On view April 14 - 17, 2022 at Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

Into the Valley of Despair is a group exhibition that stages a conversation between artistic works and practices contemplating the question: What makes discomfort so intrinsic to art and processes of learning? The project highlights artists’ attempts to draw attention to that which fundamentally lies outside of the conceivable, challenging themselves and/or their audience to remain vulnerable in approaching the unknown. In surveying the overlapping territories of discomfort and truth-seeking, this curatorial project seeks the points where new understandings of the world destabilize previous worlds. Into the Valley of Despair argues that embracing discomfort is healthy and necessary for learning, but also for perceiving a more just world through art.

The exhibition’s title references the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a linear graph developed in psychology that demonstrates a type of cognitive bias in which people’s overestimation of knowledge of a given subject or skill corresponds to a sense of overconfidence. The bottom of the sharply dipped curve is labeled “the valley of despair,” indicating the point at which one may become disillusioned by the realization that they in fact know nothing about something they once (believed to have) confidently understood. The un-selfing quality of works in this exhibition suggests that, rather than wince and turn away from the destabilizing truth of one’s limited views or experiences, embarking on a winding journey through the valley with neutral curiosity—waiting, listening, experimenting—might be the most sustainable, profound, and honest path that one could take in pursuit of real knowing. Acknowledging the contradictions that exist within and all around us, this project intends to consider how the valley of despair can reinvent itself as an oasis of repair.

Into the Valley of Despair takes shape during a time when art world stakeholders are unavoidably confronted with destabilizing realities. In her text titled “The Expanding Field,” Irit Rogoff argues that today’s shifting landscapes of art, culture, and knowledge production necessitate that “each idea or concept we take up be subjected to pressures from other modes of knowledge and of knowing—it cannot simply stay within its own comfortable paradigm and celebrate itself and its achievements.” The solution lies not in just including underrepresented perspectives through the language of multiplicity and diversity; rather, it is to reconsider the situation entirely as a series of enactments of what she calls “an epistemological crisis”— an “exiting from previous definitions, refusing former meanings, refusing moral inscription, refusing the easy stability in which one thing is seemingly good and the other potentially threatening, risking a capacity for misunderstanding.” Arguably at the core of contemporary arts’ and society’s needs is a willful rappel into the contradictions, injustices, and enclosures of the past and present, which I hope to contribute to through the further research and development of this project.

In a video work titled Third Reading (2017), Kim Kielhofner conveys this idea through the narration of painstaking attempts to map the places where discernibility escapes the mind’s grasp. Tracing underlying threads through favorite literary and cinematic imagery, she arranges and rearranges photos, film stills, and clips into a highly stylized frame and non-linear storyline, and in some moments, taps into the actresses’ personas through scene reenactments. “I’m trying to construct a pause (It just keeps going),” she whispers. “I filled notebooks with lists of things that I saw…  But I soon realized I was falling into my old patterns once again.” Discomfort is mobilized through Kielhofner’s surrendering to the tedious, at times seemingly futile, act of searching for a single meaning, and in the process, comes to understand herself more deeply through these images.

Similarly, discomfort serves as a tool for self-excavation and truth-seeking vis-a-vis the disruption of expectations in Mia Raadik’s Autoportrait (2020). The interactive installation piece consists of a computer desktop projected onto the wall with a mouse, desk, and chair in front of it for audience members to use. The desktop has two folders that can be selected by the viewer: one with black-and-white up-close snapshots of the artist’s body that document her sexual abuse, and another containing two essays that detail the account. The psychological difficulty of creating this body of work, Raadik explains, helped her regain orientation inside a body that had been rendered alien to her. The artist dually invokes difficulty in the viewer by requiring them to commit an invasion of privacy in order to engage with the work, raising questions about when we should and should not avert our eyes.

Whereas Raadik shatters expectations in the gallery space, performance duo Larissa Kopp and Florian Aschka seek out discomfort in the public sphere. In Private Property (2021-ongoing), Kopp and Aschka create a set of symbolic, slyly subversive coat of arms for the queer revolution and source from members of the queer community locations to place them as interventions. Sites chosen include private banks, vacant lots, and Wall Street to disrupt and challenge the capitalist ideologies that pervade and determine these environments. In poof paradise (2018), they combine the unsettling with the humorous to playfully engage their audience in queer imaginaries, while ultimately hoping to disarm taboos and aversions associated with the queer body.

Performance-based artist Anna Witt similarly accesses discomfort in public space as a generative force. Rogoff’s call for “refusing former meanings” takes centerfold in Radical Thinking (2009), a two-channel video work that presents recordings of strangers in a Viennese shopping mall after being asked to conceive a “radical thought.” Instead of saying it, the shoppers silently internalize it, inciting us to wonder what they refuse to pronounce. The ideas were anonymously written down and accumulated into a collective manifesto, which is shown as a scrolling text on an opposite monitor: …There are no longer any personal decisions and nobody is responsible; Work is abolished; National borders are newly defined at all times, the world is divided in new ways… Refusal and destabilization are evoked by the radicality of these ideas as much as by the seemingly endless associations tied to the word itself. Reading these ideas on the monitor, audiences are invited to momentarily consider new worlds proposed by utter strangers.

I Have Been There (2015-ongoing) is a work by artist Chun Hua Catherine Dong that similarly taps into the notion of refusal as a means of destabilizing worlds. Through this lifelong photograph series, the artist captures herself “buried” in a traditional Chinese funeral blanket in various locations around the world. Passively absorbing and listening to the social and built structures of an unfamiliar place, Dong’s body becomes suspended in a state of pure stasis. “This project often brings me into a liminal space,” she says. “A space where I am neither formally excluded nor necessarily welcome.” Often choosing sites of political conflict and contested ideologies, which have led to her arrest and interrogation by various local authorities, Dong resists the turbulence and inertia of the present moment that recognizes her refusal of action as a threatening contradiction.

Featured Artworks

Kim Kielhofner, Third Reading, 2017, from the Reading Patterns series, video, 11 min.

Anna Witt, Radical Thinking, 2021, two-channel installation, looped video installation with two monitors on podiums.

Anna Witt, Body in Progress, 2018, 5-channel video installation.

Larissa Kopp and Florian Aschka, Private Property, 2021, two embroidered textile fabric flags and site-specific photo documentation, approx. 60 x 84 in. each.

Chun Hua Catherine Dong, I Have Been There, 2015-ongoing, performance-based photograph series, 40 × 32 in. each, documenting 35 cities; virtual reality-rendered video element.

Mia Raadik, Autoportrait, 2020, interactive installation.

Mia Raadik, Self Care, 2020, sculpture, 10 bowls overflowing with shaving foam.

Julian Louis Phillips, The Strategic Response Group (TSRG), 2022, live performance.