0:05

okay good afternoon and welcome to land life and liberation part four my name is sally frater and i am the

0:12

curator of the decolonize this place exhibition when we breathe we breathe together

0:18

at our gallery of guelph i’m going to begin our time together with the art gallery of wealth’s land acknowledgement

0:25

today guelph is home to many first nations metis and inui people from across turtle island as we gather together we would

0:32

like to acknowledge that the art gallery of guelph resides on the ancestral lands of the atawanderen people

0:38

and more recently these treaty lands and territory of the mississaugas of the credit we recognize the significance of the

0:45

dish with one spoon covenant to this land and offer our respect to our anishinabe

0:51

haru nashane and neti neighbors as we strive to strengthen our relationships with them

0:57

we express our gratitude for sharing these lands for mutual benefit although we are convening virtually it

1:04

might individually be located in different places it is useful for us all to remember that

1:09

wherever we are in what we are currently referred to or what we currently refer to as the

1:15

americas we are on indigenous land and that we should move forward in the spirit of mindfulness

1:20

and reciprocity before we begin i would just like to

1:26

take a moment to acknowledge the i guess recent

1:32

but not new rise of anti-asian violence that is happening in canada in

1:39

the us and i just wanted to mention asian americans advancing justice

1:45

that’s that organization is offering free bystander intervention training as is stop aapi

1:52

hate and in here in canada there is fight coveted racism all of these organizations are great

1:58

resources for information before we begin some brief housekeeping

2:04

notes since we are in a zoom webinar everyone’s microphones are turned off you’re welcome to submit questions

2:10

throughout the conversation using the chat function and we will share them with the participants following the close of the

2:15

conversation i’d also like to say a quick thank you to shauna mccabe and jenna brownlow for their technical support

2:21

for this series land life and liberation is a series of five conversations

2:27

that have been unfolding as an accompaniment to the decolonizes place exhibition when we breathe we breathe

2:32

together which i guess is technically still on at the art gallery of guelph until april

2:38

25th but now it will be accessible mainly um by online because of the recent

2:46

um closures which have been mandated by the province of ontario the exhibitions and

2:53

conversations center the d colonial operations manual which can be downloaded on the websites

2:59

of decolonize this place and the art gallery of guelph as a starting point for reflection and

3:05

action the d colonial operations manual embodies the principle of movement-generated media

3:12

and is a document offered as a tool of study reflection and action the manual is grounded in five years of

3:19

collective thinking art making and organizing undertaken by decolonize this place with dozens of

3:25

groups in new york city then ap hoking and beyond with numerous references to

3:31

movement work preceding the establishment of decolonizes place in 2016.

3:38

the scale material quantity and distribution form of the manual underscores the importance of freely

3:44

shared printed matter in the work of movement building our conversations will explore a number of

3:51

threads related to the confluence of land sovereignty liberation and resistance

3:57

for today’s conversation decolonize this place will be joined by amwam abkha latanya otri

4:03

harry burke and yours truly sally froeder abbam abkha is a professor of drama

4:10

social and cultural analysis at nyu abu dhabi and is the author of theater and post-colonial desires

4:18

from routledge to from 2003 he is the director of film documentaries

4:24

and the curator of visual and performing arts has written several articles on

4:30

representations in africa and its diasporas representations and modernisms in theater

4:36

post-colonial theater and black atlantic films latonya s otri has organized exhibitions

4:44

and programming at the museum of contemporary art cleveland yale university art gallery

4:49

art space new haven mississippi museum of art and other institutions through her

4:55

graduate studies at the university of delaware where she is completing her phd in art history

5:00

latonya has developed expertise in the art of the united states photography and museums

5:06

her dissertation the crossroads of commemoration lynching landscapes in america which

5:12

analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment

5:18

concentrates on the interplay of race representation memory and public space

5:24

harry burke is a british poet critic and curator he was a curator at art of space new

5:30

york where he organized a performance in reading program he collaborated on the exhibition of

5:36

whole king man and hani lippard at saltz basil co-organized

5:41

the precious with precious goku human the segway reading series in new york

5:47

city poetry is practice for the new museum in new york and random house for arcadia misa in

5:53

london he curated exhibitions at the cell project space in london

5:58

and at the contemporary arts center in venezius his writings have appeared in tex

6:04

zorokunst art in america spike art quarterly moose and several artists anthologies

6:12

sally frater is interested in decolonization space and place black and caribbean diasporas

6:18

photography art of the yes every day and issues of equity and representation in physiological spaces she has curated

6:26

solo and group exhibitions for institutions such as the art gallery of guelph bellridge museum of art mccall center

6:32

for art and innovation the glaselle school of art at the museum of fine arts houston the justina and barney gallery at the

6:38

university of toronto project row houses and center three for artistic and social practice

6:46

she is a member of the association of art museum curators and is an alumna of independent curators international

6:53

and is currently the executive director of hotel galleries so i am going to turn things over to you

7:00

i mean natasha take it from here

7:09

um hi everyone sorry i was a few minutes late i’m in delhi right now and we have a curfew uh

7:14

going on so there’s like a cab rush that happens so i got really i’m trying to um get that but i’m really

7:22

excited about this conversation and thank you uh you know harry latonya um and sally to

7:28

join us today uh this is actually really exciting and actually you know we’re a little late on having this conversation specifically around

7:35

uh curio like curatorial roles within you know the movement for uh liberation

7:41

within the arts and that how that moves on to movement spaces as well um some of the things that we on our own

7:46

have been thinking about is how can art be a space for century and how can art institutions or galleries

7:53

really work towards that and something that you know is within the colonial abolitionist and anti-imperial frameworks um one of

8:00

the things that you know we’ve been struggling with specifically in the context of art institutions is

8:05

um that when you have movements like this especially this was a struggle with the whitney uh museum because you know we kind of uh went in

8:12

at the same time when the binaural was opening right and and when during the biennial uh one of the things that we um faced was that

8:18

it was the first time this is a biennial which is really diverse in terms of you know people of

8:24

color indigenous black brown queer you know trans folks for the first time you have more than 50

8:29

of the bioneer being that um but when it comes around movement lines right

8:34

that that almost automatically seems to be like a reverse cricket line like as if you’re going you know when you start

8:40

talking about uh you know what’s happening at the institution there’s often this this notion that we like you know that

8:46

the people around the movement are not seeing how this is also important and so from our side i think a lot of

8:52

times what we’ve said is there isn’t a binary between being inside the institution and outside we are part of some institution or the

8:58

other but you know um one of the things that we’re really interested in is like how do you heighten these contradictions and how do

9:04

you further push you know decolonization abolition frameworks and how do you actually

9:10

start thinking about these structures now and not wait for any institution to accept this process right um being like okay

9:16

now finally officially we’re going on to a deep global process versus how can we uh work on it already like it’s already

9:23

happening as well um so those are some of the questions i think and it’s not just you know for it’s not just a question for curators

9:30

but i think this is like as artists as curators as art historians or as academics

9:35

or as movement people you know um who do see who that sits on these boards and how these things impact their communities

9:42

this is a really urgent question in terms of what are our institutions today and and how can they be actually uh

9:48

pushed further to be these spaces of century so um yeah that’s all i want to say

9:55

and then i can just add just some things to kind of bring into the room you know um

10:02

to the extent that decolonize this place has has done things kind of um against museums but

10:09

also kind of with museum workers and curators and these kind of things we’ve always

10:15

tried to not not acknowledge the inside and outside and see the diversity of tactics and

10:20

strategies and positions that could be held and the relational organizing that

10:26

can happen and the type of conversations that can emanate and i think that we’ve entered galleries only twice this

10:33

is the second time and the first time we’ve used it with the intention so both curators at that

10:39

moment are with us today and you know we’re also happy to kind of think uh alongside you of like what how do

10:48

things like this happen and how can curation and exhibition and whatever kind of be in

10:54

service of people and struggles and movements versus you know people that are in control of

11:00

these institutions and i think that’s the last point if if people can think about

11:06

representation and inclusion inclusion and assimilation in contrast to kind of liberatory

11:13

frameworks liberatory institutions institutions that are kind of um on the side of people against fascism

11:20

against these kind of things and if that’s just an aspirational thing or there’s something really there

11:27

um so yeah uh so uh excited uh latanya you take it from

11:33

here yeah thank you so much for this invitation to be in discussion

11:40

and um i’ve been following you know dtp for years and kyle

11:46

um thank you for reaching out to ask me to participate in this i had the pleasure of working with both

11:52

kyle and by moana numatello on a show i did last year called temporary spaces of joy and freedom

11:58

and that was a really important show for me it was really small um a small show but i actually feel like it

12:03

was where i started kind of really figuring out some things about myself and i’ll just start with like i’m

12:10

somebody who has this very traditional training in art history i’m trying to finish a phd at university of delaware

12:16

it’s a very conservative very white program um i found that i needed a whole lot of

12:21

other things for the type of work i wanted to do so i started studying a whole lot of other areas you know finding things and

12:29

doing a lot of black studies actually in particular and then later finding the decolonial studies and things like

12:34

that and so some of my aspirations originally for curatorial work

12:40

and i wasn’t actually i’ve just admit this for real i being a curator has been kind of like

12:46

a it wasn’t the first thing for me going into museums i was studying the museum so being in the space was a way for me

12:52

to unpack and understand how racism operates through the institution um while i was in it i happen to also

12:59

get experience to learn how to curate shows so that’s been like a plus point but it also has come with like you know a lot of

13:05

emotional baggage being in the heart of the beast so i’ve worked in these very white institutions as often the only black person that

13:12

always the only black person but also almost always the only person of color in these spaces and it’s been just

13:17

it’s been really grueling so temporary spaces and a joy of freedom worked with um liam batas masaki simpson scholarship

13:25

and it was really wonderful to try to find artists that i thought

13:30

not just represent but their practice is doing these kind of things that leanne

13:36

talks about um how she she’s thinking about you know decolonial work

13:41

that was a joy to work on our show and i felt like i was really in tandem with the artist the show i

13:47

have up now i have to say i have to admit you know while i like a lot of aspects of it and i think it’s doing some important work

13:53

and i want to talk about it more with you um i feel like this is kind of feeling more like a representation show

13:59

um it feels very different and it’s kind of funny it was a show i had in mind but it was maybe my older version of myself

14:05

that i went back to to do this show called imagine otherwise i i’ve been really struggling with it to

14:10

tell you the truth i think a lot of times the different scholars so um i mentioned leanne uh so i’ve been

14:15

thinking a lot with fred moten’s work from the under comments to be in but not of that concept

14:20

i’ve been trying to think of my role when i was in those institutions as that like i was trying to you know

14:26

steal from the institution and put the resources in the community where it should be or with artists

14:32

the artists who do the work not just representations that look like whatever that can be really beautiful and great

14:37

but it had for me it’s got to be about the practice i have found that being the person who’s in

14:42

with no support has been a nightmare it’s very hard and i had to get out and i recently

14:48

finished in mocha cleveland um also a big idea i’ve been thinking a lot about is working in

14:55

collaboration with people who talk about transformation of museums for me the

15:01

transformation involves an abolitionist decolonization kind of perspective

15:07

although a lot of the people who are kind of even saying they’re about transformation they’re still talking about reform and that’s been um

15:14

that’s a lot of people in this whole kind of museum field sphere even though they think they’re doing something more you know whatever they

15:21

think they’re being more progressive but i still find most of them are into this kind of gradual approach and that we’re going to fix these places

15:27

you’re not going to fix them that’s they’re actually working as planned there’s nothing really broken about them

15:33

they are what they are um it’s hard i don’t know what the answer is i i’m pretty much happy to get out of

15:38

those institutions and now trying to collaborate with more of the things that i think are on the right

15:45

you know zone and trying to figure out how to put funding there i’m more about divesting from those

15:51

other institutions and just putting the money in other spaces and building up more activities

15:59

thank you um [Music] hi good evening and thank you for giving

16:05

me this opportunity to be part of this conversation no let me just come into it from

16:11

two angles one with a story last week i was actually on a panel um

16:19

in rome where museums are coming to terms in europe anyway about restitution

16:24

and returning artifacts the art forms that were stolen from africa

16:30

during the colonial times in fact the museum in brussels went as far as authenticating those artifacts by

16:37

getting congolese people to videos into sparse with the exhibition to show that

16:43

listen they’re okay with it being there and so on and um i’ve been there i keep getting troubled by those

16:49

invitations because and i always respond by saying i’m not gonna be the confessors for those

16:55

museums and and so on and uh the other point there i always made to them

17:00

because they always say well africans cannot actually afford to maintain those now the main the issue

17:07

there is of course a lot of those works were at different historical moments motifs of um there were textual systems

17:16

right there were motifs and some of them actually because of the materials that were built in degeneration is part of the aesthetic

17:23

right so this museum spent a lot of money conserving preserving and so on and thereby taking the discursive

17:31

essence of most of those works and i used to say things to them like if if you sold me those words today i

17:37

would not buy them they just don’t have they’ve lost their significance um

17:42

in fact what’s going on across europe now is museums are trying to re-signify those by trying to claim

17:48

they’re liberal they’re talking to africans they’re considering returning some of them etc but i feel

17:54

that’s just a way of augmenting the lost value of those works

18:00

rather than any laboratory or generosity to uh the sites they stole them from and

18:06

the other part of them i thought telling the story of um benko’s famous film pichote where this

18:12

little street kid from sao paulo um found this expensive cars packed

18:18

in his uh perch uh and he started scratching these expensive cars with his coin

18:23

and the policeman stopped him what are you doing and he just said what i do with my money is my business

18:29

uh it’s a way of telling them that you know if you sell those words if the africans

18:35

like they can eat them they can burn them they don’t it’s not your business what they do it’s theirs so just return that so um

18:44

for me the idea of decolonization also matters because it matters that it’s not imagined as a

18:50

moment as an event it matters that it’s it’s really recognized as a permanent

18:56

process of reinvention of asking questions about social inequities and adjusting and

19:02

strategizing against them it’s really supposed to inaugurate

19:08

counter-hegemonic attitudes with which people produce what i will call like a accountant

19:15

metaphysics right it’s a way of being a way of being in a reality that’s so historically

19:22

staged against the people uh that are looking at these works and so on or from

19:28

whom these works were taken uh so that i i for me as a curator i

19:33

staged my exhibitions and the exhibition space as a contested space i

19:39

don’t assume people will come and like the work i actually want to state it to show that these works as textual systems

19:47

are contestatory and i want to actually encourage the contestary narrative of

19:53

place but also narratives of spaces so that people are really not just saying well this place is great

20:00

they’re doing more progressive work etc but it challenges the historicity of the

20:05

place it challenges the selection process it challenges the hegemonic way with

20:10

which a textual system and conventions of reading them had historical approaches are instituted etc

20:18

and so um but it also makes the counterpoint that uh the assumption that people who

20:25

are misrepresented in this art forms in these spaces in galleries and museums

20:30

the assumption that that’s enough to traumatize the people and and it’s really

20:37

underestimating the contestatory innate energy that people live through every day uh trying to

20:44

negate um different kinds of domineering uh ways of being right so so so

20:52

for for me what happens is that um it’s a kind of a contested uh theory of

20:58

reality where one is hegemonic and the other it’s a counter-hegemonic

21:03

energy that’s permanent and it’s always what it does it’s almost like as a way

21:09

of seeing it fragments the meaning that it’s that we see and

21:14

we create bricolages and we reassemble them and we break them down again

21:20

that permanent process of reinvention is what people whose works of people who

21:25

are textually summarized and symbolized in museums and galleries and so on

21:31

that is what keeps those people actually alive and in a permanent state of decolonization and in some of those

21:39

some of the ethnographic assumption that these art forms actually tell the real story of these

21:45

peoples they ignore the various opacities that are included in the cultures of people

21:51

you know it’s like they’re like anthropologists or ethnographers assuming just because they interviewed some native people

21:57

that gave them all the information right and so that kind of assumption which is so very

22:03

arrogant is one of the things that i try to make sure that the stage when sometimes the artists that are put

22:10

in dialogue they’re contesting the place they’re contesting this uh um the the text they’re producing a counter

22:18

uh um archive they say see what it is well see us fragmented see us read

22:24

turn it into bricklage see us re-energize it and the reception does not finish in the

22:29

gallery of course the discursiveness of these sexual forms happens outside the gallery

22:35

it feeds into social movements it feeds into ways by which people actually articulate

22:41

history so for me it’s important to also stress that for people who are in a permanent state

22:47

of decolonization you spend your entire life your subjectivity

22:52

as being in excess of any one place right so that there’s not enough place

22:59

to occupy to corral and to dominate and that defiance suggests that that

23:05

these folks whose histories are in excess of the institutions that are trying to tell their stories

23:11

and that excess is where the energies of decolonization lies uh so for me um the the whole

23:19

conversation is that these institutions exist they’re hegemonic mostly or sometimes

23:25

they try to welcome oppositional perspectives only to incorporate them

23:31

um they’re more cosmetic than real and when they do that their readership uh what people do with

23:38

the readership in other words the discursiveness of the work is where the real ideas of

23:43

interpretation happen not just in the textual coherence of the world is the ways of being with this work

23:51

where people are expressing a permanent state of becoming and that those textual forms that simply

23:58

summarize them at moments of being right or even places of belonging they’re saying no we’re in

24:04

excess of those ideas and symbolisms of our being or when excess even of the places we

24:10

belong right and and and that contested catastrophe

24:15

attitude is what i try to invoke when i even stage the work and also the kinds

24:21

of people that are encouraged to engage the work so that for me it’s a conversation

24:26

that’s endless and open-ended and that’s not fema it’s not based on thesis but really it

24:33

begs the questions

24:39

thank you alan thank you um uh we have sally

24:48

um i wasn’t actually ready to go first i thought maybe harry could go yeah i’m sure harry is good

24:57

um thank you for having me here today it’s really a pleasure to get to talk to you all

25:04

um i think so it was kind of amazing to see the

25:10

colonial operations manual how that shows the timeline of dtp’s development

25:15

over the last five years and it kind of made me think about working with you all out of space in 2016 and

25:24

actually how that that kind of created a shift in my own practice like a huge one

25:29

and um actually like a lot of what

25:37

off that point i um well like since since that point i’ve taken a step away

25:42

from working curatorially in an institution um realizing that a kind of deeper

25:48

engagement with study and reading and thinking was kind of necessitated in order to like

25:53

be truly accountable to the kind of work that was being created um in these movement spaces um

26:01

so i’m doing a phd now in history of art and thinking about the colonial histories and collective

26:08

formations of contemporary art in southeast asia but also in relation

26:14

to black dysphoric practices and histories of the plantation

26:22

i i guess as as i’ve been doing a lot of reading recently i kind of wanted to

26:28

just share share a few a few notes from from a few texts i’ve been reading recently because i thought they tied to

26:34

the kind of frames and themes that that that are being discussed in this

26:40

um in this panel um so the first observation emerges from

26:46

a racial capitalism and the classroom state reading group i’m part of and much love to my comrades in the rccs working group for providing

26:54

a generous context for collective study um a couple of weeks ago dr charisse

27:01

bernstelli joined our group to talk about modern modern us racial capitalism

27:07

a recent article in the independent socialist magazine monthly monthly review and in this article bud

27:13

and steli uh building on the intellectual production of 20th century black anti-catalysts theorizes quote modern us

27:21

capitalism as a racially hierarchical political economy constituting constituting war and militarism

27:27

imperialist accumulation expropriation by domination and labour super exploitation end quote

27:36

so within this political economy blood and sterling identifies the structural location of blackness

27:41

defined as african descendants relationship to the capitalist mode of production as a site of an irresolvable

27:47

contradiction she writes that quote blackness is a capacious category of surplus value

27:54

extraction that is essential to a range of political and economic functions including but not limited to

28:01

accumulation disaccumulation debt and plan of planned obsolescence at the same time

28:07

she knows blackness is the quintessential condition of disposability expendability and devalorization

28:15

so in this analysis u.s racial capitalism is rooted in anti-blackness and anti-radicalism

28:21

and for bird and sterling anti-radicalism is quote the physical and discursive repression

28:26

and condemnation of anti-capitalist and or left-leaning ideas politics practices and modes of

28:32

organizing that are construed as subversive seditious and otherwise threatening to

28:37

capitalist society these include but are not limited to internationalism

28:42

anti-imperialism anti-colonialism peace activism and anti-sexism end quote

28:50

so drawing from burden studies argument that anti-blackness and anti-radicalism function as the legitimating

28:56

architecture of modern us racial capitalism i’ve been reflecting on the extent to which these legitimating architectures

29:03

are reproduced in and by cultural institutions so despite making space on certain

29:09

occasions and typically in limited ways for radical art practices to reach a public

29:14

many dominant modern institutional forms from commercial galleries to the non-profit and philanthropic industrial

29:21

complexes nonetheless exist at a nexus of anti-blackness and anti-radicalism

29:27

and i wanted to name this tension because i think it suggests a dialectical relationship that is critical to our discussion

29:34

so i’d say that a lot of the most significant aesthetic work today is being done by artists and curators working in the

29:40

black radical tradition when institutions platform this work the

29:45

irresolvable contradiction that is internal to us racial capitalism is reproduced and this is the kind of

29:52

key one of the key contradictions we’ve i think has come up already um but yet by addressing this as a

29:59

dialectical struggle the black radical tradition points to methods through which contradictions can be framed as sites at which the con

30:06

conditions of social possibility can be transformed so because of the irresolvable nature of

30:12

the contradiction of u.s racial capitalism it cannot be accounted for through strategies of representation or

30:18

inclusion broader historical forms and categories must be critiqued

30:23

so i think one question that we can discuss today as we consider this critique is what transformations my abolitionist

30:29

museums and abolitionist universities make possible i don’t want to just note at this point

30:35

that strike momo initiated by the international imagination of anti-national and anti-imperialist

30:41

feelings is posing this question an abolition may a month-long series of actions on

30:46

campuses across turtle island to demand the removal of all campus police is doing likewise

30:53

an abolition may for those who haven’t heard of it is it begins with a call for a nationwide day of refusal

30:58

on may 3rd and is organized by crops of campus coalition an abolition network to get crops off

31:03

campuses and cops off the planet and i’ll drop a link in the chat once i’ve stopped talking

31:11

um so that’s this kind of that’s that’s a like a dialectical approach to this this contradiction um

31:17

that that we’re all dealing with in various ways that i think could be helpful to deframing kind of the discussion today

31:25

and this is the second analytic that i want to quickly um introduce is is that of spatial justice

31:31

which is something that i’ve been discussing in a seminar led by lisa lowe so i must acknowledge my gratitude to professor lowe and the discussions in

31:38

our seminar for the conversations we’ve been having and in this seminar we’ve been thinking

31:43

about geography we recently read writings by two indigenous scholars nachie blue band

31:50

and mishwana gomen in her book natives

31:56

battles colonialism from 2017 wand analyzes quote the ongoing and

32:01

conflicting practices of space making inhabiting resulting from colonial processes

32:07

and the complex modes of presence and prescribed inclusion end quote despite these processes

32:13

indigenous geographies quote have quietly overlapped and coexisted in tension with the geographies of the settler colonial

32:20

state they have been submerged but not eliminated

32:25

end quote so bond attends to indigenous spatial practices to show how they operate as crucial acts of

32:31

self-determination and cultural continuity and serve as analytics for rejecting native

32:36

disposition and the interlocking logic of incorporation within the multicultural nation state

32:43

in in her book mark my words native women mapping our nations from 2017

32:48

goemon emphasizes the role of gender within spatial production criticizing the heteropatriarchal

32:54

representation of national space for constricting native mobilities and pathologizing mobile native bodies

33:00

and goemon introduces the method of remapping which she describes as a profound alternative to the unjust facial

33:06

imaginary of the global colonial present but i think they’re taking together band and goldman’s texts after julian records

33:13

call for visual sovereignty in contemporary art production by contending with the possibility possibility of spatial sovereignty in

33:20

cultural contexts and to quickly tie this back to the kind of material the kind of activities that

33:27

that we’re working with today um in moma’s recent abolitionist imaginary’s one day

33:32

symposium dylan rodriguez shared the following words which have been circulating on social media

33:39

i want to be working with you all i want to be a guest of yours in an art world which is dancing on the rubble of the anti-black colonial art world

33:46

that still remains hegemonic dominant so it strikes me as intentional that

33:51

rodriguez’s choice of metaphor was not only choreographic but spatial and rodriguez’s words

33:57

underscore the argument that radical modes of relation reciprocity and recognition require to

34:02

again quote gomen the production of alternative spatialities not mired in individual liberalism

34:11

um so yeah like this this this strikes me as important because

34:17

again looking at strike momo i think that the project constitutes a remapping of modern arts features and a

34:23

remapping of moment plazas and the associated sites of imperial and financial extraction

34:28

surrounding the museum and so i just want to introduce the thought that

34:33

given that curators are custodians of spaces as well as artworks i wonder in what

34:38

ways can the field engage with spatial justice and spatial sovereignty as critical modes of curatorial practice

34:46

and i think this is related to this question of how can institutions become places not a curation but of collective care

34:53

which gtp um introduced in the colonial operations manual um so yeah thank you for um

35:02

listening as i introduced you then i’m excited to talk more with you all about these ideas thanks harry

35:11

how you feeling sally you’re feeling good um yeah so i’m just i’m thinking

35:19

about um a lot of the things that the fellow

35:26

participants have have shared today and i thought i would just talk a little bit

35:31

before we move on to other topics to talk a little bit about how i got to this um particular place that i’m

35:38

i’m in right now and um my sort of foray into curating

35:43

was it was informed by studying photography

35:49

in university and as a student i was very interested i was very invested in

35:54

issues of representation and i think i was trying to make sense of my experiences of actually being an

36:01

undergrad student at the university of guelph which is where um when we breathe we breathe together

36:07

is being held on this campus and and i was very intrigued by the medium of photography because it has

36:14

this very problematic history it was used as a tool of oppression but then i was very conversant of

36:22

um the ways in which various marginalized groups have been able to

36:27

use the medium in order to create their own narratives and to create their own um ways

36:35

of of representing themselves to the world at large and also the ways in

36:40

which in many in many instances it’s a very democratic medium

36:46

regardless of people’s ability or their um financial standing they have some access

36:52

to engaging in this medium either as creators or as as as viewers but at any rate

36:59

the concerns that i had as a student studying they shifted into my curatorial practice

37:05

and when i first started curating i was interested in what we would term as issues of identity

37:11

i was interested in people sort of articulating where they were located and what they stood in relation to

37:17

and that was something that i sort of carried through but then when i went to study abroad in england i started thinking

37:23

more about how i identify and what it meant for me as someone who has

37:28

several layers of colonization in their lineage to be studying in that space what it meant for me to actually be

37:35

having to pay for a visa to study in a country that has plundered so many places where

37:41

i currently live where my ancestors are from etc and then again when i was working in

37:46

the states as a curator what it meant for me to be in these spaces what it meant

37:52

for me to be working in a place like texas where i was there as the descendant of people

37:57

who were enslaved that is a former slave state that is indigenous terry territory that

38:03

was a place that was once a part of mexico so these were things these were the ways in which i was loosely thinking

38:08

about plays and i’m just thinking about some of the work that i was doing as a curator um

38:16

as latonya referenced i was usually either the only black or the only person of color working in

38:23

spaces and that is something that i’ve been thinking of more recently what that

38:29

means in terms of the work that i’m doing as as as a cultural producer as an organizer

38:36

and working in institutions that um where we’re not necessarily having discussions

38:42

about the fact that the field that we work in stems from this history of colonization it stems from a history

38:48

of plundering it stems from a history of misrepresentation what does that mean

38:53

then to be inviting racialized practitioners artists into that space what does it mean to be

38:59

bringing their works into collections um what are what are as

39:05

i mean as you’ve referenced what are my debts to to other people when i’m working in that

39:10

space and usually what i do is i try to move forward with the sort of mindset of

39:16

you know i got through the door like who else can i bring with me and one of the things that i

39:23

wanted to sort of address at the outset was when i’ve been working in these spaces

39:28

and as latonya has mentioned they do take a toll and they affect your

39:33

ability to produce work to work creatively there are all sorts of things that i think people are

39:39

alluding to the ways in which um our work gets absorbed or claimed

39:44

within these institutions the way in which they are able to leverage and um acquire capital

39:51

which is based on our labor in ways that don’t really acknowledge what the production of that labor means um

39:59

when i was doing the work in these spaces and sort of not necessarily being able to have that

40:05

distance to articulate what was happening to me in terms of doing the work that i was doing um

40:11

i first heard about dtp from the exhibition that harry did with you all at artist space and

40:19

i went to a conference in pittsburgh and someone was wearing a museum’s are not

40:24

neutral t-shirt right and that was when i first learned about the work that latonya was doing

40:30

and this was something that mark mentioned in the last discussion um mark i have mentioned that when you’re

40:35

doing this kind of work and you get discouraged you sort of get burnt out like i wanted to acknowledge that all of

40:41

you all are producing work that helped to sustain me and help to motivate me and help me to keep going and it’s been um

40:49

you know so it’s really again i’m very excited to hear about all of the work that you all are doing but at any rate at this particular

40:56

moment what i will kind of draw attention to was after the events of last summer

41:02

not just the pandemic but particularly um the murder of george floyd and the up

41:07

risings that occurred on a global scale it was very sort of incongruous

41:12

for me to be witnessing all of this work um all of these protests um

41:20

and and to see how institutions many organizations were

41:26

rushing to issue solidarity statements but then weren’t doing

41:31

the work of saying well how do we perpetuate these behaviors how are we contributing to this

41:36

by the way that our institution functions so spaces that were issued quick to issue these statements

41:42

of solidarity about anti-black racism but they had no black people working in their spaces

41:48

the ways in which we were quick to kind of abandon the work that we were doing towards

41:53

re-centering indigeneity to be seen as being in support of black people not realizing that they can

41:58

happen in tandem the silence that a lot of these same institutions are maintaining now

42:04

when we are seeing rising violence towards um asian-american and asian-canadian

42:11

people who are working in these institutions who are amongst our circles who are in our communities right so i think

42:19

in terms of what i’m doing i’m kind of like again what are how am i being accountable to this how am i how

42:26

is my silence around these things and the spaces that i occupy how is it contributing to these

42:33

inequities what are my responsibilities and so one of the things that i try to do um

42:39

when i am in institutions if um i’m not in a place where i feel that

42:45

my voice is being heard where it’s literally being written over or silenced i can work with artists who share

42:53

similar politics or similar similar values and they can voice some of the things i

42:58

can turn over my platform and that’s beneficial to the institution because it’s bringing in outside

43:04

voices and perspectives it’s beneficial um to me because of the work that i’m

43:10

doing is predicated on other people’s labor so how do i give space

43:16

for those for for those voices and those conversations but also um this is the way in which

43:23

you can act as the way in which different people can can work as i guess the terminology

43:30

we’re using now as accomplices how do we show up as accomplices for each other in order to do this work

43:36

and when i was thinking about this conversation i read an interview with with rolando vasquez-malkin and he was

43:42

speaking about the institution he was he was talking about different decolonization

43:48

like processes of decolonization that we can do within this work in terms of the language that we use who we’re

43:54

showing who we’re collecting um how we categorize our i mean our systems

44:00

of categorization of of tracking artwork databases they’re so problematic right so he was

44:08

acknowledging all of these these threads all of these elements that are problematic at their core but

44:14

then he put forward the sort of um like metaphor of of a

44:19

dj using the turntable and how that becomes an instrument and he was proposing that we can use

44:25

these these spaces as instruments to help us on the path to decolonization so we can

44:33

acknowledge all of these fraught histories um and but use them as platforms

44:40

to moving towards spaces of liberation or um liberatory

44:48

contexts thank you sally that’s really great um so we’re gonna just try to do another

44:55

round because this is how they you know the conversation can happen things that we say what they kind of

45:02

emerge from us um back to i think

45:11

yeah there were so many good things in here i was like taking all these notes um one of the things i wanted to kind of

45:18

speak speak to this kind of well it connects with actually everybody what they were saying but um and going back to liam batas masaki

45:25

simpson the show i did last year um it’s called temporary spaces and joy of freedom and it was

45:31

from a discussion that she had with dion brand and that was a phrase that leanne said in in their

45:37

discussion and um i just like fell in love with that the conversation they had and then i tried to create a show that

45:43

hopefully felt like a conversation as well um one of the things in there is that leon said is how we

45:49

need to have scaffoldings of care for the people on the front line she’s talking about activists and

45:55

and i think so often i mean i’ve had artists that will reach out to tell me you know we need you to stay in those

46:01

spaces we need you to stay in those those white museums as a curator because you know that’s the only way we’re going

46:06

to get it we’re going to get our work shown and we need someone who will care for our work and not just be co-opting

46:11

it and stuff like that and i said you know i hear you but okay one i was here actually just

46:17

just to study the racism of the institution mainly that was the main reason to be in there and i wasn’t really planning to stay in

46:24

these in these white museums ever and that was what gave me power to actually speak in a very um

46:29

you know just speak very directly about what’s going on because it wasn’t my goal to move up as a chief curator one

46:34

day or a director of a white museum i’m like no um but i understand like from her side in a

46:41

way because she’s like it’s hard to sell our work it’s hard to you know get the right scholarship and have people pay

46:46

attention so we need you to stay in that space and i said you know the problem is there ain’t nobody over here catching us

46:52

you know so we’re getting hit left and right from um you know these people inside it’s a constant battle all

46:58

kinds of stupid stuff that you don’t have no idea the layers of foolishness with the writing the edit editorial process they

47:04

keep sending stuff back and they’ve changed all the language and it’s just constant fighting about everything

47:10

um and that’s just like one example it’s about all of the pieces people who won’t you know install the

47:15

work properly or won’t touch certain work because they don’t see it as good enough for them or

47:21

you know i split up my show and had it so that the current show so two two sites are um

47:27

outside the museum to force the museum to have to put money into black cultural spaces to try to pull money out of

47:32

and that’s my goal now trying to figure out how to pull money out of these white institutions um it wasn’t nearly enough money but it

47:38

was like you know i’m trying different things out almost like experimenting of what to do but the thing is nobody is really

47:44

supporting me in this place so while i have certain support from people who know museums are not neutral across the country across

47:51

the world but in this city i have no support and i’ve actually had people kind of call me up and go off on me on

47:58

the phone and everything it’s like it’s horrible and this is what i’m talking about so when we do we build these things

48:04

i knew what i was doing i knew that it was going to create these as obama was talking about these contradictions or um

48:11

also and harry talked about this right the contradictions um and the work and and how that can create something

48:16

else so you know you’re doing that you know it’s going against the thing you’re in that hegemonic structure

48:22

but you’re going to need some protection and i kind of felt like as a strong

48:27

individual i could take the hits but i’ve been doing it a long time by myself in volatile horrible spaces

48:35

and really people got my phone number you guys they call me up and go off the custody and everything um it is horrific and we do not right

48:43

now have enough network set to support one another through this process because really it’s

48:49

a it’s a thing where you have to kind of get in and get out like you have to keep for me i mean i’m like there’s no way i

48:55

was gonna like stay in a white institution for like 30 years or something but it’s like i’m gonna come in here i’m gonna try to do what i can do how far

49:00

can i go how you know do i hit this thing where they will not let me go any farther then i’ll flip and i’ll just do something

49:06

else and then i’ll do you know keep doing it but we need to have things that also support one another we

49:12

have to realize there is emotional cost to this work um we are draining like we see that across

49:18

in many sectors other activists are being really hit hard and um you know black folks is dying at

49:25

really high rates we have hypertension we’re getting this covet like we do don’t have enough care

49:31

networks for one another so that’s something i want to stress

49:37

alum yeah thank you for that i yeah i think one of the things that

49:44

for me is to always assume that those institutions they’re not church they’re

49:50

they’re really contact zones and as contact zones how you

49:55

engage it and attacked the guile the various strategies of engaging it

50:01

matters um they will not give you they will not be the final arbiters

50:06

for expressing the politics that you first want to deconstruct and so on

50:13

so it’s always um it’s always a paradoxical space i i

50:18

remember i did something else called there’s an essay called um african

50:26

colonial photography and outlaws of history where basically make the same point that

50:32

photography simplified and flattened africans right he told

50:37

the story of africans as simple people one-dimensional and they were late comers into modernity

50:46

but when african photographers learned the skills they got themselves into what you may

50:53

call the caliban complex right where they got they’ve used the skills against

50:58

the same discourse to begin to tell stories of alternative subjectivities so they

51:04

educated themselves in a kind of deconstructive way to get those tools reactivate new

51:11

literacies and new practices that will contest what’s already in the museums

51:17

and in the textbooks and i think there’s that educational mandate for curators that

51:23

it’s not just in the space it’s really the kinds of discursive spaces that

51:29

you can where you can extend the conversations and the issues etc the space is not enough to actually uh

51:37

express this dynamic history which i talked about earlier as a history of excess

51:43

right in other words it defies simplification in one space it defines even a textual codification

51:50

of a people so the people are in excess even of the code of their representation

51:56

and that excess matters in trying to define or produce counter texts etc

52:03

it also challenges the idea of just belonging right that sometimes the way people talk about

52:09

belonging it almost feels like we people sprouted from the soil right and it is so

52:15

talk to us right and but the point is to really talk about how people contest they migrate what

52:21

constitutes culture is not about just purity it’s about what you become after

52:26

encounters with others and and there the theme of equity of symmetry

52:31

etc matters and so for me my exhibitions are obsessed about the histories of asymmetries both

52:38

thematically and also in the modes of representation and also talk about the kind of

52:44

contested conventions of re-reading these works and so on so in in italy i did stuff around

52:52

the this collection of things called black animals which is and so on and it’s very big you

52:58

see them in italian in fact it became the motif for 17th century bourgeois mansions and you find them in

53:06

some movies etc some people still own them but what i did was a show called

53:11

re-significations right where we had to show but we brought artists in residence to contest them

53:16

and we posed the question where there are contestary works riffing off that particular

53:23

collection and what happened in the city of florence was that the mayor of the city which was weird

53:30

wasn’t expected decided to adopt the exhibition um to host a conference of

53:38

culture mayors across europe to address the question of migration and citizenship and representation and

53:45

so on now i wasn’t expecting that expecting that to happen but that’s the nature of institutions

53:52

right they appropriate things strategically so in other words you just

53:57

if you if i held on too tightly to that work i would have been so heartbroken and in

54:03

despair but i just moved on to say well that’s the nature of that space otherwise

54:09

we will just be in an existential language all the time and it will take us away from the

54:15

ultimate responsibility of always producing culture that

54:21

contests asymmetries uh and for me that’s just the marker with

54:26

which i select the even the theme of what i do the places in which i do them and the way i want audiences to respond

54:33

to them to respond to them etc and the other point for me is also that

54:39

that there are lots of um uh uh foundational things that you see but you

54:45

know what i was referring to that caliban complexes you all know that ideas like i need to learn the language of the master so when

54:52

i insult the master the master understands it that i’m not just shouting right and so so that’s you’ll find that

54:59

in a lot of black art forms you find that because we’re socialized in institutions where we are not

55:07

subjects but objects of that institution its history and so how do we find subjectivity in

55:13

those spaces right without just going into a state of despair and and so there you really take

55:20

rigorously the historicity of the conventions of what you are seeing and and also the likelihood of

55:27

demystifying them and actually repurposing them etc to make a statement

55:33

so for me it’s that that that the text the art form as a text itself should permanently be put in a state of

55:40

instability rather than frozen and valorized and

55:45

canonized etc uh it should constantly be in a state of instability and in fact

55:51

that state of instability is what invites contested interpretations of the world rather than

55:57

put all the bells and whistles and arrests work in history and so on and assume it’s a

56:03

representation of culture it’s really to say no culture is always contestatory and

56:10

cultural practices must also reflect that contestatory energy and because of that the texts that we

56:17

show should also be the contact zones for these contexts or contexts of history and subjectivity

56:25

um and and that’s why people should use should use these art forms in a kind of

56:31

a more uh decolonizing way where we also know that decolonization

56:37

is not just one moment in history but actually the foundation on which

56:42

subjectivity is built it’s a permanent state of becoming in which you’re constantly reviewing

56:48

revising and encountering asymmetries and adjusting to that

56:55

thank you thank you um harry yeah i i’d love to pick up on latanya’s

57:01

um comments on care because i think this is really important and like deeply i mean

57:07

i think it’s deeply felt um to many people who’ve worked with institutions or felt that sort of sense

57:13

of isolation and silence um isolation has only compounded in the

57:20

time of quarantine and social distancing um so it’s more it’s more than it’s something that’s happening not

57:26

just in arts and cultural institutions but um a broader experience

57:32

um but i think i in my mind this sort of sense of isolation

57:37

um that that needs to be sort of rectified through networks care

57:43

is also mirrored by kind of compartmentalization on the level of um discourse discourse

57:51

on art um it’s and this this kind of

57:56

you know the theme of silence that we raised a few times today it makes me turn towards a part of the

58:04

colonial operations manual um which i i highlighted because i i thought it was

58:10

really salient so i’m gonna quote it um it’s it’s in the section about the whitney

58:16

and the author is right artists and commentators alike remain silent about the second demand

58:22

put forth by community groups and co-signed by hundreds of prominent artwork figures in the open letter

58:27

to eject to eject candice that the whitney participate in the formation of decolonization commission that would

58:34

include community stakeholders and be guided by a variety of urgent principles indigenous land rights and restitution

58:40

reparations for enslavement and its legacies the dismantling of patriarchy workplace democracy degentrification climate

58:47

justice and sanctuary from border regimes and state islands generally

58:52

the silence around the commission demand raises questions about the role of artists and struggle

58:58

it continues um that i appreciated that

59:05

because i’ve been thinking about this this kind of dissonance that i ever observed over the

59:13

last few years in in that there’s been many activists and organizers who have addressed

59:18

contemporary arts reproduction of cholesterol and settler colonial geographies but their cause to action are often

59:24

compartmentalized in contemporary art discourse as if as if they are distinct from aesthetic

59:30

criticism um so yeah it makes

59:35

makes me wonder about the ways in which um what edward gleason called a grammar of liberation and poetics of relation

59:42

can be engaged with through aesthetic discourse and and the ways in which art criticism

59:47

can be stretched and expanded to to think about relation and care like the aesthetics of care

59:53

the aesthetics of building movements um together um i think fundamentally the

1:00:01

current political political economy of art is rooted in a valorization of property and objects

1:00:07

and that there is so much space for this to be challenged and um and relation and relationships

1:00:14

nurtured instead so i think this ties kind of our criticism to curation into our discussion today as well

1:00:25

um sally yeah um i think the i think it’s really

1:00:32

interesting and i really um appreciate that harry continues to return

1:00:37

to this idea around care because that is what the definition of of uh the curator is you’re a steward

1:00:45

right you you um extend care to the way that we understand it care to

1:00:50

objects character collections and i’m thinking about this in relation to

1:00:56

um when we talk about re-centering indigeneity and that often um leads to a lot of

1:01:03

institutions having a land acknowledgement so there’s that kind of acknowledgment of place and acknowledgement of space and

1:01:11

but i was thinking about how those same spaces that we work in this is going to some of latonya’s

1:01:16

points we won’t necessarily have safe space like declarations of safe spaces what does that mean who are they

1:01:22

saved for and one of the things that i was thinking about you know sort of again this is kind of what foreground

1:01:28

was my experience like i was thinking about how those spaces are often not physically safe like how

1:01:34

do you exit a space if we think about the kinds of violences that are erupting

1:01:39

in public space and museums and galleries or public space how how is that a safe how are these

1:01:45

safe spaces for people with disabilities people who are differently abled if you need to remove yourself from a

1:01:50

space how are they safe spaces for people of uh

1:01:55

who are at different levels of literacy how are they safe spaces for people who um belong to different

1:02:04

i guess class economies but i was also thinking about um the ways in which not necessarily

1:02:13

to adopt or extract or appropriate um indigenous modes of governance

1:02:20

but if we think about reciprocity what does that mean right and this idea of of acting as

1:02:27

guests and thinking about guests and destabilizing our positions

1:02:32

our relationships or how we stand in in relation to a lot of these spaces these are things that i’ve been thinking about

1:02:38

and that are circling through my mind again today and one of the points that latonya raised in

1:02:44

the chat was was what is the role of artists right this is not to call out artists but she was mentioning how

1:02:51

a lot of artists are taught and this is something that i’ve been thinking about too when we want to work

1:02:57

in certain institutions what does that mean what is our investment in those spaces

1:03:03

and and as she was saying who is there to catch curators who are doing this work and i think this

1:03:08

is something like i’ve had conversations with separate artists saying when i’m in the states and i’m advocating for artist fees for you

1:03:16

that there’s a cost for that and it’s directed towards me i’m the one who pays that cost as the

1:03:21

curator in this space um when i am advocating for this when i am enacting a particular type of care so

1:03:28

that you are treated well within this space and you’re shielded from some of the politics or some of the

1:03:33

violences that exist the curator is often the one who absorbs it right and not

1:03:39

not the artist and when we’re thinking about one of the things again like i’ve been

1:03:44

following a lot of the actions that dtp has been involved in other and other as well as other activist groups

1:03:51

um when um the actions uh around warren um kander’s um

1:03:58

position on the whitney board when they were kind of being we’re calling that out and a lot of

1:04:04

artists but not all were withdrawing from from participating in that year’s winning biennial

1:04:10

and there was michael brockowitz who refused to even entertain the idea of entering into that space

1:04:17

like he didn’t even offer his work up to be removed because he just refused to engage in that year’s um

1:04:24

biennial um sort of again what are our debts that we have to to one another right so these are

1:04:31

these are things that i’m i am also thinking about and also again if this idea or these this idea

1:04:39

around criticism and writing how do we respond within it with an ethics of care

1:04:47

to the objects that are in the possession so i think of of these institutions that are in the collections if we’re showing

1:04:54

less than 10 of a collection how is that how is that

1:05:01

um acting within an ethos of care um and there was one other thing that i

1:05:08

was thinking about just in terms of it being a sanctuary space i think one of the things that’s really interesting

1:05:14

is that we work in a creative field and that we and we have the potential as album

1:05:22

reference for really rhizomatic thinking around all of these issues they don’t have to be fixed that doesn’t

1:05:28

have to be a scary place of not being anchored to either a history

1:05:33

or a methodology or a practice but yet we insist on doing things in the

1:05:39

same way this is not how it’s done this is not how we do this these are this is not the type of work that we

1:05:45

show in these spaces and i think it’s incumbent on all of us not just you know some

1:05:50

renegade or or um however you want to term it curator

1:05:55

to be invested in that that’s something that your registrar needs to be invested in as well

1:06:01

that is something that we need to um really kind of empower our docents like who are who are we

1:06:07

bringing in to kind of interpret the material these are things that the education department needs to

1:06:13

be thinking of and again it’s sort of like can we transform the space can we transcend

1:06:18

this space but there are things that we can do to trouble the ways in which we do things in these spaces that lead back to

1:06:26

that i think would move them closer to being spaces of sanctuary spaces where we can hold care for one

1:06:32

another and i think um this is just the one one last thing i’ll say before we move

1:06:38

on i think it’s really interesting when we’re thinking about i think there are a couple of things i want to say

1:06:43

because we often speak about um you know art as institutions and

1:06:48

universities as institutions and for many of us we work at at we work in spaces or we work at

1:06:53

spaces who are at the nexus we’re at the intersection of both of these spaces so what does that mean

1:06:59

um but you know what i kind of lost the threat so i’m just going to end it there just end it there

1:07:07

thank you i think we can uh you know perhaps just bring in a couple of thoughts from experience from like dtp’s position

1:07:15

and how we’re thinking about the same things as part of like generated from what’s been said already

1:07:20

and i can just start with a few you know a lot of our knowledge comes from doing

1:07:26

things and then you know having failures and successes and then learning from their you know um about what to do next and i

1:07:34

think the thing that has carried with us in the work that we’ve done is us

1:07:39

and i i pose this more of like just to kind of inform the conversation like for us we don’t really think of

1:07:46

ourselves as activists and the stuff that we do we don’t think of it as protesting you know and i think that

1:07:52

the reduction of a lot of the work into actions uh and then documentation is part of

1:07:59

like the containment strategies almost or even the mythology around the whitney

1:08:05

the whitney started with organizing on the inside but it didn’t start with

1:08:10

activists on the outside you know that’s what was that was the calling for that moment and

1:08:16

in fact if you look at the manual and you remember the history we were wondering why people were silent

1:08:23

like it’s one thing to kind of you know raise hell from the outside it’s another thing when

1:08:29

120 people put their jobs on the line to say something meaningful about how

1:08:37

the institution is not being accountable to its own workers right and and that issue with the

1:08:43

whitney was money and funding so if we’re talking about

1:08:48

institutions we’re also trying to understand how they’re complex and how they rely on money

1:08:53

and who’s money and how does that impact our strategies our analysis or whatever and if curation is about

1:09:00

care it’s care for whom i understand that it’s a category of like that’s what you’re a steward of

1:09:06

something but if you’re getting paid and you have parameters then ultimately your job of care is for

1:09:12

what and for whom and i doubt it’s for movements and for justice and so you’re trying to navigate that

1:09:18

stuff right so in the process of navigating that stuff we found and i i say this from a

1:09:25

position of like teaching at nyu as an adjunct like i don’t see myself as like an

1:09:30

educator as much as i see myself as having a job and trying to engage and study in more of the undercommons kind of way

1:09:38

against with alongside underneath about whatever that kind of thing

1:09:43

now in the context of the whitney again natasha alluded to this and i also want

1:09:48

to open it up for a lot of other dtp members to share from this experience because i think it informed

1:09:54

the conversation artists were silent an artist and

1:09:59

and and there was this thing around oh artists are either supposed to withdraw

1:10:04

or not and there’s a million other ways of engagement that don’t require withdrawal or boycott

1:10:12

but somehow there was this kind of barrier and i think that this is something that

1:10:18

maybe harry is is mentioning but i’ve heard it from like fred milton and so forth how deep

1:10:24

liberalism runs in our organizing spaces in our thinking

1:10:29

and how much identity becomes the thing that you fight for

1:10:35

as if like the identity of blackness in an institution the identity of palestinian and

1:10:41

representation of palestinian institutions as if we if we get that things change

1:10:47

so again i’m just kind of saying from from this vantage point what we’ve tried to do with dtp is kind

1:10:53

of challenge these binaries and open up space multiple spaces and extend the

1:11:00

geography outside the walls of the museum and reject these walls as containment for

1:11:05

how we address problems and solutions and build power and unsettled things

1:11:11

and yet when something happens people are quick to tell the story that

1:11:17

excludes the workers that organize on the inside that reduces the all the work that’s being done the aesthetics the thinking

1:11:23

the the organizing the care the the generosity how much time it takes how much

1:11:31

work it takes to do the that we do that isn’t funded by anyone

1:11:38

this is something that we try to pass on to other people because if more people think this way now what is it how does

1:11:44

it get how does it get kind of distilled we talk to people about reorientation

1:11:50

from the institution to each other it’s not about leaving it or staying you’re always leaving it

1:11:55

right but you need a lot of people to leave it together that’s the issue of care but beyond the idea of leaving

1:12:03

how can we unsettle and create more spaces and educate and teach and learn

1:12:09

from and fail and do all these things where we recognize an aesthetic and this is where strike

1:12:15

moma is really important and i’ll just end on this point yesterday some of us were in front of

1:12:20

momo no one went into mum two banners got put up on a monument of

1:12:26

a poc person jesus morales who kind of indigenous you know it’s

1:12:32

almost like granite from the ground making uh a sculpture outside very few changes to

1:12:39

it put two banners on it that were beautiful that were sheer amy and natasha worked on

1:12:45

and several workers from inside came out one worker works in the archives another

1:12:53

worker works in the library currently and another person works at the ticket

1:12:59

booth they all had read what got put out on strike moma and they

1:13:05

had printed the terms into their operations room that now hangs right now

1:13:11

and they’re in solidarity with what’s happening outside of the museum they didn’t email because they were

1:13:17

afraid where the email would lead but they came out and they met people

1:13:22

and they talked i think that the work that’s being done

1:13:28

is about how care in my mind care is showing up at the institution’s door

1:13:35

and breaking down that wall and seeing what kind of relations can develop that

1:13:40

undermine and challenge and create space

1:13:46

uh nit if you want to go and then anyone from dtp and then we’ll go another round

1:13:55

you’re all mute knitting it um i think i i just have mainly have a question for

1:14:01

everyone around aesthetics um that’s something that i’ve been thinking about a lot you know in terms

1:14:06

of uh you know when you’re exiting the institution or when you are you know in any of these frameworks abolition

1:14:12

decolonization anti-imperialism um you know you you once again you have this binary of like you know if

1:14:18

something is contemporary art or it’s under modernity like you know you can like there’s a certain aesthetic that looks like that right

1:14:24

and if something is not looking like you know modernity or western empire and it could

1:14:30

be modernity of a different place it could be indian modernity it could be african-american it could be you know it’s not necessarily

1:14:35

there’s so many different modernities and each one has its own context so you know it could look different and so

1:14:40

you have that situation and then there’s the other situation of like oh if it looks like uh you know it could look very cultural

1:14:46

right that’s the other term that’s your like cultural being or these are cave paintings from let’s say

1:14:52

laura like in south india or like these are you know these are mughal empire like paintings or whatever

1:14:57

right so there is this kind of um separation that’s created very immediately and so i guess the

1:15:04

question that i’m going at is like how has everybody been thinking about aesthetics basically especially

1:15:09

you know with what obama was saying and i think andrew has a similar question which is when a lot of these things are not meant

1:15:15

to stay for a long time right a lot of these you know as you mentioned a lot of these aesthetics

1:15:20

are not meant to stay for a long time and another thing uh you know dylan rodriguez was brought up he also you

1:15:26

know kind of kind of pointed the fact that uh you know aesthetics of abolition are basically aesthetics of combat

1:15:32

right it’s like they are aesthetics of combat um and you know and really and if you kind

1:15:38

of go more into kind of decolonial ways of thinking about it when you center land water and air you know in all your practices it’s

1:15:44

a different sense of aesthetics right um so i mean i feel like this this this

1:15:49

kind of uh struggle that exists is is is is very much on an aesthetics plane right we’re sensing

1:15:56

feeling like not cared for um wanting to assimilate into a certain mode of thinking or like objectifying your own

1:16:03

work as an artist just so that it can be part of this kind of institutional framework um so my

1:16:09

question is really more around like how can we liberate aesthetics from a lot of these

1:16:14

you know different uh parameters that it has been kind of found itself stuck on um and

1:16:20

uh or if there’s any reflections or thoughts on it or you know any poetry on it anything i’m just thinking a lot

1:16:25

about aesthetics and thinking about how we can incorporate them even in our kind of actions and in everyday life

1:16:31

um yeah that’s it andrew

1:16:38

yeah just just adding to what natasha said about aesthetics and and also what you said i mean about the

1:16:44

whitney uh the responses around the whitney uh i’m thinking back to the earlier moment

1:16:50

when many of us this is pre-dtp when many of us worked under the aegis of golf

1:16:56

the global ultra luxury faction and we developed a lot of our tactics

1:17:02

in taking on the guggenheim specifically over the labor conditions

1:17:08

in abu dhabi and we were very careful about

1:17:14

you know stepping over that inside outside divide by insisting that we were producing art

1:17:20

as part of the the actions and the occupations and it was part of a high standard that we put on

1:17:28

the walls and all of the materials that were produced were supposed to be in sync with the

1:17:34

exhibitions that were actually up and running at the time in the guggenheim

1:17:39

so we were very careful about the aesthetic parallels there and and how we were

1:17:45

adding value to these exhibitions in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way but at the same time

1:17:51

when when the work was seized and ultimately we assumed destroyed

1:17:57

uh we also insisted that that was a you know that ran counter to the very

1:18:03

ethics of the museum that they were destroying the art of artists who were part of the community who were trying to add value

1:18:11

and uh just at the last point there the the artists were not silent around these

1:18:17

actions art the art world was very very uh vocal and uh and and joined the boycotts

1:18:26

and um and and resonated uh the messages in in all sorts of ways

1:18:32

whether they were appearing under the aegis of the guggenheim or not um

1:18:37

so i i think the difference between these institutions to some degree helped explain the different responses

1:18:45

but also um we didn’t we didn’t in both cases we really didn’t have curators to

1:18:51

work with sympathetic curators and in the case of the guggenheim we had curators

1:18:58

and an administration that was always trying to co-opt us they they generated encouraging

1:19:05

responses but we knew all along that the the ultimate effort was to co-opt

1:19:12

so it would have made a big difference in both cases i think and we’re talking about big museums and not galleries of

1:19:17

course it would have made a big difference if there had been curators

1:19:23

who who we could have worked in sync with in in both instances

1:19:32

anyone else from dtp yeah um i want to make some comments

1:19:39

around fugitivity and flight um just to echo some of what’s been said

1:19:44

before like uh latonya was talking around like the idea of you know being black and not being able

1:19:50

to stick around in white spaces for too long um i totally feel that

1:19:55

just yesterday i was like you know i did have this dream of being a bartender i could drop out of it my phd i could

1:20:04

drop out of my phd program at nyu and just be that bartender just be you know i i

1:20:09

that’s i was literally like having that moment so there’s this like fugitivity and flight that comes from white spaces

1:20:15

or the fear of getting co-opted you know um uh you know museums right now you know

1:20:22

you’re like decolonization land back and they’re like did i hear land acknowledgement is that

1:20:28

what you want you’re like no i’d like you to repatriate they’re like but we’re on lenape land i said it you know and

1:20:34

you’re like okay now we got him we gotta push past that right there’s always this sense of not being able to hold on to something

1:20:41

even if you nurture it and build it up and do something because the museum either co-ops it or um or you lose your mind

1:20:49

um so i i was that made me wonder like where do we stop for some sense of

1:20:56

belonging you know thinking of like what is the opposite of fugitivity um some sense of belonging um how do we

1:21:03

build these kind of care zones or safety zones or comfort zones that folks were talking about and then i

1:21:09

really started thinking about that we’re maintaining two spaces we’re maintaining a fugitive space of refusal

1:21:15

um but then we’re also maintaining a communal space of affirmation which is uh an abolitionist problem to

1:21:21

have right um thinking of on both the yes and the no the refusal and the affirmation um and then lastly i

1:21:29

was just thinking of you know it’s really hard to keep those two spaces separate um even mentally um they’re two separate

1:21:36

ways of relating two ways of being in the world um and it made me think of what happens when we become

1:21:43

you know kind of uh fond of of of being fugitives or or the ways

1:21:50

that like you know when i’m in white spaces i’m very just like on edge i’m very like you know don’t

1:21:57

come for me unless i have sent for you i’m very like you know um

1:22:03

uh yeah like paranoid almost even like who’s coming at me why are they coming at me and then you go into like a communal

1:22:09

space and you have to kind of like relax your shoulders you kind of have to like it’s a whole new mode of being

1:22:16

and a lot of it comes with trauma and being in white spaces and then we bring that over in those ways of being into into

1:22:23

our black communal spaces or our poc or our women or queer spaces so

1:22:29

um yeah you know how do we bring that fugitivity and that flightiness and that kind of on edginess and that

1:22:36

like third eye open at all times into communal spaces and let me know how do we navigate that

1:22:41

um in our movements those are some of the thoughts i was having

1:22:47

anyone else from dtp before we go back to latonya

1:22:54

before we go well actually i was going to direct a question to latonya just in terms of like

1:22:59

thinking uh about what mars was just describing and discussing um maybe you could talk a

1:23:06

little bit latonya about the black liberation center that you’re you’re building within mass moca

1:23:12

cleveland but also extracting it with you when you

1:23:18

leave yeah thanks for that um yeah i came up with this project black liberation

1:23:24

center last summer um you know i just i was like this place is just insane it’s really bad hurtful

1:23:31

place and so i decided to i was there under a fellowship a curatorial fellowship

1:23:36

and um i restructured that fellowship into a residency um because i was just like the people

1:23:42

who are supposed to be my supervisors are incompetent and racist um and you know the racism is

1:23:49

not a surprise it’s i’ve experienced that at every white museum i’ve worked at but the degree of incompetence was a

1:23:55

little like whoa it’s really bad here um so yeah i restructured my fellowship and made it into a residency and i

1:24:01

proposed that i would do this project black liberation center project while i was there so i would stop

1:24:06

actually um reporting to the institution as like a regular staff member i was like no

1:24:11

i don’t report to this this person anymore i just have a project like an artist coming in with a project they’re going to work on

1:24:17

and mine would be this liberation center and it was a series of programming and um it did like a teach-in last

1:24:26

december yeah december we did a big teach-in and you know thinking about the care like yes i was trained to do

1:24:32

this kind of focus on care for objects through this art history training you know and like i said i was more just kind of

1:24:38

trying to understand a museum and using a critical race theory lens applying that to museums

1:24:44

institutions um but yes in this very traditional way our history program their idea of

1:24:50

curating was like yeah we’re taking care of objects i started thinking like in the process while getting all this training

1:24:56

in these places that you know it was leaving out um and sometimes they’ll talk about caring for the artist sometimes you know

1:25:02

like contemporary institutions will pretend to do that maybe and maybe um but i started thinking i

1:25:08

needed to be working with my community more which has really nothing to do with this this place so i started thinking how to

1:25:16

work again breaking past that idea of the inside outside but just always working with my people i come from

1:25:21

working class background i’m a you know descendant of enslaved people thinking about the people who are typically pushed out of these

1:25:27

institutions how do i continue to work with them so um black liberation center i was

1:25:32

thinking like here at mocha cleveland they just did some really horrible stuff to miss samaria rice the mother of tamir

1:25:38

rice um last summer it was just it was just embarrassing to know i worked at such an

1:25:44

institution that would do treat this woman like garbage um i reached out to her

1:25:50

you know with this email address from this institution and i didn’t know she was gonna respond but

1:25:55

you know i was like i’m just gonna write to her and um try to see what i can

1:26:00

you know say what what can i do um we ended up collaborating she did respond back and said she almost didn’t

1:26:07

open it when she saw that address but she did open it because we had met one one time previously

1:26:13

um separately so she opened the email we started talking she ended up participating in this teach-in that i

1:26:19

did it was pretty fantastic it was showing me other ways to operate and again pulling

1:26:25

money from this like trying to in a way you know but this is a thing again about how the institution then co-ops work so then they’re like oh

1:26:32

they did it and they didn’t it was me who worked with her after they had already insulted her

1:26:38

treated her really badly um i was able to draw funds from the institution and then put

1:26:43

gift to her so she could do what she needs for her work as an activist um it has been hard

1:26:51

but i do think the black liberation center for me has been my future i called it a maroon society that i created for myself and this white

1:26:57

institution a way to save my life and um continue to adhere to my own

1:27:03

beliefs my own ethics and beliefs and anti-racism work and yeah the project is something i’m

1:27:10

continuing on like i finished up at mocha cleveland on the 30th march 31st and liberation center hope to have that

1:27:17

keep going it’s working with ideas audrey lord and you know it’s just a thing that i care about a lot it’s just a way to make a

1:27:23

art center and getting away from those spaces i do think i think it’s something that can

1:27:29

collaborate with you know other organizations artists

1:27:34

maybe institutions it depends on the place you know just finding people with the right kind of politics with the liberatory kind of focus

1:27:43

thank you maybe kind of recalling uh natasha’s a question and harry’s

1:27:50

questions but thinking about aesthetics is like one of the things to think about and and you know i think in relation to that

1:27:56

funding but um they’re also separate thinking about money um alarm if you wanna yeah i mean

1:28:04

firstly i’m just lucky i i i teach and my curatorial practice is

1:28:10

part of my work as a scholar and and i came from

1:28:16

a theater performance background where staging was very important to me so um that’s why the energies into staging

1:28:24

the cure the curatorial work in visual art matters to me as well

1:28:30

but i mean let’s not i mean um forget that these museums or

1:28:36

institutions there are places that produce orthodoxies of presentation orthodoxies

1:28:42

of interpretation and they want to socialize or assimilate people into those orthodoxies and even artists look

1:28:50

at those orthodoxies and try to reef off and produce work that could make them legible in those spaces

1:28:56

as well so um that’s what those institutions are there for

1:29:01

and there shouldn’t be any kind of illusion that they’re suddenly going to be revolutionary spots

1:29:08

but then that once in a while there are that loose moments where they don’t even have

1:29:14

projects that are that constantly coherent once in a while they’ll just open things up

1:29:20

and it sometimes spirals out of control for that and then they recoil and reappropriate them and so on

1:29:27

so they have their good liberal liberatory people and they have their bad laboratory people they just grow

1:29:33

look through the rolodex and so on and for i guess for me being lucky enough to

1:29:39

teach in a university where and i we we my colleague deb willis and i do this big thing called

1:29:45

black portraiture is where we bring scholars and artists together we roll in travel to different parts of the

1:29:53

world actually to engage this uh subject etc so this is kind of um our space of

1:30:00

dealing with all of these questions as they emerge and i think um what i’m

1:30:05

saying maybe crystal or mars mentioned earlier it’s really just a description of what

1:30:11

coloniality means right so imagine people for whom um the borders of history crosses them

1:30:18

where even their ways of thinking speaking and imagining the well being in the world is already predetermined by the very

1:30:26

language and discourse that objectifies them so you you you’re put into that what’s

1:30:32

franz fernando called instead of nervous condition right and that’s why and and it can do

1:30:38

two things it can just make you freak out and be in a state of despair or

1:30:43

it puts you it forces you you have no space for being neutral i mean even people who are conservative

1:30:50

um they immediately are reminded the place of the long game right so it’s

1:30:56

a black con like the idea of a black conservative yes they very much go through a process i remember that

1:31:03

image of alain key is being arrested for protesting not being in the republican um debate he was

1:31:10

arrested and he was maltreated as any other black man who was being

1:31:16

quoted disruptive in a television station because the republicans didn’t want him to be a candidate and so on

1:31:22

so even he learned so soon that the honorary space he had

1:31:27

in that circle was really a temporary one and that so the point then becomes that

1:31:35

how do we not get carried away by moments where we get recognition and forget the

1:31:41

responsibilities of the places we came from uh and i think that is a common occurrence where

1:31:47

you can easily do that so for me i feel for curators who professionally

1:31:53

they have to work in these institutions and they put in this permanent state of nervous condition where they

1:32:00

don’t want to be appear to be too disruptive they have to be um acceptably good citizens of that space

1:32:08

and when occasionally permitted to take into those discursive riches of doing

1:32:14

more important community work they it’s just a little license to do that so i i

1:32:21

understand the limitations that are imposed with those institutions that are working for me i just

1:32:26

because it’s not my day job i’m able to just go into those spaces and engage with those spaces but i also

1:32:33

in my case um i start out with the artists not with institutions

1:32:38

so there are artists whose works i like who’s in depth they fit into what i’m trying to do and

1:32:43

i put it in that space rather than working for an institution i don’t know for anyone i use museum

1:32:49

whatever it is or wherever it is so i don’t work for that so for me it’s just i walk in two departments in new york and here and

1:32:57

that’s what i do i just tell stories and engage audiences in those spaces with the kind of themes that i want to

1:33:04

do but the aesthetic issue then becomes critical like right that’s there’s no aesthetic that is permanent

1:33:11

there’s a situation it’s situational ethics right

1:33:17

and in most cases even when those aesthetics start out being quite radical and so on they can easily

1:33:23

be incorporated to become passive objects in those spaces and so on so it’s really the moment

1:33:29

in history when social inequities are being questioned and

1:33:35

addressed and the textuality of these art forms at that moment that really is much more interesting

1:33:42

than a universal historicity to the aesthetic itself because so

1:33:47

so for me the aesthetics of the work is really really like what andrew was describing and that it was so situational right and

1:33:54

it was it had its moment um even when it was destroyed the memory of the text

1:34:00

participates in the the what was going on and so on if those works were suddenly

1:34:06

bought and put inside they got they’ve lost their significance and so on so

1:34:12

the moment of signification is more for me that what will determine um the

1:34:18

significance of their statics and for me if it’s kind of a liberatory moment that’s great

1:34:24

but the coloniality of our everyday life is also an important point to make and i

1:34:30

think that was the point being made earlier that in that coloniality of everyday life how

1:34:35

do we create spaces of decolonization right how do we create the language and

1:34:42

conventions ways of seeing and being that actually constantly limits the uh dominance

1:34:49

of the coloniality of everyday life and i think for me that’s the bigger theme

1:34:55

of uh that that makes our work important right that as curators are as artists it is the fact that we’re

1:35:02

contesting uh or contending with this the coloniality of everyday life and who

1:35:08

speaks for whom and the legibility of what we do

1:35:13

what conventions of representations do we deploy to do them and where do they perform them and so on

1:35:20

and what kinds of discursive groups do we use them to motivate to

1:35:25

deal with social inequalities for me those big questions will determine what makes good art what makes

1:35:31

good uh spaces to present those work and what makes um even the catalog that

1:35:38

you produce for those audiences

1:35:43

harry this this is really beautiful i’m really enjoying how themes are building and the

1:35:49

exchanges between people and um yeah i just like hearing mars really thinking

1:35:56

about how healing is really important in dealing with these spaces that have been traumatizing spaces for so many

1:36:02

people um i think i want to pick up on natasha natasha and andrew’s points about

1:36:09

multiple modernities um the question that andrew drops in the chat

1:36:14

i think this is a critical point because actually it really speaks and this you know this ties to money into

1:36:20

financialization because it really speaks to the way in which there’s a growth mindset that’s endemic

1:36:25

to cultural institutions um you know it seems like

1:36:31

almost all museums and even non-profit spaces have to grow in order to be relevant

1:36:36

um and this this is tied to this notion of multiple modernities um

1:36:42

because as museums like moma expand and diversify their collections they

1:36:48

they kind of tie this to their ongoing growth and expansion um and so the recent rehang a couple years

1:36:54

ago for example involved a expansion of their footprint at development of the real estate at the

1:37:01

museum so of course this necessitates financial growth and a continuing dependency on

1:37:08

on philanthropy and financialization and against that paradigm i think i

1:37:14

really want to see deep growth um i think d-growth could involve the

1:37:21

re-maturation of objects equity and living wages staff redistribution of resources and

1:37:27

platforms provincialization and therefore de-universalization of the modern museum

1:37:34

and other strategies um so kind of in answer to the

1:37:41

to andrew’s question of how can curators balance between different obligations to different to

1:37:46

multiple modernities i think that d growth is one strategy that this can happen

1:37:52

um and it like d growth requires accountability to communities

1:37:58

rather than privileging the tastes and aesthetics of donors multi-million dollar climate-controlled

1:38:03

artworks are an extension of the climate chaos that is driving people away from their homes and lands

1:38:09

um so d d d growth um d growth address is a kind of climate

1:38:15

the climate issues of climate justice um and i want to shout out to hillman and

1:38:21

ricky from country study forum and collective and dracada indonesia who i see in the audience i know it’s

1:38:28

very late there so it’s amazing at joining us and their work in georgia and the other collectives and groups

1:38:34

in indonesia southeast asia elsewhere are examples where these questions of

1:38:39

cultural preservation and liberation are being are being addressed in ways that de-center european colonial frames

1:38:46

um so i see i see this work being done and i think that de-growth and

1:38:52

abolitionist museums can be platforms where connections can be made between abolition and landmark movements

1:38:58

in turtle island with archipelagoes of collective study and art making elsewhere in the decolonizing south um

1:39:05

so i think you know this is this is a manner in which we can re-enchant curatorial work and really creative and

1:39:11

liberatory ways um so yeah i see that as one as one

1:39:17

exciting kind of front for cultural work and a kind of integration of aesthetics in in

1:39:23

in our organizing and relationship building

1:39:29

sally yeah so there were a couple of things that um have have been floating through my

1:39:37

mind and one of one of the points that i actually want to go back to is something that natasha mentioned in their introductory remarks

1:39:44

where we’re at this moment and i guess we’ve been at these moments for i think the past 40 years where

1:39:53

the platform for who we hear from whose voices are being represented is

1:39:59

expanding at moments when there are calls to kind of turn out to invert these spaces

1:40:07

these types of spaces whether it’s the institution of the museum or the university or even

1:40:14

a health care system right and so at a moment when you know there is more representation

1:40:19

in terms of racialized and indigenous curators in these spaces and more of a consideration of how

1:40:25

different musiological spaces operate throughout the world beyond the us beyond

1:40:31

europe what this means we’re talking about dismantling them so it’s interesting and that’s kind of a

1:40:38

tension that um i for one is a cultural practitioner that’s something i need to navigate with

1:40:44

i need to contend with um in terms of aesthetics for me personally

1:40:50

i’m someone who started working in artist run centers and then went on to work in university

1:40:56

museums and kind of shifted back and forth between the two so my aesthetics in terms of my tastes

1:41:01

what i show etc it’s informed by those spaces so by the same token it’s like i can ask

1:41:08

someone who’s a more established artist who the way that we understand moving through these systems is that you

1:41:13

progress you start out in artists run spaces then you go to baby municipal museums then you go to these national institutions

1:41:20

and on a global scale someone who’s showing say at a moma or a whitney

1:41:25

they’re not going to be interested that’s what we understand they’re not going to be interested in having a certain type of conversation or

1:41:31

presentation in a different type of space well why can’t we invite those people

1:41:37

to show in those spaces why can’t they we invite them to meet us there why can’t curators go to meet people in

1:41:43

those spaces and the inverse of that is people who are used to showing in those spaces who

1:41:49

produce the types of aesthetics that show in those spaces why can’t we show them

1:41:55

in larger institutions right so that’s something that i’m thinking about in terms of aesthetics etc but then also these

1:42:03

aesthetics around modernity it’s interesting um because

1:42:09

the way that we understand modernity that’s something that’s kind of infiltrated many different audiences

1:42:15

many different intellectuals many different individuals on a global scale so what does what does it mean to kind

1:42:21

of inherit those those legacies but also what are the ways that we can refuse them

1:42:27

and for me it’s sort of like i don’t know like i think there are other curators

1:42:32

who work in this way where it’s sort of like we have these histories we can be in certain spaces but we don’t necessarily

1:42:38

feel that we need to engage with them or we’re interested in talking around them or talking beyond them

1:42:44

and i’m going to shout out kelly morgan who is on this call this is maybe not necessarily directly

1:42:50

answering what um natasha has proposed to us but i was reading an essay that she

1:42:57

wrote shortly after she left the indianapolis museum of art in newfields and one of the things that she was

1:43:04

speaking about um and this goes in relation to the recent controversy around that space where they

1:43:10

you know want to maintain their core white audience while diversifying who goes into that space

1:43:15

um kelly mentioned i don’t recall the artist’s name but it was an african-american it was a black artist who was showing in that

1:43:22

space and kelly and i believe other people in these in the institution they did the work in advance of that

1:43:28

that exhibition taking place there they went to churches they went to different community groups etc

1:43:33

and at the opening of that exhibition they saw i think their largest numbers of black audiences within that

1:43:40

space so i think those are things for us to think about like how do we move outside of the space and

1:43:45

how do we invite people into the space um and again thinking about

1:43:52

thinking about these idea ideas around binaries and i apologize if i’m mishearing what people are saying

1:43:59

because i think that when we’re talking about like curators having politics of radicalism

1:44:05

we don’t know whether they do or not right there are only so many things you can do inside these spaces

1:44:10

people may be um in allegiance to what we understand as being radical

1:44:16

and and actually what does that actually mean right what does that actually mean how are we defining that what does

1:44:21

radicalism look like in the space of the of the classroom the university classroom or in the space of the museum

1:44:28

it’s not necessarily something as drastic as what we might understand or expect it to be

1:44:34

but also when we’re talking about um communities and and um this was something that like

1:44:42

sort of i was thinking about this when mars was talking about this there are spaces that i’ve worked in that are built around

1:44:49

this idea of community and there is this idea of like um like community is something that’s

1:44:56

homogeneous or monolithic and there are violences that you can still experience within those spaces so when we’re

1:45:02

talking about say the black community that’s a term that’s often used and that’s not a space that necessarily

1:45:09

allows for um you know broad spans of like

1:45:15

of education of class of sexuality right and these are all of the things that i think we need to be thinking about

1:45:22

because curators are also members within these outside communities and it’s not

1:45:27

that even if you are whether or not you sort of make an

1:45:32

uh conscious decision i am going to adhere to the methodologies the expectations

1:45:38

that this institution demands you don’t necessarily abandon all those parts of yourself when you enter into those spaces um so

1:45:46

that was just something that i wanted to bring up and again when we’re talking about artists um and i mentioned artists

1:45:52

earlier on me personally not to call out artists but because the work that we do is predicated on the labor of artists

1:45:59

these institutions exist to showcase the work of of artists right it’s not that they’re

1:46:05

they’re um their um their artistic production is not being co-opted or misrepresented etc that they

1:46:13

have a lot of power in some instances they have more power than curators do or interpreters or other types of

1:46:19

programmers and again if we are making work a lot of us who belong to various marginalized groups

1:46:25

the work that we are doing is usually informed by our membership in those groups right

1:46:31

there is a reason why we want to talk about you know different racial or ethnic representations the reasons why we need to acknowledge

1:46:38

indigeneity why we’re insisting that within the americas right why we’re talking about ability so

1:46:44

it’s disingenuous to be making work around those issues and then to be

1:46:49

getting grants or funding because you are a member of these groups but then not taking that out to the

1:46:55

street and so when we’re talking about yes i was very impressed by the fact

1:47:01

that i’m going back to the whitney again that curators within that institution they put their livelihoods on the line

1:47:07

they made things uncomfortable for themselves working in in that space by signing that letter

1:47:13

condemning candace right and calling out their institution as well but when we want to be in these

1:47:20

institutions are working in them like these are conversations we have to have with ourselves what does it mean

1:47:25

when we are adhering to um i guess the exhibition of certain types of aesthetics

1:47:31

and and and we contribute to the reproduction of certain types of aesthetics what does it mean

1:47:37

when we are going to showcase or we want to showcase our work or work in a space

1:47:42

that has a history or has a collection that’s amassed around stolen artifacts and reproducing

1:47:48

misinformation in relation to them um this idea around longevity that goes

1:47:53

back to care which i’m gonna go back to um uh i think again it’s i think the way

1:48:00

that um harry is speaking and is pulling out all of these sort of attendant issues is very critical it’s very important to be

1:48:07

speaking about climate change and what it means to be um

1:48:12

caring for objects which we don’t which often don’t see the light of day right

1:48:17

that’s something we should be talking about as well but when i’m thinking about care and this idea of

1:48:23

temporalities or something that is temporarily you’re temporarily in engagement with

1:48:29

i think that’s a way of kind of showcasing respect that can be replicated on many different

1:48:35

levels so when even the care that it’s taking um that can be enacted within repatriating

1:48:42

an object returning an object i think those are things that are very

1:48:49

important to be to be mindful of moving forward but i think we can do all of that those

1:48:56

things in the moment in which we are engaged in dialogue with a practitioner with a maker etc

1:49:02

but then also realize that these things are not going to be preserved for for posterity i think i think that’s

1:49:08

okay i don’t think those two things are in contradiction with each other and um

1:49:14

and again in terms of thinking about artists there i’m going to shout out a couple of artists that are

1:49:19

all based here in canada there are people like shelly nero and sandra brewster and maria hubfield

1:49:26

who i’ve i’ve worked with all three of them but they will exhibit their work in different types of

1:49:31

spaces and i know sandra brewster in particular and i’m kind of talking out of turn here

1:49:38

as is someone who is interested in in showcasing in different spaces but doesn’t necessarily

1:49:43

value an exhibition at a larger type of institution over say showcasing in an artists run

1:49:50

center she will approach them both in the same way with the same level of respect and and care for this for this opportunity

1:49:56

for engagement and she’s also someone who is very invested in i’m showcasing this work

1:50:01

here these are the kinds of dialogues i’m having here but what kind of what kind of conversations

1:50:06

can i be having with communities that exist outside of these spaces how can we have those conversations

1:50:12

with particular um residents both inside and outside

1:50:18

of these of these institutions and i think that’s something that this is kind of what i was thinking of

1:50:24

in terms of how kelly has been working i’m kelly morgan i’m i’m referring to here both how do i engage

1:50:31

with these dialogues or how do i kind of unleash these dialogues within the space and outside of this space

1:50:37

so that you’re kind of moving acro across these boundaries however invisible or visible they may be

1:50:47

thank you i want to acknowledge time it’s 153 so i think i don’t think we got any questions

1:50:53

um and so if not then we can just um wrap up uh through

1:51:00

um hearing you all one last time and then we can have some closing remarks and then this will feed into the fifth

1:51:06

conversation in two weeks so i think latonya latonya if you have

1:51:12

any thoughts and then we’ll just do one last round yeah thank you um yeah i think it’s

1:51:19

definitely i’ve been thinking a lot about this what sally was just talking about the value of the spaces that we’re in in relationship to care um

1:51:27

this concept of fugitivity and i was i was writing down

1:51:32

the relationship between fugitivity and care like that’s something i i felt like maybe that should be just a

1:51:38

whole talk about that so i’m going to just stop there

1:51:44

thank you awam thank you for this opportunity and um i i think for me it is just that

1:51:51

curatorial practices are never finished they’re open-ended questioning processes and the places

1:51:58

we engage our work will challenge us and um the exhibition is not going to be

1:52:06

the sole way of changing the world but it will contribute some words and

1:52:11

that prominent act of engagement with the text with the artist with the

1:52:16

context which produces them is what actually will make the work uh an

1:52:22

active um process rather than a very passive process and i think the

1:52:27

decolonized the the colonial aspect is also critical that even as we

1:52:33

work in in institutions that have colonial histories etc

1:52:38

um our presences there are textually decolonial as well but we have to activate them so

1:52:46

that we are in excess of those places and i think that for me is the camera

1:52:52

from the thing that as curators or as professors or whatever we just want to show that we the place

1:52:59

is not enough to cover broad spectrums of subjectivity

1:53:04

that we’re looking at or that we’re signaling even by our practices as curators or as artists

1:53:11

so i think that for me that’s where i’ll kind of live it that it’s it’s really a permanent process of

1:53:17

inquiry encounters criticality and that we’re not supposed to be simply

1:53:25

providing stories for the status quo but we’re constantly

1:53:31

destabilizing and uh the status quo and its artifacts and that energy is what will make the

1:53:37

artist also get into the groove of producing works that are not finished but are open-ended

1:53:44

texts with which they want to engage the world

1:53:49

gary um i really just want to say thank you um brilliant conversation it’s really nice

1:53:56

to be talking with you all um to be building relationships together and i know that i and i i recognize i

1:54:04

think that talking is a form of doing i also just want to say that i want to do more of the doing with you all

1:54:10

because um i believe there’s a really important practice here that that is being discussed in terms of um

1:54:18

creating care building other um imaginaries and structures so really

1:54:23

excited to continue that work with you all um moving forward so thank you

1:54:29

thank you sally yeah i think i was just listening to what other people were saying and i

1:54:35

wasn’t thinking about how i was going to summarize this um but yeah i guess to build on

1:54:41

what what harry was saying that at the end of the day i feel very

1:54:48

fortunate and privileged in some ways that i’m able to do

1:54:53

to engage in a line of work where it um is kind of psychologically or

1:55:01

emotionally um fulfilling and invalidating and and energizing and

1:55:09

um through the engagement of art objects but more with the people

1:55:15

who produce them and having these kinds of conversations

1:55:21

and engagements um i find them to be very expansive and validating to the work that we are

1:55:28

doing that it can have it has a value for the people who are attending these spaces

1:55:35

and for the people who are working within these spaces but also the people who are calling us

1:55:41

to be accountable to think about how we are creating work

1:55:48

that that basically exists as a portal to all of the spaces

1:55:55

i.e the world that exists around us and so i think um someone made a comment in in

1:56:02

the it was more of a comment in the chat section about ethics i think you know there’s an ethics of care

1:56:07

and ethics of accountability um and ethics of responsibility that i think all of us who are working within

1:56:14

this field um need to be mindful of and that i think again i’m going to i’m going to thank

1:56:20

the other participants but for dtp because these are the ways

1:56:25

in which you work you kind of call us to account but also move beyond that you’re moving within

1:56:30

with an ethos of care with an ethos of love calling us to think beyond how we

1:56:36

function within these spaces so i’ll just leave it there i’m thankful for this um

1:56:42

yeah thank you all i think that you know my my last thought on this to kind of think

1:56:48

about is like again it’s something that i carry with me from yesterday but being in front of

1:56:54

moma and not inside of moma was so empowering once you find others and once people

1:57:00

walk out of the institution and find each other and then all of a sudden the type of aesthetics and the ability to breathe

1:57:07

in what is beautiful and possible just just the idea like you can you can represent care and feeling and

1:57:14

all the stuff or you can just experience it and you try to find the words for it right and i

1:57:19

think that something that i left uh yesterday with

1:57:24

is that the the light the people that were working in the library and people that were working in the archives and

1:57:31

then the people that were working at the tickets and one of the curators they all had similar politics and feelings to what we

1:57:38

have and the questions we have but they haven’t been able to talk to each other in the same institution right

1:57:46

so then creating other spaces both geographically psychically spatially is really important and i

1:57:53

think that the work that we’re doing is that we have to find ways in excess outside of you know

1:58:00

that that can allow us to uh to create other relations and that’s what’s that’s

1:58:07

ultimately what will be unsettling what we found my experience has been because

1:58:13

i left thinking moma’s really at risk

1:58:18

when you’re able to be outside and to meet and to organize you’ve solved an organizational

1:58:24

issue for them you’ve created a crisis and this is the same technologies that they use

1:58:29

to divide and control and conquer they use it with the migrant workers when they put them

1:58:35

in the same you know in the same camp unable to speak the same languages from areas that are geographically conflicted

1:58:42

around borders colonial borders so so the work that we can do um and that we’re doing together is is

1:58:50

and what we’ve managed to do because of curators that took risks that’s the other thing you know and i

1:58:57

think to awam’s point you know it was a fluke that we got into artist space

1:59:02

an absolute fluke because the director was leaving and he didn’t tell anyone he was leaving and he

1:59:08

kind of just wanted to leave with a bang or didn’t care something was going on there that was like you know harry can speak more to it and

1:59:15

then harry did all the work you know but also harry was there and you know and and we

1:59:20

the idea of like curator and artist really dissolved and we were trying to and we went in

1:59:25

there not with the show because we didn’t do a show but we went in there thinking how can we

1:59:31

redistribute resources and how can we create power in a decolonial formation in the city

1:59:37

and if you look at the decolonial manual that was that journey that resulted in being able to do ftp in

1:59:43

the city way outside of the walls of the institution right um so that doesn’t recognize these

1:59:50

divides thank you all so much nick do you have any last thoughts i just wanted to say this was really

1:59:56

beautiful i mean i feel like you know there’s care degrowth like aesthetics is an open document so

2:00:01

his uh arch art should be open document i mean i feel like so much of what we do in our movement is

2:00:07

constantly learning and learning and moving uh within the time and space right and and and

2:00:13

resisting coloniality through that so i feel like it all kind of connects together so it was really nice to hear

2:00:18

everybody thank you all and thanks everyone for coming in two weeks from

2:00:23

now same time saturday at 12 eastern time thank you thank you all

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