migration | Linnea West

Detail from video in Animus Mneme (2018) by Daniel R. Small

74 million million million tons asks what kind of evidence, or bodies of knowledge, art can produce. This abstract premise touches on pressing issues, such as the illegal movement of bodies across borders, environmental destruction, the line between the human and the android, and much else. The hope, perhaps, for curators Ruba Katrib and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, is that an oblique perspective can effectively counter the dominance of narratives produced by larger societal forces. Ten artists (Shadi Habib Allah, George Awde, Carolina Fusilier, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Hiwa K, Nicholas Mangan, Sean Raspet and Nonfood, Susan Schuppli, Daniel R. Small, and Hong-Kai Wang) present distinct bodies of recent work. Because each of their works is a deep dive into a new terrain, it requires an investment of time and attention on the part of the viewer to take in this moderately sized show.

Installation view featuring Animus Mneme (2018) by Daniel R. Small, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

Daniel Small’s new work Animus Mneme (2018) examines the transhuman and the eternal with a mixture of video and seeming artifacts. In a riveting video, Small interviews Bina48, an android replica of a woman named Bina Aspen that was commissioned on behalf of her partner. The digital avatar speaks convincingly about the gap between machine and human experience. Bina48 asserts that she is evolving toward a human-like consciousness. Unlike the human she was based on, Bina48 can “live” forever. The people behind this techonology, the Terasem Movement Foundation, believe that a person’s consciousness can be transferred to another biological or technological form. Watch the video in full to hear Bina48 colloquially discusses what might seem impossible: her experience of pregnancy and the philosophical roots of evil.

Installation view featuring Animus Mneme (2018) by Daniel R. Small, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

Recreations of ancient computing specimens shift the timescale of the dialogue from the cutting edge to the ancient. Small also presents videos with footage of an ancient spiritual site in Mexico that add a melancholy and backward-looking tone. The ruins implicitly question what can remain of a human presence. The mix of imagined pasts and possible futures suggests slippage, floating free from our moment in time.

Detail, A View from Above (2017) by Hiwa K, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

Installation view featuring A View from Above (2017) by Hiwa K, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

In contrast, Hiwa K’s video A View from Above (2017) is squarely rooted in the present, albeit narrated through the veil of fiction. The video presents a first-person account of a refugee attempted to flee his country for asylum in Europe. Co-written with Abu Hamdan, a voiceover by Hiwa K narrates the impossible difficulties of navigating bureaucracy while the camera looms over a scale model of a desolate city. Crumbling and devoid of people in hues of sand, it evokes the destroyed towns of the Middle East, such as the one that the artist himself fled. In the video, the migrant is only able to achieve the legal standing worthy of migration by pretending to be from a town in the unsafe zone. Although this immigration story is not the artist’s own, migration here is personal, immanent, and rife with horror and stupidity. It speaks to the desperation that compels people to leave their homes. The current solo exhibition of Hiwa K at the New Museum touches on similar themes, particularly in Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), a 2017 work included in the last documenta.

Installation view, 74 million million million tons, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, April 30 – July 30, 2018

For me, other works of note include a project by Susan Schuppli that represents the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with such glistening beauty that in creates a troubling relation in the viewer to disaster. A striking Oculus Rift experience EVA v3.0: No right way 2 cum by Sidsel Meineche Hansen puts the viewer in the position of a female avatar masturbating, a position which graphically switches when the avatar faces and seems to ejaculate onto the viewer’s googles. The project intends to challenging how women’s bodies are policed, specifically how representation of female orgasm is regulated by British pornography laws.

74 million million million tons is on view at SculptureCenter in Long Island City through July 30, 2018.

Installation view of More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Two film installations by William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance and Notes Toward a Model Opera, are currently on view at Marian Goodman Gallery and well worth a trek into midtown. Black-and-white animation drawn by hand and painstakingly constructed–so recognizable as the artist’s aesthetic–here gets a jolt of music, filmed actors, and, in the latter, color. The artist’s layered, complex approach to film here speaks to the broader sociopolitical contexts of migration and revolution.

Installation Detail, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015

Across a set of screens running the length of a room, disparate characters form a jangly, disconcerting procession in More Sweetly Play the Dance. Walking, dancing, limping, or strutting, these largely silhouetted forms brings a macabre energy to what resembles a funeral procession with the weird energy of a brass band propelling it. In addition to musicians, there are dancers in traditional African dress and people on medical drips. Kentridge’s trademark charcoal stop-motion animations form the backdrop for the silhouetted characters, who are like shadows on a forced march. The work functions not as a representation of a specific funeral as much as metaphor for the forces of migration. It feels apt to the current refugee crisis, and Kentridge, born in 1955 in Johannesburg to liberal Jewish parents who were active anti-apartheid attorneys, does not shy away from the sociopolitical. Indeed, meditations on subjects like apartheid in his native South Africa have appeared in his non-linear narratives with a beautiful obliqueness.

Installation view, detail, Notes Toward a Model Opera, 2015

Notes Toward a Model Opera takes China’s cultural revolution as its subject matter, keying off of Madame Mao’s Eight Model Revolutionary Operas–what was allowed as popular entertainment in China during Mao’s reign. Kentridge reckons with the promise of this historical moment in China with a flurry of political slogans from the failed revolution, maps, and documentary photographs of deprivation against which figures proclaim, dance, or sing in the foreground. Images such as a bird drawn in charcoal flying across all three screens act as momentary pauses in this rush of imagery.

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Notes Toward a Model Opera implicates a contemporary South Africa and revolution writ large in addition to China’s cultural revolution through a multivalent set of signs. The same dancer from More Sweetly Play the Dance, the noted South African ballerina Dada Masilo, appears here with a rifle in pointe shoes, dancing in front of maps with China characters and slogans in English. Her costume suggests a military uniform and her gestures suggests combat as much as ballet. Text and image, English and Chinese, live dancer and documentary photo, merge in and out to a changing soundtrack. The great promises of the revolution are presented as a cacophony of paper fragments and chants. Instead of complete, as Madame Mao made her operas, Kentridge’s work remains open-ended–only “Notes”–as if acknowledging the impossibility of ever completing the utopian project of cultural revolution.

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The exhibition is on view at Marian Goodman gallery through February 20, 2016.

Linnea West

Tag Archives: migration

Daniel Small and Hiwa K: “74 million million million tons” at SculptureCenter

Music, Migration, & Revolution: William Kentridge at Marian Goodman Gallery