Wura-Natasha Ogunji, The return, 2007. Courtesy of the artist.

Katie Paterson: Deepening Time

Proposal for a series of international exhibitions hosted by Science Gallery Network

Deepening Time is a series of international exhibitions that contemplates deep time through the conceptual art practice of Katie Paterson. The project aims to highlight how the works’ materiality and sensory-based qualities render geologic time humanly discernible, as well as engage viewers’ bodies to spark curiosity and kinship with the universe as it existed, and will one day exist again, without our witnessing. The title plays upon the term ‘deep time’ as well as describes the broadening of our conception of and connection to time through dimensions of the natural and the phenomenological.

Several of Paterson’s works, to quote her life-long Ideas series of haiku poems, metaphorically construct “beach[es] made with sand from hourglasses.” They distill a notion of time that simultaneously destabilizes and grounds the common linear, anthropocentric understanding of it in a much vaster context, using the human senses as an entrypoint. In The Cosmic Spectrum (2019), Paterson sources scientific data to create a continuously spinning wheel of visible colors that depicts the universe’s starlight from the beginning of time toward a speculated future era. Similarly, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), a work that consists of a burning incense that simulates the smell of the world’s first-ever (and potentially, its eventual last) forest, paints a sublime olfactory scene of land before and after the way humans experience it today. These, along with Timepieces (2014), Vatnajökull (the sound of) (2007-08), and Lightbulb to Simulate Moonlight (2008), will be featured in the show as some of Paterson’s artworks that utilize concepts accessible through the senses to complicate and expand our awareness of, and thus our participation in, a fuller portrait of natural existence.

Situated at the crossroads of science and art, and with nine university-led partnering gallery spaces around the world, Science Gallery Network is the ideal host institution for Deepening Time. SGN, with locations in Dublin, Atlanta, Bengaluru, Venice, and Melbourne to name a few, frequently organizes exhibitions around a general theme (Blood; Intimacy; Perfection) to which collaborating interdisciplinary artists respond with interpretations based in science and technology. I envision Deepening Time as being a string of exhibitions that take shape concurrently in various SGN locations with Paterson’s works as a point of commonality, scattered across the globe all at once. Each show, however, will also include a different selection of artists and researchers specific to the region in which it is exhibited that are responding to the theme of deep time and the senses. The purpose of this ambitious curatorial project is to complexify and unite conceptions of time across cultures and geographies in acknowledgment of the wide spectrum of histories, knowledges, and ever-evolving frameworks of time and humankind’s place within it.

Wura-Natasha Ogunji: Sync and Swim

Proposal for a solo exhibition hosted by Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos, Nigeria and The Contemporary Austin in Austin, Texas

Sync and Swim is a traveling solo exhibition of selected drawings and performance works by artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji. The show gathers works from throughout Ogunji’s career in an effort to examine the role of water as a recurring motif and formative inspiration in the Nigerian-American artist’s creative investigation into identity, gender, culture, and history. Existing between two homelands, the Atlantic Ocean becomes at once the wedge, the connective tissue, and the container of multitudes for Ogunji. Leaning into the endless depths of her self as ocean, the artist’s multidisciplinary practice seeks out through the bodily form the moments in which rules might be broken in exciting and imaginative ways, creating disruptions of everyday life and norms on the streets of Nigeria with her performances. Destabilizing space and time for herself, her performers, and those who witness them, the works encourage us to sync up to, rather than sink into, the unknowability of the possible.

The first part of the exhibition consists of a collection of drawings by Ogunji that contemplate water as a fluid entry point into that which lies just beyond reach. The process of drawing itself, for Ogunji, is one of treading and testing the bounds of the unknown. Pulling thread through tracing paper, she begins to stitch together a composition before being fully aware of the nature of the idea. A title then emerges through the process and guides the overall direction and meaning of the work for her, like in the case of The proof, an undersea volcano, extraction, attraction, distraction (2017). This work’s sweeping, roughly horizontal lines trace a woman’s abstracted body--face, hands, lips, and ears--in graphite, ink, and threads of bright reds and blues. The titles’ words weave and settle into the drawings’ landscapes, sometimes literally, as in works like Atlantic (2016). A woman’s head leans off the page with words spouting from her ear: “Our lost ones line the sea... Our land ain’t Africa but the sand that is our ancestors’ bones.” The text instantly draws our attention to who we are really looking at by way of who is absent, pulling us in to think about the people it took to form the portrait before us. In Oyibo vs Herself [That's not the Atlantic; there's a disco ball between us.] (2013), she similarly “considers both the geographic and psychic distance between Africa and the Americas in order to speak about the possibilities that this immense Atlantic separation might allow.”

The second part of the show exhibits performance and video works by Ogunji that use the materiality and poltics of water as a means for questioning the world as it exists and manifesting new ways women can exist in it. The return (2007), for instance, is a 50-second video work where the artist walks on water with twigs tied to the bare soles of her feet. The video begins with only the artist’s silhouette casted over the water, its murkiness rendering its depth indiscernible; nonetheless, she walks across the frame along the water’s surface, apparently defying gravity, as she makes ripples in the water that soon dissipate into stillness again. Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? (2011) is an endurance performance that features Ogunji and participating female performers dragging water jugs attached to their ankles across Lagos. The women wore masks as a reference to the Egungun masquerade, a sacred tradition that prohibits women from participating. This performance allows women to imagine what it would be like to occupy a sacred, untouchable space in society carved for them, as their carrying of water through the city (as women traditionally do in Nigerian culture) takes on a new and transformative significance. beauty, poolside (2016) is another performance in which water becomes a central material in the fostering of possible worlds. Tethered to one another by a long lock of hair submerged in water, Ogunji and her collaborator Adeola Olagunju stand across a swimming pool from one another, themselves submerged in thoughts of joy, leisure, and imagination.

This show will open at the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos (CCAL), then travel to The Contemporary Austin in Austin, Texas. Ogunji has previously exhibited her work at CCAL in 2012 in a thematic solo show about love. Sync and Swim will introduce audiences to another integral facet of her multidisciplinary practice and philosophical inquiries, and, in hopes to connect her two homes across the ocean, the show will subsequently take shape later in Austin, Ogunji’s previous home in the United States between which she once split her life.

Luis Camnitzer: Desire Lines

Proposal for an exhibitionary experiment in wayfinding hosted by MoMA PS1

Desire Lines: An Experiment in Wayfinding is a solo exhibition and curatorial project created in collaboration with conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer that seeks to investigate the question: What does an exhibition shaped by its audience’s learning, rather than for an audience, look like? The exhibition derives its title and curatorial strategy from an anecdote shared by Camnitzer about the moment he decided to abandon his architectural education after observing that a walkway through the school’s garden was not fulfilling its function: people preferred to make and take their own paths through the space over the one designed for them. These invented pathways are what architects and urban planners have come to call desire lines, which some value as historical records that “allow the past to directly inform the present,” or a metaphor for “the endless human desire to have choice [and] the importance of not having someone prescribe your path.” They are also suggestive of the infinite solutions and sightlines connected to a given problem or situation and what Camnitzer considers to be art’s unique potential to render those lines detectable, accessible, and possible in a future world.

The show shares lineage with Camnitzer’s The Assignment Book exhibition held at Parsons New School for Design in 2011, which presented a series of the same name that prompted visitors to respond to the artworks’ conceptual prompts, questions, and conundrums on a piece of paper and attach them onto the gallery wall beside the works. Desire Lines takes this idea a step further into the curatorial, bringing the series together with other seminal works that span the artist’s long career, including Leftovers (1970); This Is a Mirror, You Are a Written Sentence (1966-1968); Timelanguage (2016); Fenster [Ventana, Window] (2001-2002); Somebody’s Fragment (1969); and The Form Generating the Content (1973–1997), all of which draw awareness to the politics of image- and meaning-making through a playful interrogation of language, semiotics, spatiality, and aesthetics.

Known for championing multi-disciplinary contemporary art projects that are experimental by nature, and located inside a former public school, MoMA PS1 would be an ideal host for Desire Lines. Recentering the curatorial as both an artistic and pedagogical practice, the exhibition presents a space determined by its own public. Most of the art objects will be installed on movable walls, platforms, and overhead tracks that, with the help of professional art handlers-turned-gallery attendants, can be reconfigured in real-time. Viewers will be engaged in open conversations (by the attendants, Camnitzer, and/or me) about the works, and then the works will be moved according to the viewers’ responses and ideas, effectively generating alternate spatial relationships and lines of sight between the works throughout the course of the exhibition. The different configurations of the show will be recorded by drawing lines on the museum floor, alongside any other notes, ideas, questions, or messages that audiences wish to write and/or respond to on its surface.

This experimental format aims to transform the exhibition space from a traditionally controlled, one-directional place for seeing and receiving information about art into a dynamic pedagogical tool for multichannel exchange through dialogue and movement. The hope for this project is to not only activate audiences’ thinking about concepts related to the works and the art of exhibition-making, but to likewise add new life to the widely collected and exhibited works’ biographies. Desire Lines furthers Camnitzer’s vision of the museum as a school by turning the exhibition space into a shifting classroom, its floor into a blackboard, and its visitors into the artist’s and curator’s collaborators.

Edgar Arcenaux: Between Closure

Between Closure is a solo exhibition of artworks by Edgar Arcenaux that examines the multidisciplinary artist’s investigation into the audience’s role in meaning-making through the modes of narrative, reference, and duration. The exhibition’s title refers to the term closure, defined in visual theorist Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics as the inference that naturally occurs within the “gutter” between the panels of a pictorial story-telling device, in which the viewer fills in sequential gaps of a story using their imagination. It also points to the sense of “getting closure,” or finding resolution to an unfinished story, as each of the exhibited works builds upon viewers’ perceptions and interpretations of facts related to an iconic figure, event, or idea. Between refers to everything leading up to the viewer’s reception of the work, the gutter between past and present where they have accrued their own personal archives of knowledge, information and moral judgments through experience. The gallery in which the artworks are witnessed and absorbed, then, serves as a liminal space between the ending of audiences’ previous formulations of an idea and the beginning of new ones.

The exhibition is structured around three questions that the artist himself poses as part of his artistic process. The first section, How do we tell the stories that we tell? explores the ways in which narrative is used to manipulate historical and factual information. Arcenaux’s Library of Black Lies is an installation that brings together a collection of books and written materials--some crystallized shut--that are related to Black history, culture, and identities. Organized into a labyrinthine library, the work encourages audiences to wander, destabilize their perspective, and build their own stories from a collection of fragmented narratives.

The second guiding question, What does the story say, and what does that say about the viewer? highlights the use of reference and iconography in Arcenaux’s practice. Triadic Drawings (1997-) is a series of captioned drawings composed of three sketches arranged horizontally. Each sketch portrays an idea or figure that is semantically related to the other two sketches and decenters the sequence in which the trio’s meaning is processed and decoded by the viewer. The viewer’s subjective familiarity and associations with the icons portrayed in the drawings ultimately determine the message that is communicated.

The final section centers around the question: When does a story begin and when does it end? Exhibited here is a screening of the first performance of Until Until Until (2015), a play written and directed by Arcenaux that tells the untold story of the trauma experienced by actor Ben Vereen after his disastrous blackface performance at former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s inaugural ceremony. Arcenaux has emphasized that the audience’s presence was integral to the work, as their absence is what marked the downfall of Vereen's career decades before. Rather than host a live performance, Between Closure opts to display video documentation of the play to solidify its original audience as a necessary and permanent component of the work’s materiality, while also drawing attention to the current audiences’ role in keeping an artwork like Until, Until, Until alive through spectatorship. This section also features A Book and a Medal (2014), a sculptural work that consists of archival materials reproduced onto large mirror-surfaced panels and presents a lesser known story tied to the legacy of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. While the work pushes audiences to complexify their understanding of a historical figure through firsthand witnessing of documents, it also contemplates how the meaning and identity of objects can transform over time, and insists that the viewer’s participation is directly implicated and literally reflected in that ongoing process.

Shirin Neshat: Bound in Another’s Chains

Proposal for a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Bound in Another’s Chains is an exhibition of selected works by Shirin Neshat that contemplates the artist and filmmaker’s longstanding creative investigation into the unfamiliar. Neshat’s oeuvre can be interpreted as one large self-portrait, often representing herself whether through the employment of her own body, actors, or non-actor subjects in photography, video, and film. Paradoxically, Neshat’s practice evinces that to understand the self is to turn one’s attention to the unself. The exhibition traces unfamiliarity operating both at an internal and an external level in Neshat’s artistic practice: through the invocation of dreams, which reflect the unknown depths of subconscious fears and desires; and through her evocation of ‘the Other’ as a reflection of the self. The exhibition’s title borrows a line from a poem by the great Persian female poet Forough Farrokhzad (whom Neshat has quoted in her esteemed Women of Allah (1995) photograph series) that tells the story of a woman who continuously dreams of an unfamiliar face that evades her every effort to discover its identity. Although it reads like a love story, the poem arguably also conveys art’s capacity to reveal and contemplate the affects and afflictions that make us human, affirming Neshat’s belief that “by getting closer to other people’s pain, you cope with your own.”

The first section of Bound in Another’s Chains exhibits works that demonstrate how the unfamiliar manifests in Neshat’s collaborative approaches. Our House is on Fire (2013), for instance, is a body of work inspired by the artist’s time spent in Egypt after the people’s revolution that captures emotive closeup portraits of citizens. Artnet describes the photo series as harnessing “what Neshat refers to as the ‘power in human expression,’ in which the individual gaze creates a connection between viewer and subject, between personal narrative and the collective human experience.” The realization of this project required the building of trust between her and her subjects over several interview sessions, which revealed to her how akin her experience of the Iranian revolution was to theirs despite leading different lives. Similarly, unfamiliarity is complexly conveyed in Neshat’s film Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017), which tells the story of an Iranian film director working outside of her homeland and struggling to make a film about the life of 20th-century Egyptian entertainer Oum Kulthum. Like in many of Neshat’s films, the protagonist is a stand-in for her own personal feelings, questions, and concerns about deepening understanding of one’s multi-hyphenate identity through processes of art-making and storytelling.

The second section showcases works that explore manifestations of ‘the unfamiliar’ at an intrapersonal level. On view will be Neshat’s Illusions and Mirrors (2014), a black-and-white film that tells the story of a woman futilely chasing a shadow through the dunes of an empty beach, and marks a departure from the artist’s previously socio-political themes regarding Iran and Islam and enters the “very timeless and universal” realm of dreams and uncharted terrains of the psyche. The surrealist quality of this film and others such as Roja (2016) renders the subconscious as an isolated, uninhabitable, yet eerily familiar and infinite place. Neshat maintains, “Our dreams are where our fears live,” and it is our fears that most earnestly reflect who we are.

Bound in Another’s Chains will take shape in the second- and fourth-floor galleries of the Guggenheim’s extension tower. Connecting the two levels will be Neshat’s Land of Dreams (2018), a multi-faceted project that straddles both of the exhibition’s conceptions of the unfamiliar. This epic installation will display over 100 framed portraits dangling at various heights from the museum’s rotunda ceiling by intertangled chains, while the project’s film will be shown in a black-box space on the fourth floor. While this exhibition serves as an overdue moment to celebrate the breadth of Shirin Neshat’s artistic and cinematic contributions inside a major NYC art institution, it is equally a meditation on the interconnectedness that underlies each human experience and aims to inspire solidarity and compassion for the contradictions that exist within and around every one of us.

Carina Martinez

Info

Curatorial: ① Taller Granny Square ② Into the Valley of Despair ③ From Aqui, from Alla ④ Do-Until Loop Parade. Writing: ⑤ Artist Interviews ⑥ Exhibition Proposals ⑦ Essays. Press: ⑧ The Latinx Project