To harness this sonic resistance as a political project—one that defies the discursive constructions imposed by unjust systems of exclusion—is crucial and necessary. In amplifying the many muted, murmuring voices that will collectively reflect our possible futures, the artists demonstrate that sound carries a particular presence. This presence—beyond voice, beyond the body, and beyond legibility—is located within a complex amalgamation of sound and echo, and is left for the viewer to listen closely and register.
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"Dancer, Anchor, Stage" by Mira Dayal
Writings about the relationships between the news, politics, and art often repeat that art cannot possibly react to the news as quickly as the morning Times; that art cannot affect change or influence current events with the same efficacy as, say, street protests, elections, or nationally televised speeches. Godoy’s embodiment of the figure of the newscaster is not an attempt to make art as effective or responsive as the news per se. Rather, it is a method of slowing down the news, allowing it to tickle the spine, to disturb the mind, to be repeated, to be fragmented and reconstructed. Alternate stories emerge. Parallel lines are uncovered.
Read More"First There's Play, Then There's Trouble" by April Freely
Uncanny, impenetrable, haunting is the work. The roofline continues forever. Where we might expect windows, key to easy personifications of home, no light is permitted. If a house is a body, this sculpture represents a form that is obscure even to itself. No one can look in, no one can see out. The form has no door, no mouth.
Read More"On Place: Physical, Imagined, Technological" by Amanda York
James Yakimicki’s paintings and drawings are fusions of landscapes omitting horizon lines, scale, and perspective in favor of aerial views and multiple vanishing points. His experiences living on the flat planes of central Indiana, the altitudinal heights of Boulder, Colorado, and the urban sprawl of New York City are incorporated into all of his works, which do not represent one place or event, but are conflations of many over time. Yakimicki introduces dreamlike elements into these environments, such as celestial formations or floating objects, and the result is alternately euphoric or nightmarish. Technology figures into his work as large mechanical assemblages, and his godlike vantage points allude to modern surveillance capabilities.
Read More"Cogitations on Surviving Language" by Ladi'Sasha Jones
So much of survival resides in living in abstraction. The overconsuming registers of injustice elicit an experimental living and cyclic rituals to undo, loosen, or see through the grips of violence. Survival engenders a critical labor that produces openings towards relief, reprieve, cultural creation, and self-organization. It is a process of mapping and mark making rather than escaping. The potential of unmaking the conditions of injustice is what we are motioning towards.
Read More"Liquid Assets, Lubricants: Sheida Soleimani’s 'The Medium of Exchange'" by Emily Watlington
Sheida Soleimani’s photographs and videos are both acerbic and illegible. The oil, the Shell logos, the hijabs, the keffiyeh, the doms, the subs, the queer bodies, and the caricatured faces of politicians: together, these referents speak to power dynamics at once gendered and geopolitical. Many of these cultural motifs read, to most Westerners at least, as pan-‘Middle Eastern,’ and while the specific actors and scenarios remain elusive, the sort of corruption and abuse of power the photographs embody is all too familiar.
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