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"Latent Energies" by Swagato Chakravorty

Added on October 18, 2024 by Admin.

Writer: Swagato Chakravorty
Essay Mentor: Alpesh Kantilal Patel

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition This Fire That Warms You by Tsohil Bhatia, mentored by Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), and on view at CUE Art from September 5 – December 14, 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 *This Fire That Warms You*, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

This Fire That Warms You highlights new directions in Tsohil Bhatia’s conceptual, multidisciplinary practice, articulated through sculptural installations. The works in this exhibition, some of which are variations upon works shown previously at Blueprint.12 Gallery in New Delhi, comprise an extended investigation into process and transformation. Inside CUE’s theatrically spotlit gallery, one finds decay and desiccation [21 September 2022 – Ongoing, 2022; Fruits of passing (Remains from home), 2022–24], the cumulative force of small gestures [Three Simple Fountains, 2024; Untitled (Latent tension), 2024; Untitled (Cacerolazo ii), 2024], simmering energies and the occasional volatile release (Notes on Resistance, 2024), and—permeating it all—the promise (or threat) of an event, a happening—something yet to be, or maybe already bygone. Bhatia self-identifies as a homemaker as well as a working artist, conceiving of care-work and domestic labor—particularly relating to cooking and the kitchen—as forms of creative practice, and vice-versa. Here, however, labors of care and domesticity seem withdrawn. The artist-caregiver-homemaker is not present; only their traces endure. This absent presence haunts the works, making ordinariness newly strange by revealing the materiality of time’s passing. Bhatia extends and occasionally disrupts the address of these works through activations, interventions, and a related public sculpture-performance presented at NADA House on Governors Island.

This Fire that Warms You reimagines the art gallery as a kitchen; a creative reworlding that undoes hierarchies of artistic and domestic spaces. Notably, there are no wall labels. Stepping into CUE’s spaces, you encounter Bhatia’s kitchen shelves, laden with condiments and jars of grains, lentils, and spices. During installation, the artist had shown me these shelves in their own kitchen. Here, transposed to another context, they appear as a wall-mounted installation of found objects titled Untitled (Concrete Codex) (2017–24), implicitly quoting—in its serial regularity—Minimalism with a difference. These everyday items, reassembled as an artwork completed over a specific duration, also document Bhatia’s culinary practice; the differing quantities of ingredients index a chronicle of cooking. Some ingredients are unlabeled, but those with a working knowledge of South Asian cooking will identify many staples of the desi (and diasporic) kitchen. If the seriality of Untitled (Concrete Codex) evokes histories of Euro-American modernism, its presentation of ordinary cooking ingredients (some more culturally-specific than others) suggests what the artist calls an “abstracted biography”—a way of contesting (raced, gendered) visibility through the strategic withholding of information.¹ Bhatia’s use of abstraction, in this sense, doubles as an assertion of what Édouard Glissant calls the “right to opacity.”²

*Untitled (Concrete Codex)*, 2017–24. Photo by Leo Ng.

Bhatia’s work is formally rigorous. Untitled (Cacerolazo ii) organizes the artist’s pots, pans, and utensils into a hanging chandelier. Three Simple Fountains presents three steel sinks set in a row, each with carefully piled up metal plates, ceramicware, and glassware, onto which tap continuous streams of pumped water. Notes on Resistance comprises four pressure cookers simmering on an electric cooking range, with a Palestinian keffiyeh draped over the oven door handle, doubling as an ordinary kitchen towel. In Untitled (Latent tension), some fifty pieces of glassware neatly arrayed on five shelves rest precariously atop each other, balancing on just the bottom shelf, with the rest set apart from the wall. Fruits of passing (Remains from home) is a large square of packed soil on the floor. Upon its surface is strewn—in an orderly chaos—a large number of dried, decayed, and rotted fruits, vegetables, and plant matter seemingly drawn from around the world (the banana flower, common across South and Southeast Asia, is rare in the US; mangoes and okra evoke expansive diasporic histories).

*Three Simple Fountains*, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

Five repetitions of a singular form along the wall, “one thing after another.”³ A square sculptural form placed on the floor. Three “fountains” lined up in a series. I see Bhatia queering episodes from a (mostly straight, white, and male) history of modern and contemporary art: Judd, Andre, Duchamp, Nauman….Across their seriality, with iterations upon the line and the grid, one senses the ghosts or afterlives of Minimalism. We never quite grasp the fullness of these installations; they are in flux, at temporal scales that sometimes escape human perception. It’s difficult to adequately describe what the work of some of Bhatia’s artworks is––that is, at what point in time (if ever) it is completed.

Untitled (Cacerolazo ii), true to the history of noisy protest it names, erupts into clamor whenever the artist vigorously shakes the chandelier of pots and pans, setting the whole thing swinging and swaying, and casting fantastical shadows onto the wall. Thus activated, the work suddenly reaches across historical and geographical contexts, tracing unexpected affinities—from the intimacies and labors of Bhatia’s South Asian diasporic kitchen to popular protests worldwide: France in the nineteenth century, French-colonized Algeria in 1961, Chile in the 1970s and 80s, Argentina in 2001, Lebanon in 2019, and rallies for Palestinian liberation since late 2023. Three Simple Fountains seems poised on the edge of catastrophe, as the cascading streams of water—with their subtly distinct acoustic pitches that disrupt the installation’s seriality—threaten to unbalance the delicate heaps of plates and glassware. This precarity, a latent potential for structural failure that would instantly transform order into chaos, recurs in the title and the just-so balancing act of Untitled (Latent tension).

*Untitled (Cacerolazo ii)*, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

Notes on Resistance and Fruits of passing (Remains from home) most clearly evince the tensions contesting aesthetic formalism in Bhatia’s practice. Take the Palestinian keffiyeh in Notes on Resistance that, through its strategic placement within the installation, doubles as an ordinary kitchen towel. In the present context, it risks overdetermining the work, even as it highlights Bhatia’s commitments to forging community and solidarities with the minoritized and the dispossessed everywhere. One must work through these initial recognitions to also apprehend this object as the artist offers it—as a kitchen towel—and to more closely read the installation’s titular notes on resistance. The four pressure cookers, of an older design familiar to generations of South Asians (and indeed much of the global majority), are of various sizes and contain differing levels of water. They are continually heated upon their respective cooktops, inexorably building pressure that results in explosive releases of steam.

Detail of *Notes on Resistance*, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

This is not a quiet or gentle work. Walk around the installation and you hear the simmering of its water as a sustained grumble. Get too close during a steam release and you could get hurt. Pressure cookers of this design have sometimes been modified into explosive devices, weaponized toward various ends. They have even exploded in ordinary use. Here, in the exhibition, the release of steam by each pressure cooker—a furious hiss—sometimes occurs together as a chance synchronization, a cacophony of pent-up energies rushing forth. At other times, one of them may produce a lone sound. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang tell us that decolonization is not a metaphor.⁴ See the keffiyeh. See it as a kitchen towel. Repeat until time doubles your perception. It recalls nineteenth-century optical illusions, in which two images each signify something on their own, yet also combine to signify a third thing. Third meanings, third spaces,⁵ Third World solidarities. Often in Bhatia’s practice, formal rigor gives shape to materially-grounded concerns. Notes on Resistance brings them together with precision, asking us to hold space for a multiplicity of meanings as well as for the global multitude.

*Fruits of passing (Remains from home)*, 2022-24. Photo by Leo Ng.

Fruits of passing (Remains from home) is a work of somber tenderness. Eschewing the sterility of Minimalist histories of sculpture such as that in the work of Carl Andre, it offers soil as a material support for organic matter. The work’s double gesture of citation and (historical) transformation becomes a refusal of violent white masculinity, especially considering Bhatia’s use of earth—a material central to, for example, Ana Mendieta’s “earth-body” performances and her Silueta series. The varied organic material, meanwhile, recalls seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas still life paintings. These richly detailed paintings, their emergence entangled with the global reach of Dutch colonial enterprises, offered viewers sumptuous visions of global biodiversity as well as sobering moral lessons on the impermanence of life through depictions of rotting fruit and flowers, complete with those lifeforms—flies and other insects—that continue cycles of life after human beings cease to be.

The presence of dried and decaying fruit also evokes the queer histories and fleshly ephemerality of Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit (1992–97), itself born out of the 1980s–90s HIV/AIDS crisis. Leonard created Strange Fruit to mourn the passing of a friend, the artist David Wojnarowicz (1954–92). Over five years, she sewed back together the peels from approximately 300 bananas, oranges, lemons, and other fruits. These mended skins, emptied of the flesh they once contained, continue to decompose at the artist’s own insistence. The inevitability of their transformation over time poses an enduring challenge to institutional tendencies toward preserving objects in a fixed state.

Detail of *Fruits of passing (Remains from home)*, 2022-24. Photo by Leo Ng.

Among the organic matter in Fruits of passing (Remains from home), there is a solitary rose—dark red, complete with its stem. It reminds me of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (1943), a picaresque tale of a young prince who wanders through space and travels to various planets, touching on existential themes of friendship, love, loneliness, and loss. But it is the little prince’s (ultimately frustrated) relationship with a rose that returns us to care-work, its withdrawal, and the concerns with time that animate Bhatia’s practice. Seeking closure, the little prince realizes that what makes his rose distinctive is not necessarily its unique beauty but rather the labor and time that have shaped his care: “it is she that I have watered…it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.” And he is reminded (by a wise fox that has become his companion): “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”⁶

Fruits of passing (Remains from home) is rich in complexity; it offers art historical transformations and refusals, earthly sculpture, an archive of ephemerality, and as the title suggests, a grave marker of sorts. The questions it, like other works in the exhibition, poses are deceptively simple: how might we apprehend time in the act of its passing? How do we relate to it from the tenuousness of our bodily existence? This Fire That Warms You offers propositions constructed around abstraction, opacity, precarity, and community—imagined and otherwise. In the process, Tsohil Bhatia goes a long way toward unburdening representation.⁷

Endnotes

[1] “Thinking Through Flower Box 3D,” a conversation between Alpesh Kantilal Patel and Tsohil Bhatia, in the thing that happens when the thing that is supposed to happen does not happen, eds. Elizabeth Chodos, Jon Rubin, Charlie White (Pittsburgh: Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University, 2022), 72.
[2] Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997), 189-194.
[3] Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1975).
[4] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1, 1-40 (2012).
[5] Homi Bhabha defines a “third space” as that “which gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation” in contexts of anti-colonial cultural resistance. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
[6] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, trans. Katherine Woods (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 48.
[7] Kobena Mercer, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Third Text, 4:10 (1990).

About the Writer
Swagato Chakravorty (he/him) is an Indian American curator and critic whose work ranges across modern and contemporary art and visual culture, focusing on cross-cultural and diasporic contexts, especially in relation to the Global South. He is currently completing his PhD at Yale University. Most recently, he was the Daniel W. Dietrich II Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), where he co-curated Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi –– A Marvellous Entanglement (with a newly-commissioned performance) and organized Day With(out) Art 2022: Being and Belonging (with Visual AIDS), as well as several time-based media installations. Previously at MoMA, the Jewish Museum, and the New Museum, he assisted with numerous exhibitions, including Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done; Jonas Mekas: The Camera was Always Running; and Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel. He has published work on the reception of Ritwik Ghatak’s cinematic radicalism in Western contexts, high-speed photography and the history of performance art at MoMA, Anthony McCall’s light installations, and the lens-based practice of Alfredo Jaar.

About the Writing Mentor
Alpesh Kantilal Patel served as a mentor for this essay. Patel is an associate professor of global contemporary art and LGBT*Q theory at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Their art historical scholarship, curating, and criticism reflect their queer, anti-racist, and transcultural approach to contemporary art. They organized a series of exhibitions under the theme "Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity" at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, where they were curator-at-large in 2023. They are the author of Productive Failure: Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories (2017) and co-editor of a special issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2021) commemorating Okwui Enwezor, as well as the anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2022). They recently contributed to the volumes Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2023) and A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (2023). Their research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Arts Council England, NEH, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and New York University. Their book Multiple and One: global queer art histories is forthcoming in 2026.

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.

"Luma, Between Memory and Contemplation" by Alexandra Trujillo Tamayo

Added on July 24, 2024 by Admin.

Writer: Alexandra Trujillo Tamayo
Essay Mentor: Aimé Iglesias Lukin

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Luma by Catalina Tuca, mentored by Esperanza Mayobre, and on view at CUE Art from June 20 – August 10, 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 *Luma* by Catalina Tuca, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

Catalina Tuca's practice is situated in a fertile ground of political and environmental interpretation. Interested in the performativity of objects and their relationship to human behavior, Tuca’s works give new dimension to the idea of nature, uncovering layers of ecological, sociological, and psychological meaning embedded in the things we think we know.

It is not surprising, then, that her most recent body of work, presented in the solo exhibition Luma at CUE Art, took her to the national forests of Chiloé, an island in the southwestern part of Chile. This work, at once a process of research and resignification, traces the bodies of the forest and objects that derive from it, and positions them as far more than passive tools to be used, but rather as active agents in the construction and reproduction of identity. Tuca focuses in particular on the paradox of the luma, a police baton in Chilean Spanish, and its origin, a tree of the same name. In bringing awareness to this duality of meaning, she challenges established narratives and promotes a critical awareness of Chile's political history and the intersections between social and ecological memory.

The capacity of objects to influence the world and social relations through their use and meaning is profound. Judith Butler, for example, researched the ways in which objects can serve to reproduce gender and power identities.¹ In Tuca's work, she relates objects to memories, geography, emotion, and identity. The forest is a site of origin for our embodied violence.

The luma used by police in Chile—and its counterpart in most nation-states throughout the world—is a tool for civilian control. It represents the power of the state and the social wounds that this power inflicts. After the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, during the still recent period of history referred to in Chile as simply “the dictatorship,” the country experienced a violent agenda of political repression, human rights violations, and censorship. Until its dismantling in 1990, the military regime implemented authoritarian measures to consolidate its power, including the persecution of political opponents and suppression of the media.

In 2019, twenty-nine years later and just before the pandemic, a series of large-scale protests erupted in Santiago. In that moment, Tuca—and many others of her generation—remembered the luma of the 1970s, constructed of wood. She also recalled something about its materiality: that she had been told by her father that the luma was, in fact, a tree. It was then that she began the poetic search that informs this body of work.

“Many people in Chile know more about the police baton than the tree,” she tells me. And so she began contemplating how to share this duality of meaning, and how it could be a metaphor for the ways in which we change the meaning of things through their use.

The luma tree grows in the southern parts of Chile and has long been known to inhabitants of those areas. It has medicinal uses in Mapuche traditions, where it is a remedy for digestive problems and an anti-inflammatory treatment. Tuca spoke with many local people on the island of Chiloé who told her stories about these uses not encountered in textbooks, such as Luzmira Soto, who recalled her grandmother bringing the leaves home. The tree is a part of the myths and legends of the communities in this region, and many of these stories allude to spectral beings. It is said that the presence of the luma attracts the protective spirits of nature, and that those who respect and care for the tree are blessed with good fortune against the dangers of the forest.

The luma, beyond its existence as a biological entity, serves as a locus of intertwined cultural, social, and ecological meanings. From a phenomenological and semiotic perspective, the tree becomes a node in a vast network of human and natural relationships, where its symbolic and material presence feeds a web of narratives, rituals, and cosmovisions. Tuca mentions in our conversation that local people use the wood of the luma for warmth. The forest enters the house, and the luma takes on a different meaning. Its performativity lies not only in its ability to serve as a material resource, but in its capacity to embody and transmit values, identities, and ontological links between humanity and its environment. The significance of the luma is rooted not only in the materiality of its biology, but extends towards a horizon of shared meaning, where the intersection between the human and the natural is intertwined in a dance of co-creation and constant resignification.

The luma as police baton is an extension of this resignification, and it, in turn, can be resignified by those who hold it in their collective memory. Instead of simply being an instrument of coercion or force, the baton becomes a symbol of violation and repression that many acknowledge as destructive and seek to create distance from. "We inherited the traumas of the dictatorship," says Tuca. As a way of healing, she gives voice to the forest, which is also threatened by prevailing extractivism.

In my conversations with Tuca, I come to think of the luma as a manifest image. According to Andrea Giunta, these are images that not only represent an idea or a cause, but that also transform our sense of reality. They go beyond mere visual representation and become tools for political and social action.² Through Tuca's sculptural work presented in the exhibition, the luma loses its power, becoming a symbol of fragility by way of new material interventions. The choice of clay for this gesture adds another layer of complexity; the material alters the physical appearance of the baton, and in turn challenges its ingrained meanings. The cast versions are made of something soft that turns brittle and breakable, reminding us of the precariousness of inherited and existing forms of power.

The dichotomy of the luma is made clear by Tuca through this exhibition, and the space of the gallery becomes a site of shared recognition, one that allows us to collectively reflect upon the relationship between nature and culture, between violence and contemplation. The luma—both the baton and the tree—acquire new identities contextualized by their relationship to one another. The resignification of visual symbols is not only an artistic tool, but also a strategy to challenge hegemonic narratives and offer new perspectives. In making visible the origin of the baton in the forest, away from the hegemony of the state, Tuca challenges conventional conceptions of power and resistance, and opens space for a deeper reflection on the relationships between humans and non-humans, between culture and nature.

The paradox of the luma as a symbol of life and death is an undercurrent throughout the show. While the tree is a life-giving being, the baton can serve to extract and diminish life. In repositioning the final narrative of the baton beyond its foregone conclusion—away from one that leads to death—and in referencing the illustrations of pioneering Chilean botanist Adriana Hoffmann (one of the few women in her field), Tuca’s work could also be read as embodying an ecofeminist perspective that rejects the dominance of patriarchal forces and embraces more holistic and interdependent relationships between human and non-human beings.

Through the exhibition Luma, Catalina Tuca further develops an approach that is one of the hallmarks of her artistic practice, inviting us to rethink our relationships with objects and to reposition their meanings. In placing the narrative of the luma that occupies the political memory of her generation alongside that of its ecological source, she subverts its destructive power, giving life-affirming potential to an object rooted in structures of violence and exploitation. Her work reminds us that objects are not simply inert products of society, but active agents that participate in the construction and reproduction of social and cultural meaning—and perhaps can even, through their resignification, become tools of resistance.

Detail view of *Luma* by Catalina Tuca, 2024. Photo by Leo Ng.

Endnotes

[1] Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge: New York.
[2] Giunta, Andrea (2016). “Todas las partes del mundo.” VERBOAMÉRICA. Malba: Buenos Aires.

About the Writer
Alexandra Trujillo Tamayo (b. 1990, Quito, Ecuador) is a transdisciplinary artist, designer, and performer. She is a graduate of Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where she studied performing arts, installation, illustration, and visual arts. She holds a Masters degree in Visual Communication and Diversities from Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador, and also studied at Instituto Mexicano de Curaduría y Restauración in Mexico City. She currently resides in New York City.

Trujillo Tamayo has exhibited at prominent events and institutions worldwide, including the São Paulo Biennial and the New York Latin American Art Triennial, as well as +Arte Galería, Arte Actual FLACSO, and Centro Cultural Metropolitano in Ecuador. She participated in the Cuarto Aparte Bienal de Cuenca in 2018, and her work has been presented in international projects in France, Argentina, Bolivia, the US, Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and Ecuador. She is a co-founder of CUERPA(S) International Performance Festival, where she led video-mapping projects nationwide. Trujillo Tamayo has held artist residencies in Paris, and she was awarded the Al-Zurich Art Prize for Art and Community in 2020 and the COCOA Art Prize in 2017.

About the Writing Mentor
Aimé Iglesias Lukin is an art historian and curator. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, she has lived in New York since 2011. Her Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers University, titled “This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York 1965–1975,” became a show at Americas Society in 2021. She completed her M.A. at The Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and her undergraduate studies in art history at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her research received grants from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Terra and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations, and the ICAA Peter C. Marzio Award from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her writing has been presented at conferences internationally and published by prestigious museums and academic journals, including the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. She curated exhibitions independently in museums and cultural centers and previously worked in the Modern and Contemporary Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires.

"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. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1874. Sabin Americana: History of the Americas, 1500-1926.
[2] Ibid.

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.

"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.

"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.

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Writer: Sarah AzizaEssay Mentor: Dina Ramadan

Writer: Sarah Aziza
Essay Mentor: Dina Ramadan