibition featuring artists Alison Chen, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Raymond Pinto, Marie Ségolène, and Xirin, organized by Anna Cahn. This group of artists, shown together for the first time, are united by their grappling with the emotionally and politically charged power of longing. A central question of the exhibition asks: how is desire affected by the oppressive systems of patriarchy and white supremacy? With diverse practices of performance, installation, text, and movement, the artists engage with the restlessness of longing while closely drawing us into the profundity of inner and outer worlds.

The exhibition features eight artworks and premieres two new performances by Xirin and Raymond Pinto, accompanying their installations in the exhibition. In the front gallery, Marie Ségolène debuts her mixed-media installation, Rouge Gorge (2021). In her video performance and installation, soil, vegetation, worms, and wine are unearthed and consumed in queer rapture. SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY’s sculpture, REQUEST-->LURE-->RESPONSE-->REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE (2017), will be shown in New York for the first time. The sculpture references what is known in BDSM as “puppy play,” and features a human-sized digitally printed blanket with text draped over a large dog cage. The power dynamics between sub and dom, human and animal, and the upright and the kneeling are explored. Alison Chen’s video work, For One Night Only (2015), depicts the artist and her partner moving through the familiar, mundane, and sometimes awkward gestures of intimacy. Investigating both banal and erotic moments within a relationship, her work affirms, critiques, and questions the role of feminine subjectivity.

Taste Test: Dinner Banquet will feature Xirin and her partner Sebastian Chacon as they consume a three-course meal together while exploring the act of regurgitation. The performers will experiment with ideas of oral fixation, sensual pleasure, and excess. Taste Test is a site-specific performance that will be livestreamed on CUE’s website on Saturday, June 26th at 7pm ET.

what is left, if I am earth is a performance by Raymond Pinto and a collaboration with Fana Fraser. They will examine notions of longing as it intersects with Black queer experiences through improvised and experimental movement, as well as using organic materials such as geodes. The performance will feature recorded songs by London-based musician Klein as a musical score. what is left, if I am earth will take place in CUE’s gallery and will be livestreamed for an audience on Wednesday, July 14th at 2pm ET.

The artists of In Longing help us examine how we can begin to touch our deepest urges, reminding us that these moments of the extraordinary may be found in the ordinary. Curator Anna Cahn writes that she wants visitors to: “Succumb to your memories of experiencing pleasure and pain, joy and horror, desire and disgust. In this wandering, we discover how desire shapes our collective experience of the world.”

Anna Cahn is an independent curator and writer based in New York City. She is particularly interested in the intersections of performance and interdisciplinary media in contemporary artistic practices. From 2016-2020 she worked as a Curatorial Associate at the Rubin Museum of Art where she assisted with exhibitions and curated performances and artists’ talks such as the Refiguring the Future series. She has held previous positions as guest curator and visiting critic for Residency Unlimited, adjunct lecturer at the City College of New York, and research fellow at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic and Spiral Magazine. She received her BA from Clark University and an MA in Art History from the City College of New York.

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. Curated exhibitions and projects include LEAN (2020) featuring Justin Allen, Jen Everett, Devin Kenny, Kalup Linzy, Rene Matić, Sadé Mica, and Leilah Weinraub for Performa's Radical Broadcast which opened March 2020 at Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway; This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2019-20 (2020) featuring E. Jane, Elliot Reed, and Naudline Pierre at MoMA PS1; Projects: Garrett Bradley (2020) and Projects 110: Michael Armitage (2019), organized with Thelma Golden and The Studio Museum in Harlem at MoMA; Dozie Kanu: Function (2019), Chloë Bass: Wayfinding (2019), and Radical Reading Room (2019) at The Studio Museum in Harlem. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) is published by Verso Books. Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books.

Alison Chen is a Los Angeles-based visual artist working with video, performance, photography, and text. She earned an MFA in Photography and Related Media from Parsons School for Design. She has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Beijing, and Marseilles and has been featured in the Beijing Design Festival, the Pingyao International Photography Festival, and the Dali International Photo Festival. She has also had the honor to study under the direction of Magnum photographer, Antoine D’Agata. Most recently, she attended the Wassaic Project as a family resident. She is currently represented by Stay Home Gallery in Paris, TN. 

SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like the New Museum (NY), The Kitchen (NY), the Time-Based Art Festival at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (IL). SHAWNÉ is a 2020-21 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Queer Theatre & Performance Resident and is teaching across the New Arts Journalism and the Film, Video, New Media, and Animation departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

As an artist, Raymond Pinto mixes disciplines of movement and distills remnants of gestures that attend to non-locality. Most recently, they are concerned with a notion of bodilessness. Their research investigates the statehood of having no body. The transmogrification of internal experiences crystalizes to form critical choreographic dispositions rendering fragments of intimacy, abjection, and stick-to-it-iveness. Off the beat, Raymond enjoys DJing, cooking, and reading science fiction novels by Samuel R. Delany.

Marie Ségolène holds a BA in Creative Writing and a BFA in Intermedia Cyberarts from Concordia University (Canada). She completed her MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Marie has exhibited work in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2018, she took part in “Conversations in Contemporary Poetics,” curated by Jeffrey Grunthaner at Hauser & Wirth in New York City, and performed as part of the Performance and Noise Biennial: Tempting Failure in London. Her fifth artist publication, entitled Dehiscence (2018), was published with the support of Anteism. In 2020, Marie founded Arcadia, a series of fine dining experiences which took place in Texas, New York City, and Montreal and explored practices of radical hospitality and care, with performance interventions and intricate menus served in lush floral installations. Marie’s writing has been featured in The Wine Zine, Dinner Bell Magazine, and Desuetude Journal. Her first poetry manuscript, Yellow Berries, is set to come out in Summer 2021, designed and published by Grosse Fugue.

Xirin is an Iranian, New York-based multidisciplinary artist whose work reclaims romantic tropes, emphasizing the ways idealistic notions of attachment cause pain. In her work (composed of performance, painting, video, and installation), she frequently uses the form of the duet to explore how larger social power structures locate themselves within intimate relationships. Through a series of autofiction, she investigates what it means to love men as a feminist within patriarchy. With her body often situated as the subject, Xirin’s work embraces intimacy, optimism, and romance as erotic, transgressive tools against social apathy. Recently, Xirin has performed at A.I.R. Gallery, the Jewish Museum‬, Knockdown Center‬, and Pioneer Works‬. Her writing is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work has been featured in publications such as Pitchfork, Vestoj, and PAPER magazine, and she has recently participated in artist residencies at A.I.R. Gallery and A-Z West: Institute of Investigative Living. Alongside Kembra Pfahler, Xirin frequently organizes performance art events in New York, known as Incarnata Social Club. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence and her MFA from Columbia University. She currently teaches online courses such as “Cruel Idealism,” a film, art, and performance studies class that explores the performativity of optimism and the taboo of radical utopias.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a 32-page color catalogue, with texts by Anna Cahn, Legacy Russell, Tiana Reid, Alison Chen, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Raymond Pinto, Marie Ségolène, and Xirin. The catalogue will be available online and free of charge to gallery visitors. For more information please contact Programs Director Lilly Hern-Fondation at lilly@cueartfoundation.org.

This exhibition is a winning selection from the 2020-21 Open Call for Curatorial Projects. The proposal was unanimously selected by a panel comprised of artist Guadalupe Maravilla, curator Sohrab Mohebbi, artist Ronny Quevedo, and curator Legacy Russell. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition. We are honored to work with Legacy Russell as the mentor to Anna Cahn.

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Catalogue essay: “Pitch Imperfect” by Tiana Reid

Director and Cinematographer: Erin Smith