"In the Folds" by Sasha Cordingley

Added on April 24, 2024 by Admin.

Writer: Sasha Cordingley
Essay Mentor: Ana Tuazon

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Sometimes My Accent Slips Out by Bhen Alan, mentored by Jade Yumang with curatorial guidance from Jon Santos, and on view at CUE Art from April 4 – May 18, 2024. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online.

Installation view of *Sometimes My Accent Slips Out* by Bhen Alan, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

When I ask Filipino artist Bhen Alan about the purpose of the banig, he offers an extensive list: it is a site for gossiping, eating, dance, and rest, he shares, and goes on to extol it as a vessel for life and death. His admiration for the hand-woven mat and its connection to the life cycle is understandable; its slick surface welcomed him—as it had many of his antecedents—in birth, and just two years afterward, the plaited fibers of the same banig were wrapped around his father’s body after he drowned in the village river.

Although most are familiar with the banig in the context of its domestic uses, its function as casket, midwife, or sacred grounds can be traced to the Philippines’ pre-colonial era, before the Spanish Empire arrived bearing rosary and cross, or the imperial arm of the United States instituted its own systems of education and governance. Antonio Pigafetta documented the banig in Primo viaggio intorno al mondo (1525), a personal chronicle of Ferdinand Magellan’s proselytizing voyage to the Philippines’ Visayan Islands in the 16th century. The scribe wrote, “When we came to the town we found the King of Zzubu [Cebu] at his palace, sitting on the ground on a mat made of palm, with many people about him.”1 He recorded matrilineal customs, too: “[The women] do not work in the fields but stay in the house, weaving mats, baskets, and other things…from palm leaves.”2 Even the queen partook in the laborious folding that characterizes the banig, and its indigenous applications traversed hierarchies and functions alike.

Works by Bhen Alan, presented as part of *Sometimes My Accent Slips Out*, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

Despite its longevity, the banig has scarcely been documented in the manuals and archives of the Philippines’ material history. Alan tells me that it is a tradition passed directly from one weaver to another, transmitted through communities that are already attuned to the specific bends and splices of the palm, pandan, or tikog leaves that they employ. Techniques and designs are often held close—rarely leaving the boundaries of a barangay—for the simple fact that each community—and each weaver—retains distinct color schemes and pattern designs, ones that reflect local or personal narratives, ideologies, and beliefs. What they do share is the collective understanding that banig weaving does not start at the first fold of a reed over another, but with seeds that are sewn and tended to until harvest.

Many of these communities live in intimate relationship with the surrounding ecosystem, and tending to the land is an integral function of daily life. The Molbog people, for example, are nestled in the remote mountaintops of Balabac, Palawan; their isolated barangay lacks a cellular network, electricity, or access to clean water. Employment is scant. Yet, banig weaving persists as a viable source of income precisely because the community continually invests in the full life cycle of the pandan plant. For the Molbog, the banig is intimately entwined in a natural cycle of living and dying that is essential to human and nonhuman survival, wherein one cannot exist without the other; it is a stark contrast to the “destroy, extract, exploit” approach to the land’s resources in much of the West. Taken altogether, banig is not just an everyday object, but an emblem of Filipino identities—of people who have firmly resisted the steamrolling of culture, memory, and tradition by colonial enterprises.

Bhen Alan, *Madapaka*, 2022. Mixed media; 6 x 4 feet. Photo by Leo Ng.

Bhen Alan’s practice of abstracted sculptural banigs makes this explicit. Madapaka (2022) is a burst of tousled fabrics in dazzling yellow and orange, pockmarked by dehydrated palm leaves, knotted fibers of yarn, and a slew of embellished fans. A close look at the work reveals dangling rosaries impersonating strands of thread, hidden amongst the torrent of material. They may look like haphazard additions, but the shrouding of the sacrament alludes to the Spanish Empire’s wielding of Catholicism and so-called cultural enlightenment as a means of seizing land across the Philippines from 1565 onward. Surrounding the rosaries are a number of intricately detailed multi-colored fans. Alan tells me he used to be a folk dancer, and that fans are often used in the dances of his community as an extension of the arm, marking the limits of bodily movement through swift flicks and circumvolutions by the dancer. In the work, the fans protrude like the feathers of a peacock, amplifying its presence. Their use suggests a prevailing native body and the traditions it enacts, informed by colonial presence yet unwilling to be suppressed by its afterlife.

Mother Tongue (2023) unfurls from the ceiling and splays out like a mouth stretched open and seized mid-sentence. It is a scroll of bound horizontal palm and pandan leaves in sage, turquoise, red, beige, yellow, and purple, and its edges jut out in provocation. Lodged throughout the work are bushy patches of cattails gathered from the lakes of the artist’s adopted home in New England. They stand tall like weeds emerging from gravel, refusing to warp to the linear arrangement of the work’s principal textiles.

In our conversation, Alan tells me how his assimilation into North America is at times interrupted by his inability to fully assume the English language. Words dissipate upon recollection, and the intonations of his mother tongue inflect as he speaks. Rather than force the expected dialect of the region’s primary language, Alan indulges his linguistic ruptures by letting them linger, mis/translating them through the entropic composition of his banigs. He draws upon these dynamics of language in The Difference between P and F (2024), composed of bundles of tangled yarn that clump and droop across asymmetrically adjoined stretchers, and Filipino. Pilipino. (2022-24), in which coiled strips of rattan loop around and through each other against a gridded brace, as if tripping over tongue-twisters in a new language or grasping at tip-of-the-tongue recollections.

Particularly striking about this latter work is the artist’s use of whole sheets of woven rattan, which are found on many of the Philippines’ white sand beaches. Rattan is often woven by locals into chaise lounges, handbags, placemats, and coffee tables. The same is true for the banig; its forms and processes have taken on the shape of yoga mats, coasters, and sun hats by will of tourists seeking supposedly authentic souvenirs. Some communities in the archipelago have even lost their traditions of weaving as a direct result of the commodification of the craft. Although acutely aware of the onerous economic conditions that engender the banig as marketable product, Alan resists this outcome as the mat’s final form.

It is undeniable that much of the archipelago’s post-colonial culture today maintains remnants of the Spanish and American empires: there are basketball courts and churches in every barangay, and military bases aplenty. The banig, however, has endured. By foregrounding the woven mat in his practice, Alan reclaims the object as a tactile archive that has survived rounds of cultural erasure by colonial regimes, one that narrates stories not just of the artist, but of communities that for centuries have gossiped, eaten, danced, rested, lived, and died—all on the ubiquitous banig.

Endnotes

[1] Stanley, Henry Edward John, and Antonio Pigafetta. The first voyage round the world, by Magellan. Pg 89. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1874. Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926.
[2] Stanley, Henry Edward John, and Antonio Pigafetta. The first voyage round the world, by Magellan. Pg 70. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1874. Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926

About the Writer
Sasha Cordingley (she/they) is an arts and culture writer from the Philippines, born in Hong Kong, and residing in Brooklyn, NY. She currently works as a Press Officer and Writer at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, Art Papers, ArtAsiaPacific, C Magazine, The Strategist, and Dirt. She is the recipient of C Magazine’s New Critic Award and the Henry Moore Institute Dissertation Award.

About the Writing Mentor
Ana Tuazon is a writer and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing on art, culture, and collectivity has been published in print and online; most recently in Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism (Paper Monument, 2023). She was an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grantee in 2021, and a 2019-21 Critical Studies Fellow in the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She currently teaches part-time at Parsons School of Design.

About the Art Critic Mentorship Program
This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (the US section of International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE. Learn more about the program here. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior written consent from the author.

"A Series of Openings—or, Ways of Worrying a Score" by Jordan Jones

Added on February 10, 2024 by Admin.

Writer: Jordan Jones
Essay Mentor: Renee Gladman

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition worried notes by Keli Safia Maksud, with mentorship from Abigail DeVille and on view at CUE Art Foundation from January 25 – March 16, 2024. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online.

Detail of *how then do you position yourself?*, 2023. Photo by Leo Ng.

Keli Safia Maksud presents us with worried notes. Musically, a worried note, or a blue note, is a pitch that destabilizes the major scale—a sound between a note on the major scale and a note on the blues scale.¹ Introducing a worried note unsettles the path of a song, progressing it in a way one might not expect. Worry also unsettles the paths of a thought; rather than progressing it forward, it sits and dives deeper and deeper. Maksud’s practice lives between these two meanings. She imagines a process of worrying that is not just an extension of anxiety, but also one that is a furrowing investigation. Worrying as adopting an ongoing concern. Worrying as aligned with dis-ease. Worrying as the act of upsetting accepted structures and ideas. In worried notes, Maksud interrogates the languages of musical scores for African national anthems, architectural diagrams, and colonial cartography. She worries them. She takes unquestioned symbols and examines their self-evidence, asking, with fierce insistence: “But why?” Turning up shrugs from traditional knowledge sources, Maksud instead turns to more embodied ways of knowledge-making. Worrying meets the hand, and drawing becomes a means of wayfinding, of navigating through these concerns.

Discussing her interest in forensic etymology, scholar Christina Sharpe shares, “I just get obsessed about certain things and I just want to keep staying with it and worrying it and worrying it and worrying it.”² Maksud’s practice aligns with Sharpe’s in this way. Worry becomes a durational activity—a slow peeling back of meaning. It turns into a scholarly strategy, a form of dedicated study. Sharpe continues, “I can return to the same thing again and again and again and again because I’m trying to see it from all of these different angles and trying to understand something about it…I just think that staying with something can open up a different kind of aperture by which we don’t collapse everything into it, but by which we can make an argument or see the world.”³

The long scrolls of Maksud’s work are dotted with such apertures. They are evidence of her worrying—and of her shaping of a particular way of looking. These apertures appear sometimes as the head of a note, a fermata; other times as an asterisk, a dark star. Worry a piece of paper—worry it further—and a hole appears, through which a needle might be pulled. Where Maksud sees a dashed line, she also perceives a sewn line—a series of punctures. Perhaps worrying suggests a need for openings. The holes she creates encourage viewers to also worry the work—to view it from many perspectives.

Two works in the gallery, if I say the sky’s small arithmetic, its inscription, its echo and (our) making / unmaking / making / unmaking (2023) are presented on freestanding metal armatures, angled toward each other in the center of the space. It is easy to circle the works, to move back and forth between the dense blue expanses and the navy notations on white ground; between neat, stitched lines and loose, drooping, tangled threads. A staid text becomes permeable—a double-sided thing that is worried from many angles. There is no true front and back to each work, only the side we encounter first and the side we encounter second, each complicating the other. Instead of prompting us to look head on, Maksud encourages us to adopt an askance and roving viewpoint. Standing perpendicular to the work, you can begin to grasp both sides; moving around it, you can begin to discern the details.

Installation view of *worried notes*, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

Created from carbon paper, a tool used in drafting, Maksud’s drawings are situated in the middle of a process—unfixed, open to edits, but full of possibility. She is not afraid to linger in a place of unknowing. She describes her process as, “denoting things that you haven’t encountered yet, but knowing that you will.”⁴ In bits and pieces, with time in necessary darkness, the drawings find real world analogs. Thelonious Monk plays, and for Maksud, it happens like this:

I was listening to something of his and I understood it in my drawing. I don’t read music, so most of the time, I am drawing in the dark, placing one symbol next to another—putting them in some sort of affective proximity to one another, creating new connections and layers of meaning. But as I listened to Monk, I could see the lines or notes that I produced on the blue side of the paper. They aren’t straight lines that run up and down a staff, but instead notes that cut across, creating new pathways.⁵

Maksud is not concerned with learning how to read sheet music through the traditional avenues. In lieu of reading—and driven by a curiosity grounded in the systems of symbols themselves—she draws. She is drawing her way toward these moments of encounter, of knowing, where a line becomes sound, where a draft becomes something briefly definitive and tangible. Scoring as mark making. Mark making as meaning making. “I think that drawing is the way that knowledge has been produced,” she asserts. “A map is drawn. Writing is drawing letters. You draw music on paper. You draw architectural plans. Drawing has always been the element of all these other disciplines. Drawing enacts an architecture, a built environment that organizes bodies and governs how we move through space.”⁶

For Maksud, drawing both creates and enacts knowledge; it is a political act. A score becomes music. A map becomes the land. These lines become the boundaries we find ourselves placed within or without. Situating her work inside the carbon copy, she reopens previously foreclosed upon space to new possibilities, continued learning, and future revisions.

Detail of *if I say the sky’s small arithmetic, its inscription, its echo*, 2023. Photo by Leo Ng.

Placed on the floor throughout the gallery are three monitors that comprise ttttaappp (2024). This work draws upon footage pulled from a wide array of sources: performances of Thelonious Monk, Zaouli dancers, Jimmy Slyde, and children from a military school in Nigeria. Each of the three channels depicts a film that is cropped in close on the feet of performers who are tapping along to unheard music. ttttaappp rhythmically flips through footage of these performers, lighting up with bursts of movement and then switching to a black screen.

Detail of *ttttaappp*, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

While the feet are silent, Maksud’s sound work, untitled bpm(s) (2024), introduces the tapping of metronomes that periodically punctuate the space. A metronome is a device designed to keep time. Within a score, the symbol ( 𝄒 ) is used to tell the musician when to take a breath. Rest marks indicate when and for how long to pause. The time signature “4/4” designates that the music is to be performed in what is known as “common time.” There are many external structures used to regulate the performer. ttttaappp, however, reminds us that the body keeps its own time—that it has its own bpm. Looking closely, the performers in the films don’t simply tap their toes up and down, but rather employ a rich and varied language of movement. They slide and shuffle. They kick up the earth. The tapping is not isolated to the foot; it is an extension of the whole body. They have personality—playful or strict, free, insistent—that drives forward an unheard beat.

Scores, maps, and diagrams can be understood as works of capture—the capture of a sound before it leaves the air and escapes one’s memory; the occupation of land; the control of space. ttttaappp undoes the work of this capture. It centers the performers rather than the score, and allows us to witness their feet scoring their own ephemeral compositions. We can’t hear them, but they are felt. Low to the ground and close to our own feet, rather than traveling through the language of symbols, their rhythms can circulate from body to body.

Detail of *(our) making / unmaking / making / unmaking*, 2023. Photo by Leo Ng.

The national anthems that initially informed Maksud’s scores have become just a starting point. Maksud has turned down the volume on these songs to listen to something deeper playing across them. She describes it like this:

The sound of a national anthem for me is very up—it’s being projected down onto the people—so my work has also been about trying to understand what’s happening below, and the complexity of what might be below. A very deep, low…[frequency] can also have a complexity within it that we have to attune ourselves to listen to in a very different way.⁷

Maksud pushes beyond and below the music—attending to the lower frequencies. The scores shake loose the defined space of the national anthem and become something else. In removing the blast of sound typically produced by the performance of an anthem, they become something you can get up close to. Moving through the gallery, the faint lines and symbols present throughout the work require a keen eye and an even sharper ear. Here, the dynamic markings are piano or pianissimo even. The scores are not merely quiet, but played softly—sounding with a specific texture and pressure. Look and listen closely, and something else comes through:

cresc. e pesando
con bravura
TERRITORY
a Tempo
THE CAPE COLONY
Chants Africains
Un poco piu mosso
Plan de Léopoldville
Andante quasi fantasia
Congo Belge
sur chaque tem de la mesure
COLONY & PROTECTORATE

While national anthems are expressed loudly and publicly, Maksud wants us to be aware of what is internal and quiet within them. She heeds Tina Campt’s warning that, “contrary to what might seem common sense, quiet must not be conflated with silence. Quiet registers sonically, as a level of intensity that requires focused attention.”⁸ Writer Kevin Quashie offers further counsel, stating, “Quiet is uncertain and it is sure; trembling and arrogant. Quiet is faith in that it can embrace what there is little evidence of. Quiet can exist without horizon, and it has no consecutive. Quiet is like the moon, rarely showing its full wondrous sphere and instead offering slivers of its potent, tide-shifting self. Quiet is to feel deeply and to feel what is deep.”⁹

Within the gallery, rather than creating enclosures with suspended scrolls, Maksud has made a series of passages. They create their own loose architecture. They are not rigid barriers, but rather suggestions for space. worried notes offers a set of plans in progress. “Plans for what?” I ask. “What is it building in space?” Maksud answers. “It is a kind of wayfinding. It is like a wayfinding system for me to something—for something—that I am not quite sure what I am looking for. That’s fine.”ᴵᴼ

Maksud’s latest focus is the stars. They appear in more places than you’d think. They are in sheet music, on the flags of nations, and on maps to mark points of interest. If you catch the work from just the right angle, the deep blue is, in fact, scattered with constellations of light. Maksud’s punctures, apertures, and openings have yet another purpose. Stars in the night sky have long been used as tools for navigation. A crescendo mark is just an arrow pointing one in a particular direction. The structures Maksud has built help chart a course. how then do you position yourself? (2024) becomes another kind of compass, with four scores oriented along a set of axes. Until we get where Maksud is guiding us, I am happy to follow: to worry the signs and symbols, to sit in a dark blue space, to listen to the quiet, and maybe even to tap along.

Endnotes

[1] Ethan Hein, “Blue notes and other microtones,” The Ethan Hein Blog, May 5, 2010. [https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2010/blue-notes]

Aria Dean, “Worry the Image,” Art in America, May 26, 2017. [https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/worry-the-image-63266]

[2] David Naimon, “Between the Covers: Christina Sharpe Interview,” Tin House, accessed January 15, 2024. [https://tinhouse.com/transcript/between-the-covers-christina-sharpe-interview]

[3] David Naimon, “Between the Covers: Christina Sharpe Interview.”

[4] Interview with Keli Safia Maksud, Brooklyn, NY, November 19, 2023.

[5] Interview with Keli Safia Maksud.

[6] Interview with Keli Safia Maksud.

[7] Interview with Keli Safia Maksud.

[8] Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Press Durham and London: Duke University, 2017), pg. 6.

[9] Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2012), pg. 134.

[10] Interview with Keli Safia Maksud.

About the Writer
Jordan Jones is an arts worker living and working in New York. She is currently the Exhibitions Coordinator at Independent Curators International (ICI). She has participated in the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program (IATP), the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Museum Education Practicum, and the Center for Book Arts’ Creative Publishing Seminar for Emerging Writers. She has also completed residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center on Governors Island and The Vermont Studio Center. Jones received a B.A. from Williams College.

About the Writing Mentor
Renee Gladman served as the mentor for this essay. Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. She is the author of fourteen published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians—Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017)—as well as three collections of drawings: Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence, a series of white ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in POETRY Magazine, The Paris Review, Gulf Coast, Granta, Harper's, BOMB Magazine, e-flux, and n+1. She has been awarded fellowships, artist grants, and residencies from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and is a 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize winner in fiction.

"A 'Bug' in The System" by Constanza Salazar

Added on November 10, 2023 by Admin.

Writer: Constanza Salazar
Essay Mentor: Carson Chan

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Insight Outsight by Ling-lin Ku, with mentorship from Agnieszka Kurant and on view at CUE Art Foundation from November 9 – December 22, 2023. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online.

Detail of *Insight Outsight* by Ling-lin Ku, 2023. Photo by Leo Ng.

The origin of the term “bug” in computer culture is often attributed to U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, after an incident involving a moth inside Harvard University’s Mark II computer. This story exists alongside others, like that of Thomas Edison using the term to first signify a defect in his phonograph, but it nevertheless raises the question of how insects, or bugs, have become commonplace in popular computer slang, a linguistic relationship we often take for granted. In Insight Outsight, multimedia artist Ling-lin Ku exhibits playful sculptures that reveal the viewer’s linguistic and ecological entanglement with insect life, reminding us that digital media has always had very real material properties and effects, and compelling us to imagine a world beyond ourselves.

I first became aware of the metaphorical and material intersections between nature and technology after reading Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology, published in 2010. In the text, Parikka uncovers how insect life has been translated to modern media technologies since the 19th century. For instance, humans speak about a hive to signify distributed intelligence, a swarm to describe coordinated organization, and the web to delineate connected systems and networks. In all these metaphors, insect life is used to orient us to the possibilities of communication, coordination, and even architecture, or at least to implement tactics of modern power structures. Parikka, however, recovers the inhumanity of media to say that “there is a whole cosmology of media technologies that spans much more of time than the human historical approach suggests. In this sense, insects and animals provide an interesting case of how to widen the possibilities to think about media and technological culture.”¹ In Insight Outsight, Ku builds upon this dialogue, opening up a new dimension to think through the parallels between insect and human technological life.

Ku’s works emerge as fantastical experiences that one slowly uncovers. With the use of computer technologies, contemporary art today often presents spectacles that thrive on the immediacy and overconsumption of images, eliciting a feeling of immersion, such as in works by Refik Anadol, Cao Fei, and teamLab. By contrast, in Ku’s multi-media sculptures, she emphasizes a subtle form of discovery that provokes feelings of delight and surprise on a micro scale. The title of this exhibition, Insight Outsight, suggests tensions between multiple layers of seeing and being seen, including sight facilitated by technological tools such as a computer screen or camera. Take the 3D printed sculpture with a 404 error code engraved onto the body of an insect, in which the code is at first glance barely visible due to its transparency. Its conceit lies in its multi-layered significance. In computer language, the 404 error code tells a computer user about a missing requested webpage. In Ku’s sculpture, the viewer witnesses the insect transforming into a digital “bug” frozen in time. Caught in the process of metamorphosis between insect and digital media, the sculpture’s form is rendered as a “glitch.” While glitches are typically faults or errors that prevent the functioning of various types of operations, in Ku’s works, they also represent opportunities for interspecies understanding and relation.

The tactics of camouflage and mimicry utilized by Ku throughout the exhibition aid in the viewer’s visceral engagement of the sculptural works in the show. Despite its military genealogy, camouflage has recently been taken up as an urgent artistic counter-strategy, often through performance. Artists such as Hito Steyerl, Leo Selvaggio, and Adam Harvey, among others, have used camouflage to protect themselves against surveillance technologies, in particular facial recognition. Ku’s works similarly employ a sense of concealment as a visual strategy against the proliferation of images that mark our contemporary condition. For instance, she installs non-functioning surveillance cameras throughout her work as a strategy to instill a feeling of being watched. This uncanniness through artifice elicits in viewers contrasting reactions of both curiosity and self-regulation. However, rather than returning to the postmodern screen-based landscape where once intrusive surveillance technologies have become commonplace, Ku orients the viewer toward the differences and similarities by which insects and humans view the world, either through their own eyes or assisted with technologies like cameras. Insect vision, which creates a mosaic of images through compound eyes, and technological vision, which pixelates images in the works, come together to signal the way humans have adopted non-human vision into our day-to-day lives.

In another of Ku’s sculptures presented as part of the exhibition, fluorescent green caterpillars crawl inside the crevices of the numbers on a bright yellow flood scale. While scales such as this one are typically used to measure the severity of floods, in Ku’s work, it and the caterpillars take on multiple meanings. Witnessing their slow ascent of the scale, it is difficult not to anthropomorphize them, giving them human qualities of sentience and wondering about their insect logic. What do insects know that we do not? What can they tell us about the world? As they climb the structure (metaphorically related to humans climbing social ladders), their instinct for survival undeniably has an overtone of ecological urgency, of surviving the rising tides brought by climate change. In this work, viewers are reminded that they belong to a larger macrocosm of diverse species life, and the anthropocentrism of humans is momentarily overturned to highlight this ecological reality.

Technology and nature further intertwine in Ku’s artistic practice. Through the digital fabrication of organic forms in 3D animation, surveillance cameras, and 3D printed glitched objects, Ku emphasizes the materiality and objecthood of nature rather than merely relying upon technology in itself. Ku offers us moments of respite from our technological daze to return to the world and its real material properties and effects. There is a kind of ecological recalibration in the works that provoke viewers to simultaneously reflect upon their finitude and the world they will leave behind. For instance, a plastic straw that doubles as a centipede is not simply a symbolic placeholder for the ecological effects of human waste, but also as a real posthuman entity that, nevertheless, survives in the Anthropocene. It is said that plastic takes up to 1,000 years to decompose, but what happens in the meantime? Insects, like all animals that came before human civilization, have gone through eons of adaptation and survival. Humans are usually not privy to waste and its lifespan, and yet waste, like many forms of insect life, will outlive us.

In Insight Outsight, viewers first encounter what appears to be a playground of insects engaged in a game of hide-and-seek, slowly emerging and withdrawing from sight. Over time, one develops a newfound understanding of humanity in this macrocosm between nature and technology. In the end, we are left with a sense of transitory belonging and a perspective that will linger for some time.

Endnotes

[1] Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv.

About the Writer
Constanza Salazar is a Canadian art historian, educator, and writer based in New York City. Her work centers the histories and theories of technology, new media, and art. Salazar has presented papers internationally, and her writing has been published in Momus, Afterimage, and Internet Histories, among others. She is currently working on a book project based on her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Embodied Digital Dissent: Co-opting and Transforming Technologies in Art, 1990-Present. She received a Bachelor in Fine Arts and Philosophy at the University of Waterloo in Canada, a Master in Art History at the University of Guelph in Canada, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University in New York.

About the Writing Mentor
Carson Chan is the inaugural Director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment at the Museum of Modern Art, and a Curator in the museum’s Department of Architecture and Design. He develops, leads, and implements the Ambasz Institute’s research initiatives through a range of programs, including exhibitions, public lectures, conferences, seminars, and publications. Before joining MoMA, he worked as an architecture writer, curator, and educator. In 2006, he co-founded PROGRAM, a project space and residency program in Berlin that tested the disciplinary boundaries of architecture through exhibition making. Chan co-curated the 4th Marrakech Biennale in 2012, and the year after he served as Executive Curator of the Biennial of the Americas in Denver. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and a Master of Design Studies from Harvard Graduate School of Design. His doctoral research at Princeton University tracks the architecture of public aquariums in the postwar United States against the rise of environmentalism as a social and intellectual movement. He is a founding editor of Current: Collective for Architecture History and Environment, an online publishing and research platform that foregrounds the environment in the study of architecture history.

Artist Interview with Cornelius Tulloch by Kalila Ain

Added on October 14, 2023 by Admin.

Interviewer: Kalila Ain
Mentor: Dr. Joan Morgan

This interview was produced in conjunction with the solo exhibition Vendah by Cornelius Tulloch with mentorship from Danny Baez and on view at CUE Art Foundation from September 7 – October 21, 2023. The text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

“*Those that do not smile will kill me,”* 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.

Cornelius Tulloch’s Vendah (vendor) brilliantly asks us to reconsider how we identify Antillanité (Caribbean-ness), Créolité (Creole-ness), and Blackness throughout the Caribbean, Africa, and the Americas. Tulloch’s travels to specific sites led him to a definition of connected Caribbean identity. Through installation, architecture, printmaking, and painting, he transports us to moments and places that expand his perspective. The vendahs of the marketplace, though visible, are porous and evade our gaze. Works such as “Those that do not smile will kill me,” with its warning of the concentrated poison in unripe ackee, and Plantain Prayer, which pays reverence to an iconic fruit of the islands, remind us that food is a bridge between lands, languages, and lived experiences. Whether we say plantain (Jamaica), platano (Cuba), or plantayne (Uganda), Vendah softens our oppositions, and recognizes magnificence in transformation.

–Kalila Ain

Kalila Ain: Upon entering the gallery, your work brought me immediately to water. I thought about weathered boats, eroded materials, cutting boards, inventiveness, and resilience. Typically when water is incorporated as it relates to the diaspora, it’s a metaphor for breaking. With mention of Édouard Glissant in the press release, I wouldn’t say that's your intention here. How are you using water to convey Caribbean identity in this body of work?

Cornelius Tulloch: As I was traveling the Caribbean, I visited Jamaica, Miami, Colombia, and Suriname, and I collected all these images of water. There was this theme of color, with aquas and blues building up in my process – this same color palette apparent in the tarps at the marketplace in Jamaica. In 2022, when I showed work in an exhibition called Culture Caribana, an artist named Lauren Baccus shared a quote that introduced me to the concept of the Caribbean as one unified landscape rather than an archipelago.

There came this layeredness when I started to think about the Caribbean as a continuous landscape connected under the water rather than separated. I have always seen very blue water as a signifier of what the Caribbean is, so I used that as a tool when establishing a visual language people could identify with, and it became a motif throughout the exhibition. Recognizing water as the connector of these spaces, and allowing us movement from location to location, has generated an expansion of what Caribbean identity looks like, sounds like, tastes like.

When I was introduced to Glissant years ago, I began to consider Créolité more expansively, and investigate new ideas of Caribbean-ness, particularly between Caribbean traditions and new landscapes. Growing up in both Jamaica and Miami, I always noticed an exchange of pallets, materials, and walls. I saw hand-painted signs in Jamaica that were also in certain Caribbean neighborhoods in Miami, but not in other American cities. While visiting Cartagena and Santa Marta, I thought: this feels very much like Jamaica. We're all cousins, we're all connected. We have our differences where cultures split, and there's beauty in the nuances of each region as our cultures shift and adapt. I’ve blurred the boundaries of these different locations, collaging them. Allowing for a sense of material weatherednes is one of my approaches to understanding memory.

*Catch*, 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.

KA: The connectedness you describe under the water is truly apparent throughout the portals you’ve created in the exhibition. The oculi in Catch and Produce Patwah, the fragmented iron gate in Marina and Dougie’s Wholesale, and of course the curtains of Verandah Views. The open curtains invite our gaze to observe a marketplace that could be Jamaica, Haiti, or Ghana. What were you thinking about while constructing these entryways?

CT: I have been exploring what I would describe as ephemeral architecture: windows, doors, portals to the outside world and, particularly, the verandah of houses, which is the space between public and private. I'm working through the idea of architectural memory through materiality, and how it connects us culturally. It can give sensations and feelings about what these spaces are to us and what makes them Caribbean or not Caribbean.

Verandah Views is an image of Charles Gordon Market in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Rather than creating a perfected image, I’m sharing notes and hints. I want people to be intrigued by the feeling and aspects of the image rather than focusing on individuals.

I always ask myself: how do we break the frame? Photographs capture moments, but what's coming next? Scale makes a big difference, and adding this portal into the gallery space allowed me to invite people into a scene while leaving room for them to wonder what's happening outside this exact moment. Where exactly is this? As I’m describing these complexities of what the Caribbean is, I’m also considering what these places look like outside of the Caribbean. Whether in West Africa or Miami, there are certain spaces that still feel like or remind you of home.

*Verandah Views: Vendah*, 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.

KA: Glissant's concept of opacity feels prominent throughout the completed works as well as through your physical labor of printmaking, layering, obscurification, and manipulation of images. There are beautifully cropped compositions of your parents cooking and showcasing different ingredients. Tell me about the experience of photographing your parents and how you came to conceive of Dougie's Wholesale as a site of cultural exchange.

CT: I am always thinking of my family and how to make concepts discussed by artists and academics accessible. If my family doesn't enjoy an exhibition and isn’t grasping what's going on in a show, then it's not good. If people not connected to the art world cannot grasp the concept, to me, it defeats the purpose of why I’m making work.

I try to clearly represent the idea of cultural exchange, and it always comes back to food. Food was a big thing in my household. Both of my parents cook. Frequently, we cook as a family with ingredients from our yard in Jamaica. There is always a conversation; I have learned about many different places through food.

In the past, my parents were a little reluctant to participate, but nowadays they're so willing.

Especially my mother; she's always either in front of or behind the camera, and has been since I first began creating work. Now, my family is more eager, and asks when it will be their turn to be part of a painting, or they say “you got to do something that includes me,” and I think it's so funny to see that change.

A lot of ideas in this show come from Fruits of Our Mother's Labor, a photographic series I developed of my mom and dad holding fruits and plants grown at our house. The imagery was iconic and venerating. Now, anytime they pick something from our yard or return from the market, they say ”oh, he has first dibs, let him choose what he wants to photograph.” Or my dad will come with specific fruits and say “you need to photograph this." Maven, which shows a figure with a mesh bag carrying plantains on her head, is a portrait of my mother. Multiple people have asked me if it's a self-portrait because we have similar eyes. The plantain is one of those fruits that explains the multi-layeredness of Caribbean identity, Black identity, and cultural connectedness. It's been great to include my family; they’ve become part of the process and development of my work, and food is a part of our storytelling.

With Dougie’s Wholesale, I was interested in creating an entry point where there could be more dialogue among visitors. My focus is for people who are of Caribbean or any Afro-diasporic background to get the nuances of the work, but I also wanted people of different backgrounds to feel invited into the conversation as guests. Decentering my own perspective has allowed visitors to reflect and actively participate by sharing their own recipes.

Installation view of *Dougie’s Wholesale*, 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.

KA: You touched on it briefly in terms of the series Fruits of Our Mother's Labor, but do you recall the first thoughts that led to the creation of the body of work presented in Vendah?

CT: I initially wanted to have a conversation about Caribbean markets through Miami and Jamaica. The funny thing is that there's a specific Jamaican curry brand that is manufactured in Miami but exported to be sold in Jamaica. So I began to look at the exchange between these two spaces through markets and food production; although separated, they're connected. It wasn't until I came across these motifs of water from going to Cartagena that I actively put it all together. Visiting a Maroon village in the Amazon and seeing their culture intact because of geographic separation was the first time I experienced the Caribbean outside of my own version and lens of Jamaica. As my own understanding expanded, I was able to explore more of what I wanted the show to encapsulate.

KA: Is there anything specific you want viewers to carry with them after participating in the exhibition?

CT: I want people to ask questions about their own histories, and consider their cultures through the lens of exchange. What are the things that make us who we are? Trace where those things come from. What does it mean for our culture to exist in this new hybrid, hyphenated experience? I want people to look more intentionally at how we tell stories through everyday objects, and how these items inform our understanding of identity and cultural evolution.

KA: Lastly, why the title Vendah?

CT: Market vendors literally and figuratively feed the entire country. Our cultural traditions and recipes exist due to the labor they put in. When it comes to Caribbean and Black culture, there is a historical tie to labor and landscape. The way culture cultivates itself in Jamaica, in particular, begins to mend that history. The work vendors do and their street culture colloquialisms are part of the psyche of the country and its people. This is a microcosm affecting the macrocosm, catalyzing massive cultural exchange and development.

Detail of *Dougie’s Wholesale*, 2023. Photo by David Michael Cortes.

About the Interviewer
Kalila Ain is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer. She studied at the Art Students League of New York and Istituto Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence, Italy, and earned her bachelor's degree in painting and art history from SUNY Purchase. Her painting and printmaking practice is grounded in healing from breaking and illuminating sources of reconnection succeeding fragmentation. Ain's work is presented in permanent installations at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital in New York City and The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is a Laundromat Project grant recipient and illustrator of the children's book Life is Fine. Her painting My Mother Named Me Beloved was selected by New York University’s Center for Black Visual Culture to represent The Black Rest Project initative.

About the Mentor
Dr. Joan Morgan is the Program Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. She is an award-winning cultural critic, feminist author, Grammy nominated songwriter, and pioneering hip-hop journalist. Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999, when she published the groundbreaking book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down, which is taught at universities globally. Regarded internationally as an expert on the topics of hip-hop, race, and gender, Morgan has made numerous television, radio, and film appearances, including on HBOMax, Netflix, Lifetime, MTV, BET, VH-1, CNN, WBAI’s The Spin, and MSNBC. She has written for numerous publications including Vibe, Essence, Ms., The New York Times, and British Vogue.

Dr. Morgan has been a Visiting Scholar at The New School, Vanderbilt, and Duke, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Cultural Analysis at NYU. She was a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University’s Institute for the Diversity of the Arts, where she was awarded the Dr. St. Clair Drake Teaching Award. She is the first Visiting Scholar to ever receive it.

Dr. Morgan is a mentor for Unlock Her Potential and serves on the Board of the National YoungArts Foundation. She is currently working on a screenplay adaptation of her first book, which has been optioned for screen rights. Jamaican born and South Bronx bred, Dr. Morgan is a proud native New Yorker.

"The Time Is Now: Speculative Memory, Reclaimed Futures" by Sarah Aziza

Added on April 5, 2023 by Admin.

Writer: Sarah Aziza
Essay Mentor: Dina Ramadan

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition A thought is a memory, curated by Noel Maghathe, with mentorship from Sara Raza and on view at CUE Art Foundation from March 23 – May 13, 2023. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

The first time I remember hearing the word “Palestine,” I was about six years old. The moment is captured on a family video that shows my father seated in the corner of our playroom, leaning a globe on his knee. “Daddy is from a place called Palestine,” he says, holding up the round replica of the world. In my mind’s eye, I recall vividly the thin lines of the painted topography, my father’s fingertip abutting the words ISRAEL/PALESTINE. [1] Still only barely able to read, I stared at the ink, willing it to enter me, to reveal its mystery.

Most second- and third-generation immigrants retain a version of this threshold in their childhood memories. The idea of homeland arrives, haloing all things with elsewhere and before. The self-evident, singular present gives way to a messy enmeshment with history. The child discovers that she is part of a multitude she has not seen, her body a nexus of others’ memories. Whether her family’s immigration was due to force or choice, her life becomes a counterpoint, cast in relief against what might have been.

Soon, she will also have to contend with the imagination of those outside her ethnicized group. الفكرة ذكرى / A thought is a memory, a group exhibition at CUE Art Foundation curated by Noel Maghathe, presents work by four artists—Zeinab Saab, Kiki Salem, Nailah Taman, Zeina Zeitoun—who all identify as Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA). [2] Each has confronted the limited, neo-Orientalist expectations which too often frame the work of SWANA artists through the pseudo-curiosity of an audience that seeks not to learn, but to reaffirm the limited and familiar. For such consumers, desirable cultural production satisfies a lurid, post-9/11 tendency to both otherize and “humanize” the (particularly Muslim) “Middle Eastern” subject. Among the most celebrated works are those presenting spectacles of suffering, glossed folklore, or flamboyant rejections of supposedly-traditional barbarity.

These stifling expectations from non-SWANA audiences are often compounded by an internal pressure to create art that conveys unadulterated affection and nostalgia for specific versions of a supposedly-collective past. We are expected to account for, and in fact constitute, notions of self and nation based not in personal experience but in contrived vocabularies—based either on the presumptions of outsiders or a duty to our elders’ (often sentimental) memories. In each, complexity is elided, as we are called upon to represent communities that may be much more expansive or diverse than what we know.

A thought is memory contemplates these gaps through imaginative gestures that create a space beyond overdetermined terrains. The show presents works that are diverse in medium and material, from painting to digital animation, film, photo collage, installation, and soft sculpture. The result is a chorus of new languages, one that revels in declarations of futurity springing from living, multi-varied histories.

Installation view of *A thought is a memory*, curated by Noel Maghathe. Presented by CUE Art Foundation, 2023. Photo by Filip Wolak.

Many of the works in the show are exercises in triangulation, as the artists move imaginatively around—and through—collective silences. Zeina Zeitoun contemplates the ways in which absence and loss haunt her relationship with both her father and the Lebanon he left behind. In the film work Happiness is the Sea and my Baba Smiling, Zeitoun splices together fragments of a family video that depict the artist as a little girl splashing and clinging to her father’s neck as they swim in the Mediterranean. The footage is cut with a black screen and white text subtitling the artist’s one-sided conversation with her father. “There is a scar on the back of your leg… I asked you where you got it from…” The closing segment, which shows Zeitoun and her father in split-screen facing away from one another, confirms the film’s ultimate experience of a love defined by innumerable unknowns, omissions both chosen and inevitable.

In Zeitoun’s collages, composed of photographs and film stills, old flight tickets, and snippets of text, the artist’s family archival material provide means to contemplate ancestral mystery. In one work, bright depictions of waves and hills are disrupted by human figures that are mostly truncated and obscured. In another, the figure of Zeitoun’s grandfather appears dislodged, sliding out of frame against what looks like scraps from a diary. Paper-thin, these layers evoke dimensions that are not there, objects beyond grasp. A particular kind of memory: a grief for that which might have been.

Zeina Zeitoun, *Wajih Zeitoun*, 2023. Photo by Filip Wolak.

Nailah Taman also embeds familial artifacts in their work, creating makeshift meeting spaces between the past and the artist’s imagination. These spaces flicker with the light of alternate lives and intimacies, forming original collaborations with the past. In this experimentation, Taman joins Zeitoun in a practice I term speculative memory. While Zeitoun’s speculation slants toward mourning, Taman is eager to reach for that which is only made possible with distance and time.

In Taeta’s Tabletent, Taman creates a portal-shelter where then, now, and future meet. They began with a partially-embroidered tablecloth left incomplete by their Egyptian grandmother (taeta). After stumbling across the discarded item, they partnered with their taeta’s living spirit, constructing a moveable dwelling place embellished with objects from their personal and familial past—seashells, an inhaler, their fiance’s empty bottle of testosterone.

Through this work, Taman collapses barriers of time and space, creating juxtapositions that were once impossible. Bonds of birth and blood are made contemporaneous with Taman’s adulthood, their chosen loves. Their queerness is placed into proximity with their grandmother’s lips. Threads stitched in the 1980s of the AIDS crisis live alongside objects that Taman rescued from COVID-era trash piles on the street. Hoisted as a shelter that evokes either childhood games or iconic Bedouin camps, it has the effect of welcome, wonder, even nurturing. Perhaps the present has something to offer the past, and not only the other way around.

Nailah Taman, *Taeta’s Tabletent* (detail), 2021. Photo by Filip Wolak.

Zainab Saab’s work, which includes a series of experimental paintings on paper, emerges from their own path toward self-determination and futurity. The gestures are hard won—growing up in the uniquely-large Arab American community in Dearborn, Saab faced intra-community pressure to conform to a particular form of Lebanese femininity. As such, familial and communal interpretations of Arabness—as well as gender and religion—felt overdetermined, and like something to escape.

Saab’s paintings signal a successful jailbreak. In contrast to the classic diasporic project of capturing an evanescent, collective past, Saab seeks to recover their inner child. The series Visual Decadence, for example, emerged from pandemic experimentations, when Saab bought themself the colorful gel pens they once yearned for as a child. The works are boisterous, ringing with vivid colors that vibrate and shimmer in abstraction. Both geometric and fluid, and accompanied in the show by similar large-scale works with titles such as You Wanted Femininity, But All I Have is Fire and Can’t A Girl Just Spiral In Peace?, Saab’s paintings are windows into youthful mischief, flamboyance, and joy. Together, they are an exuberant declaration of presence, a claiming of space in the here and now.

Zeinab Saab, *Visual Decadence*, 2022. Photo by Filip Wolak.

Kiki Salem also conceives of a vividly-imagined future, incorporating materials both inherited and bespoke. Salem’s works call back to their Palestinian heritage through Islamic architecture as well as traditional embroidery. Drawing upon the shapes and patterns of each, the artist brings these historically-rich legacies into endless, digital life. In A thought is memory, Salem presents projections and paintings that occupy both sides of large, handmade screens hung from the gallery ceiling. FOLLOW THE LEAD(ER) riffs on a diamond-and-spade pattern from Islamic tiling, the animation alternating between oranges, greens, purples, and golds. In What is Destined For You Will Come to You Even if it is Between Two Mountains, Salem draws on the eight-pointed star of Jerusalem, creating an interlocking spread of shapes in which color pulses outward from a red center, evoking a throbbing heart. Salem invites these would-be static symbols to breathe—and to dance.

This hypnotic effect splices together the ancient and modern in a way that speaks to the relentless march of time. It also gestures to the particularly Palestinian search for ever new and ingenious ways to transcend the obstacles placed between us and our homeland. Bursting with unapologetic color, Salem’s animations move ceaselessly, telling us that Palestine will exist in the future. There are new memories to come.

Kiki Salem, *What is Destined For You Will Come Even if it is Between Two Mountains*, 2021 (L) and *FOLLOW THE LEAD(ER)*, 2022 (R). Photo by Filip Wolak.

For all four artists, that which is culturally “Arab” is imbued into their work with a subversive subtlety, present in accents and glimpses such as embroidery, geometry, mosaic, and text. When these visual aspects appear, they do so on their own terms, original and un-beholden to precedent or cliché. The effect is thrilling; one cannot help but feel a sense of the future, an assurance that there is more—at last and as there has always been—to being SWANA than forever-longing for the past.

These nuanced, imaginative forays are more than pleasurable—they are necessary. For all the external demands placed on idealized narratives of Arab American experience, much of our diasporic memory is shrouded in personal pain. Like so many Arab American families living on the far side of two centuries of Western colonization, [3] war, and upheaval, my relatives were selective in their retelling of the past. As a child, I often sat and stared at photos of my father and grandmother. Grainy and grayscale, in a mid-1960s Gazan refugee camp, their faces were grave and beautiful. Around them lay evidence of chaos: the glare of sunlight hitting debris, stones strewn around my father’s bare feet.

Looking at these photos filled me with a mixture of longing and alarm. I could not comprehend the young boy as my father, the somber young mother as the same woman who now filled our kitchen with the fragrance of frying onions, maramiya, and sumac. There was an infinity between ISRAEL/PALESTINE and our home in northern Illinois, which my father’s brief geography lesson did little to fill. The first word in that backslashed name—Israel—was a topic too painful to broach, as was Nakba, its synonym. Aside from a few token stories, my parents leaned on the American “melting pot” mythos, choosing to believe its promise to obliterate the unique textures of our pain. And so, I joined many others who inherited a form of double-erasure. Together, we are left trailing in the wake of opaque histories, pondering scraps in the periphery of photographs, secrets tucked in silences.

A thought is a memory wades through these fragments, arching between the past and a diasporic story of the future. It converges times and places—the gone, the current, the never-were, the yet-might-be. The works brought together by Noel Maghathe—whose curatorial practice centers the hybridity, diversity, and community of artists of the Arab American diaspora—create something beyond their sum: a sense of multiplicity, of mystery that feels exciting rather than terminal. A viewer may feel something akin to what I feel staring at photos of two strangers who are also family, who are also me. A sense of yearning and bewilderment. Of utter knowledge that is only waiting for the right language. Perhaps, in the kaleidoscope of ephemeral movement, hypnotizing color, otherworldly glyphs, and muted ink, the viewer finds forms that resonate. Much like Etel Adnan’s symbolic language, these expressions could be ancient, extra-terrestrial, or both. Just like us.

Endnotes

[1] When searching for "Palestine" on Google Maps, the map zooms in on the Israel-Palestine region, and both the Gaza Strip and West Bank territories are labeled and separated by dotted lines. But there is no label for Palestine. Apple Maps, similar to Google, zooms in on the region but doesn't label anything as Palestine. [Fact check: Google does not have a Palestine label on its maps, USA Today May 22, 2022].

In moments of despondency – or, for others no doubt, mere realism – it can be tempting to answer the question “Where is Palestine?” with “Nowhere”: nowhere geographically, nowhere politically, nowhere theoretically, nowhere postcolonially. [Where is Palestine? Patrick Williams & Anna Ball (2014), Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50:2, 127-133].

[2] SWANA is a term increasingly used to situate the region and its peoples in geographically neutral terms, as opposed to the Euro-centric political orientation embedded in “Middle East.”

[3] Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798; France’s colonization of Algeria began in 1830, of Tunisia in 1881, and of Morocco in 1912. Meanwhile, Britain colonized Egypt in 1882, and also took control of Sudan in 1899. Further colonial incursions followed.

About the Writer
Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. Her journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Lux Magazine, The Rumpus, NPR, The New York Times, the Asian American Writers Workshop, and The Nation among others. She is currently working on her first book, a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

About the Writing Mentor
Dina A Ramadan is Continuing Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College and Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, where she teaches on modern and contemporary cultural production from the Middle East, decolonial movements, and migration. She has contributed to Art Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and is currently completing a book on Egyptian art criticism titled TheEducation of Taste: Art, Aesthetics, and Subject Formation in Colonial Egypt (Edinburgh University Press). Her writing on contemporary art has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, e-flux Criticism, ArtReview, and Art Papers.

“Heridas terrestres (Terrestrial Wounds): The Works of Carolina Aranibar-Fernández” by Angelica Arbelaez

Added on March 2, 2023 by Admin.

Writer: Angelica Arbelaez
Essay Mentor: Max Pearl

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Agua entre la metalurgia (Water in between metallurgy) by Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, with mentorship from Alana Hernandez and on view at CUE Art Foundation from January 19 – March 11, 2023. The text was commissioned as part of CUE’s Art Critic Mentorship Program, and is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

*Las memorias de las huellas (The memories of thumbprints)*, 2022. Photo: David Michael Cortes.

In the exhibition Agua entre la metalurgia (Water in between metallurgy), Bolivian artist Carolina Aranibar-Fernández considers the scale and impact of the global mining industry through poetic and labor-intensive material gestures. Engaging primarily with textiles and copper, the artist uses embroidery and printmaking to create maps and aerial topographies that visualize typically unseen mining-related activities. The extraction of geological matter from the earth, its trade, and its eventual consumption have generated a circuit of capitalistic interest that relies on the availability of natural resources and human labor—primarily from Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Aranibar-Fernández uses cartography not only to give these dynamics a visual and tangible form, but also as an instructive tool to acknowledge the parallel strain placed on human and terrestrial bodies.

The artist’s insights into mining are based on rigorous studies of its history, economy, and politics. Her exploration began with Cerro Rico, the infamous mountain in the city of Potosí, Bolivia that became a lucrative silver mine for the Spanish Empire in the 16th century. The “mountain that eats men,” as it’s colloquially referred to, has been continually mined for centuries, resulting in incalculable human loss and irreversible ecological damage. [1] Through site visits, archival research, and the first-hand accounts of local mine workers, Aranibar-Fernández began to see Cerro Rico as a blueprint for modern mining. This led her to see connections with colonial and industrial histories in other parts of the world, including the American Southwest and Indonesia, both of which she explores in this exhibition.

Agua entre la metalurgia features six bodies of work that unmask the mining industry’s neocolonial role as an agent of ecological disaster. In lieu of a didactic message, however, the artist weaves these ideas into beautiful, vibrant, and delicate works of art. They carry a softness which is antithetical to the violence and destruction that are characteristic of the practices and histories to which they refer. The artist purposefully cultivates this tension as a way to draw viewers in and encourage conversations on a topic they might otherwise cast aside. As a result, the works are sites where a sobering awareness of our world’s ills can be met with empathy and compassion.

*Water Labor*, 2019-2021. Photo: David Michael Cortes.

Cartographic Techniques
Water Labor (2019-21) depicts a hand-embroidered world map featuring dense clusters of red and green sequins. These small embellishments represent the positions, routes, and movements of shipping containers and bulk carriers transporting commodities across the globe. For this work, Aranibar-Fernández consulted the website MarineTraffic to see live coverage of international maritime activity. [2] Using a combination of satellite imagery and information from coastal AIS receiving stations, MarineTraffic offers an impressive view of the cargo ships, tankers, pleasure crafts, and commercial fishing boats actively moving throughout the world.

The animated swarm of sequins in Water Labor takes on a parasitic character, overwhelming and infiltrating the withering continents rendered in a dark velvet. They also illustrate the relatively unseen movements of raw materials from their sites of extraction to succeeding sites of trade and consumption. Aranibar-Fernández adopts the coherent design strategies of data visualization in order to track, map, and make sense of this dizzying concentration of activity and the scale at which it operates. While the word “labor” in the work’s title undoubtedly refers to the human and machine work that drives the industry, it’s also reflected in the painstakingly hand-embroidered ocean that serves as the work’s background.

In Silver Labor (2019-21), the artist uses mapping techniques to trace the paths of silver around the world, but with a more abstract approach. By framing the striking silver routes against a sea of dark blue velvet fabric, Aranibar-Fernández removes any obvious representational references to maps. The formal simplicity of this line work invites other associations: a network of tunnels in a mine, the branches on a tree, or veins in a body. It suggests that extractivism continues even after the unearthing: silver changes hands many times as it makes its way from the miner who collected it to our tableware, jewelry, and mirrors. In Silver Labor, mapping is both a tool for viewers to locate themselves along this supply chain and a way of showing connections between bodies across vast distances.

*Silver Labor*, 2019-2021. Photo: David Michael Cortes.

Registering the Unseen
For this exhibition, Aranibar-Fernández produced two new works featuring fabric flowers that were individually cut from women’s shawls and then sewn together by hand onto diaphanous pieces of tulle. Together, these flowers are used to create maps of specific countries and different regions throughout the world. The installation Los testimonios de las flores (The testimonies of flowers) (2022) consists of two large layers of the aforementioned flower maps: the first is a positive image depicting countries in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; the second is a negative image of those same regions. The top and bottom edges of each component are bordered by copper rods that are used to suspend the work from the ceiling. The layers are positioned four feet away from each other, allowing visitors to walk between them. When standing in front of the work, at a distance, the two maps almost become a single vibrant bed of flowers.

As the title suggests, Los testimonios de las flores is a testimony, a presentation of evidence. Historically, many of the countries depicted in this work have been subject to extraction, plunder, and oppression through colonization—mainly at the hands of the countries not represented. The artist refers to these countries collectively as the Global South, a concept that’s been criticized for omitting certain geopolitical subtleties. But when discussing the work, she asserts the term’s usefulness as a way of appreciating the colonial histories these countries share. “These are the places that are constantly sought out for their resources, but don’t benefit economically,” she said. [3]

The Cartografia (Cartography) series (2022) includes nine individual flower maps portraying the following locations: Antofagasta, Chile; Gobi Desert, Mongolia; Kabwe, Zambia; Nevada, USA; Papua, Indonesia; Para, Brazil; Sakha, Russia; Sewell, Chile; and Utah, USA. Each of these places is also home to various open-pit copper, lithium, and silver mines. As in Los testimonios de las flores, the maps are also made of individually cut fabric flowers that are hand sewn on delicate sheets of white tulle. For each Cartografia, Aranibar-Fernández has added an additional layer of tulle with a nearly imperceptible linocut print of the topography of each open-pit mine seen from above. Here, the relationship of presence and absence is expressed again. The sections of land are decorative, captivating, and become the central focus of the work, but the actual effects of the activity imposed on them are veiled, obscured, and unseen. In this work, the geological impact of these activities is as conspicuous as the shroud of obfuscation that keeps the public from finding out.

*Cartografías (Cartographies)*, 2022. Photos: David Michael Cortes.

*Cicatriz (Scar) I, II, II*, 2021-2022. Photo: David Michael Cortes.

Parallel Actions
While living in Phoenix, AZ, Aranibar-Fernández began researching the Arizona-based mining company Freeport-McMoRan, owner of some of the world’s largest copper and gold mines. Cicatriz (Scar) I, II, and III (2021-22) are linocut prints on cotton paper that were made in response to the artist’s findings. Each print is an aerial view of three different open-pit mines operated by Freeport-McMoRan located in Chile, Indonesia, and Peru. When the artist produced the prints, she scattered copper powder on top of the ink while it was still wet to create an iridescent effect. Open-pit mines are created using surface mining methods to extract rock, minerals, or metals from the earth. The results of such activity are literally and metaphorically profound. They are colossal cavities in the earth that are organized by levels, similar to benches in an arena, as miners descend deeper into the ground. In each Cicatriz, the artist intentionally creates a parallel between the excavation of the earth and the carving that is necessary to manipulate the linoleum surface.

In Las memorias de las huellas (The memories of thumbprints) (2022), sixty-one copper plates that are etched with acid hang from the ceiling in alternating heights to echo the various levels of an open-pit mine. On each plate is an aerial topography of a single mine on one side and the GPS coordinates of that specific site on the other. The line work seen in the topographic drawings is serpentine, forming loose concentric circles. When seen from above, these drawings bear a resemblance to gashes, fingerprints, or the rings of a tree trunk. The artist welcomes the inclination to anthropomorphize these forms and draw parallels to the natural world. In her estimation, it keeps the work grounded in a corporeal reality that engenders a more visceral response to what mining does to the earth. It encourages the question: could these terrestrial wounds be my own?

In addition to the numerous bodily parallels one can project onto open-pit mines, their contours and their visual logic also emulate ripples, a metaphor that gets at the conceptual heart of Agua entre la metalurgia. Small waves turn into larger ones as they stretch far beyond their point of origin, mirroring the flow of people and things as they pass through processes of extraction, trade, and consumption. In the hands of Aranibar-Fernández, maps are useful for visualizing and tracking these patterns, but more so, they’re tools for understanding the inner workings of power in visceral, corporeal terms. Though the effects of these cycles may feel distant, the artist insists that they’re much closer than we know.

Installation view of *Agua entre la metalurgia*, 2023. Photo: David Michael Cortes.

Endnotes

[1] Forero, Juan. “Bolivia's Cerro Rico: The Mountain That Eats Men.” NPR. September 25, 2012.
[https://www.npr.org/2012/09/25/161752820/bolivias-cerro-rico-the-mountain-that-eats-men]

[2] MarineTraffic [https://www.marinetraffic.com]

[3] Conversation with the artist on December 28, 2022

About the Writer
Angelica Arbelaez is an independent curator and researcher from Miami, Florida. Currently, she is the inaugural Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was previously the Programs Manager at Oolite Arts, and the Communications and Events Manager at Locust Projects. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and a BA in Art History from Florida International University.

About the Writing Mentor
Max Pearl is a writer and translator based between the US and Mexico.

Interviewer: Kalila AinMentor: Dr. Joan Morgan

This interview was produced in conjunction with the solo exhibition Vendah by Cornelius Tulloch with mentorship from Danny Baez and on view at CUE Art Foundation from September 7 – October 21, 2023. The text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE and online here.

Writer: Sarah AzizaEssay Mentor: Dina Ramadan

Interviewer: Kalila Ain
Mentor: Dr. Joan Morgan

Writer: Sarah Aziza
Essay Mentor: Dina Ramadan