"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.

Installation view 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.

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.

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.

Detail 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.

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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by David Michael Cortes.

*Cicatriz (Scar) I, II, II*, 2021-2022. Photo by 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* by Carolina Aranibar-Fernández, 2023. Photo by 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.

"Black Queer Vernacular Art and the Beauty of rod jones ii" by Logan Cryer

Added on October 27, 2022 by Admin.

Writer: Logan Cryer
Essay Mentor: Serubiri Moses

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition this must be the place to be by rod jones ii, with mentorship from Didier William and on view at CUE Art Foundation November 3rd, 2022 – January 7th, 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.

*unttld,* 2022. Resourced fabric, polyfil, waxed linen thread, leather. Approx. dimensions 60 x 60 x 42 in. Photo courtesy the artist.

“The Lord told me to let it go.” – Wendy Jones

rod jones ii is not sure why his mother, Wendy Jones, sold her beauty salon in the summer of 2009. To this day, the only explanation she ever gave was an affirmation of her faith in the Lord. The salon was located on 67th and Broadway, just south of jones’s hometown of Gary, Indiana, a Rust Belt city with a population just under 70,000. Gary is one of the many Black hubs in the Midwest. A beauty salon is a hub within a hub, a place where Black hair and conversation are warmly accepted. jones grew up in his mother’s salon. He spent time there after school, answering the telephone: “Mark of Excellence, how may I help you?” He was made aware that whenever he went outside, there could always be a stranger who knew his mother. He had best act right, just in case.

The connection between the beauty salon and this must be the place to be, jones’s solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, is apparent from a material standpoint. His sculptures are constructed using Kanekalon hair, ABS nails, and plastic hair beads. Although he never learned to do hair himself at his mother’s salon, jones possesses the same patience needed to work with such fussy items; he braids, threads, and decorates with meticulous detail. jones’s pieces show off the labor of their creation the same way Black hair does: through evident repetition, thriftiness, abundance, and style.

The largest piece in the exhibition is made from dental floss and is loosely laced together to form a wide netting that billows within the gallery space. Hair beads rest in the nodes of the floss netting. These acrylic beads were chosen by color and texture, and they are threaded onto the floss in groups of only two or three, leaving the net nearly transparent. The teal color of the manufactured floss represents a hypothetical freshness. It is complemented by the cool tone of the beads that jones selected.

Detail of work in progress, 2022. Photo courtesy the artist.

jones looks back on his childhood memories of his mother’s salon with both an intense familiarity and an alienated curiosity. this must be the place to be began as an examination of the beauty salon as both a social space and a proxy for his relationship with his mother. jones’s investigations consist of material research and experimental socio-spatial constructions. The sculptures, videos, and textiles that he creates are continuations of his anomalistic practice—that is to say, a practice filled with creature creation and walls that come alive.

The “homies” represent an ongoing body of work that jones has developed over the length of his practice. These soft sculptures are made in various sizes and materials with pieces of scrap fabric that jones has found and sewn together. Their ambiguous forms slide between the humanoid and the insectile, and they possess the fierce vitality of dolls that have been sewn by self-taught hands. The homies’ presence in the gallery can be interpreted through a number of lenses: as divine guardians; as representations of Blackness; as jones himself embodied in various forms; as the “other.” jones has intended for the homies to live in and occupy the gallery; visitors enter their world and bear witness to their space.

Detail of works in progress, 2022. Photos by taylor manigoult.

this must be the place to be plays with the humility embedded in entering an unfamiliar cultural space. Generally, an artist has the ability to invert the viewer’s sense of who belongs and who does not by imbuing the white cube with cultural signifiers. Many Black artists deploy an inversion in order to speak to Black audiences even within a white context. As a consequence, non-Black audiences experience a positive transgression, an unusual sense of belonging amidst Blackness, when entering these inverted realms. By centering the homies, jones experiments with cultural signifiers that go beyond the racial to incorporate an ontological division as well. The net effect of this strategy is that no one is fully accepted into the exhibition because there is no way for human audiences to access a non-human experience.

This is not to say that the ultimate goal of jones’s work is to antagonize his audience. He has orchestrated a set of circumstances that make it impossible for the audience to conflate aesthetic appreciation and intellectual control. His practice draws upon the legacies of Black American artists such as Adrian Piper, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennifer Packer, Ulysess Jenkins, and Rodney McMillian in that it brings the viewer into their own self-awareness of who they are in relation to objects of art.

jones’s artwork has inspired me to create a term that contextualizes his practice as a new genre of artmaking: Black Queer Vernacular Craft (BQVC). I utilize this new term to describe an artist whose practice shows the following qualities: (1) an abundant collection of materials and resources sourced through scavenging, purchasing, archival research, etc.; (2) the explicit relationship of some of these collected materials to Blackness. (Blackness is a process); (3) an awareness on behalf of the artist of the spiritual and metaphysical qualities present within their sourced materials and/or completed works; and (4) a queerness within the work that is not displayed through didactic symbolism. (Queerness is a process).

BQVC is, to my observation, quite influential within Philadelphia, the city in which jones has resided since 2017. Notable artists whose practice can be described to live in and around this new genre of BQVC include: Vitche-Boul Ra, Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips (Black Quantum Futurism), and Jordan Deal. I would posit that the prevalence of BQVC in Philadelphia is due, in part, to the small number of commercial galleries within the city, which has led to the formation of communities of artists who are motivated by aesthetic experimentation over marketability. The effect of this creative ecosystem is apparent in jones’s exhibition at CUE Art Foundation. Most of the artworks in this must be the place to be remain unnamed, and the gestures that jones introduces into the gallery (expressively painting the walls; sculpting “arms” that carry the homies) do not form discrete pieces or distinct “artworks” in the eyes of the artist.

At this moment, jones’s exposure as an artist has not reached far beyond the city of Philadelphia. jones attended college with the intention to become a professional football player, and only became focused on visual art after a serious injury ended his football prospects. He graduated from Truman State University’s modest undergraduate Studio Art program in 2016, along with only one other student. When jones enrolled as a graduate student at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts the following year, it was the first time he experienced working in his own studio. jones struggled to contextualize his artistic impulses within pre-established art spaces and art histories. In this must be the place to be, jones’s experience of moving through belonging and unfamiliarity led him to create an empathetic world of uncommon folk. His prolific practice is just at the start.

All citations by the artist are drawn from interviews with the author of this essay.

About the Writer
Logan Cryer is a writer, artist, music lover, and curator living and learning in Philadelphia. They are a graduate of Moore College of Art and Design, where they majored in Fine Arts, and an alum of Headlong Performance Institute. They have a soft spot for awkwardness and revel in the boldness that young, queer, and/or poc artists bring to the world.

About the Mentor
Serubiri Moses is currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in Art History at Hunter College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. He has delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, and The New School. He has also lectured at the basis voor aktuelle kunst (NL) and The University of the Arts Helsinki (FI). As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth, and received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

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. Please visit www.aicausa.org or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn more about the program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author.

"PLAY WITH FORM AND TIME IN ALISHA WORMSLEY’S REMNANTS OF AN ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY" by Amanda Dibando Awanjo

Added on September 20, 2022 by CUE Accounts.

Writer: Amanda Dibando Awanjo
Essay Mentor: Kemi Adeyemi

This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Remnants of an Advanced Technology by Alisha Wormsley with mentorship from Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels and on view at CUE Art Foundation from September 15 – October 22, 2022 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.

As a child, I sat at the feet of my mother and foremothers. Listening to their stories, I was moved to silence and awe by a grace that felt as vast as space. Ancestral by nature, this form of knowledge plays time for a fool, eschewing linearity for something more. There are not enough words, spaces, and worlds dedicated to the richness of Black women. Alisha Wormsley’s Remnants of an Advanced Technology (CUE Art Foundation, 2022) draws from a deep well of matriarchal history, imbuing it with techno-archival methods to position Black women as ever-expanding creators of their own worlds. Featuring video, text, sound, immersive installation, and sculpture, the exhibition opens up the potential for new ways of knowing ourselves, our past, and our worlds by connecting us to the radical power of Black women’s sovereign creation through time.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Wormsley works fluidly through various materials, combining and enmeshing them to play with their physical and spiritual potential. The works in Remnants of an Advanced Technology draw from Children of NAN, a material and theoretical archive that Wormsley has constructed over the years; an assemblage of objects and ideas grounded in Black women’s wisdom, magic, and dreaming. The archive serves as a poetic survival guide that flows and grows through time, and that informs all of Wormsley’s work.

Installation view of *Remnants of an Advanced Technology* by Alisha B Wormsley, 2022. Photo by David Michael Cortes.

In Remnants of an Advanced Technology, Wormsley presents a series of twenty-six photo-based quilts that prompt a consideration of the complex roadways of Black women’s futurity. The quilts use as their source material African textiles, repurposed photographic wallpaper from Wormsley’s previous exhibitions, embroidery, and other types of mark making. Varying in size and shape, they are suspended from the ceiling, making it possible to walk around—but not through—them. Their backings are embroidered with maps and messages from Children of NAN. To the artist, these photo-based quilts serve as maps themselves, as the embedded instruction of their embroidery intersects with the long dreamed-of future that the photographs they carry embody.

Interplay of form and time is a key theme of the exhibition, as Wormsley’s work moves seamlessly between the ancient and the contemporary. In her tapestries, Wormsley has physically woven together natural fibers that are dyed a muted color palette of beige, brown, and black. They stand in close conversation with, but also in stark contrast to, the bursts of color and exuberant patterns of the quilts. Each one anchored by a curved branch, the tapestries utilize simple shapes like triangles and circles, with their fibers breaking from the weaving at certain points to hang below. The rustic fabric and the weathered smoothness of the wood call forward the timelessness of the earth, while the metal circuit boards and plates woven into them speak a distinctly technological language. The small metal plates are embossed with text such as: “It is right that a black woman should lead. A womb is what God made in the beginning. And in the womb was born time and all that fills up space. So says the beautiful spirit.” This quotation is adapted from Zora Neale Hurston’s 1920s anthropological study, “Mother Catherine.” Into it, Wormsley inserts the word “black,” further emphasizing Black women’s spiritual practice and survival ethos. The tapestries pull at the intersection of craft and code, asking viewers to question the lineages of contemporary technologies, while also imagining new modes of making and putting forth the role of Black women as technologists within their own right.

*So Says The Beautiful Spirit: Daughter*, 2020; cotton and wool, motherboards, and vinyl text. Photo courtesy the artist.

Remnants of an Advanced Technology features many moments of stillness and ponderance, especially expressed in Wormsley’s sixteen works with glass, made in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Glass Center. These glass vessels, stained in warm and jewel tones, are each filled with plants, candles, herbs, books, and ephemera. They are decorated with collaged images from the Children of NAN archive, as well as with images of Black women from Wormsley’s previous projects. The inlaid images, some embossed with gold leaf, form a catalogue of otherworldly Black womanhood that evokes the imagery of Afrofuturism and science fiction. The vessels are arranged on a large wooden platform and together create an altar, an honored and holy space filled with tokens of gratitude and homage. Gold-accented candles, some of which are molded into women’s bodies, are interspersed throughout. Working in tandem with the quilts and the tapestries, the vessels underscore Black women’s spirituality, creativity, and persistence, centering their ability to survive and thrive with joy, love, and community.

The works exhibited in Remnants of an Advanced Technology call to mind Toni Morrison’s narration of healing methodology in her 1987 novel Beloved. In the book, she writes:

“They stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning there was sound and they all knew what that sound sounded like…the voices of the women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.” (Morrison, 308)

This moment in the narrative of Beloved represents the birth of a new timeline, the creation of a new world for the women and their progeny. The characters’ migration “back to the beginning,” is crucially multidisciplinary; they seek to use all possible tools and technologies to build a new future on the back of an ancient bubbling pain. Wormsley’s Remnants of an Advanced Technology similarly embeds the notion of healing as a multidisciplinary venture by connecting technologies of survival across time to Black women’s methodological ethic of care and liberation.

Wormsley’s growing archive boldly asserts that Black women are worlds unto themselves. I first came into contact with her work in 2019, when I encountered it in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, in the form of a billboard that read: “There are Black People in the Future.” Radical in its simplicity and assuredness, this statement affirms the lingering truth of Black survival in our violently anti-Black world. The billboard was also evidence, to me, of the potential of Black women to radically hold public space, both in the present and in the future. Wormsley continues these legacies in Remnants of an Advanced Technology by manifesting her radical dreamwork—and that of many others, past, present, and future—into a varied, dynamic, and inspiring presentation of work that holds plainly the truth of Black women’s power.

About the Writer
Amanda Dibando Awanjo is a Cameroonian American researcher, historian, and artist. She holds a PhD in Critical Cultural Studies in Literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Inspired by W.E.B Du Bois’ 1927 question, “What will people in a hundred years say of Black Americans?,” her research explores the role of Black women creators in the evolution of Afrofuturism. Through fellowships with the Carnegie Museum of Art and the University of Pittsburgh's University Art Gallery, her research has expanded to explorations of the visual culture surrounding Black girlhood in the 20th century.

About the Writing Mentor
Kemi Adeyemi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of FeelsRight: Black Queer Women & the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of the volume Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Kemi founded and directs The Black Embodiments Studio, an arts writing incubator, public programming initiative, and publishing platform dedicated to building discourse around contemporary black art. She currently serves as dramaturg for Will Rawls’ project [SICCER]. She has recently curated solo shows by Katherine Simóne Reynolds (Jacob Lawrence Gallery, 2021) and Amina Ross (Ditch Projects, 2019), as well as co-curated a group show called unstable objects at the Alice Gallery (2017)

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

Writer: Amanda Dibando AwanjoEssay Mentor: Kemi Adeyemi

Interviewer: Kalila Ain
Mentor: Dr. Joan Morgan

Writer: Sarah Aziza
Essay Mentor: Dina Ramadan

Writer: Amanda Dibando Awanjo
Essay Mentor: Kemi Adeyemi