 I'm Saisha Grayson, I'm the assistant curator at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and I'm thrilled to have you all here with me to welcome Chitra Ganesh, Mariam Ghani, and Christopher Myers to the Sackler Center Forum. You've hopefully had a chance to see Chitra's exhibition next door, Eyes of Time, which includes a site-specific installation and artist-curated selection from the museum's encyclopedic collection. Having worked closely with Chitra on this project, I can attest to the dialogue, exploration, and sharing of ideas and points of inspiration that is part of her process. So it's unsurprising that as a suggested program for her show, she would want to open out to an artist roundtable that would include her close colleagues and collaborators as a way of talking about how exchanges and creative communities that stretch from Brooklyn to Afghanistan to India and Vietnam and beyond feed practices and projects here. I'd like to thank these three stellar artists and writers for joining us tonight. I'd also like to thank Jess Wilcox, our program manager for helping to organize this and the AV team as well, and Dr. Sackler for making all events at the Sackler Center possible. Looking ahead, I'd like to invite you to come back. On May 17th, we have a symposium called Revising Revisionism, looking at biography and feminist historiography, and that'll bring together academics, archivists, and artists to talk about the way that these practices inform each other. There are flyers in the back if you want more information. So to get to the main event, I'll give just brief introductions of the three artists, and then we'll get to hear them talk. Chitra Ganesh works across media from painting and installation to digital collages, film and text-based artworks, excavating suppressed histories, interrogating given myths and literary tropes, and refriguring both the past and images of the future to find new spaces of possibility for female protagonists and their desires. A graduate of Brown University and Columbia's MFA program, she's the recipient of numerous awards, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, and the endowed Kirst Larkar Visiting Scholars Program at Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is in museum collections around the world, from MoMA to Deutsche Bank Berlin to the Guangzhou Contemporary Art Museum, and recent solo museums have appeared at Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Guten Kunstala, Sweden. We are very happy that her most recent solo presentation is on view next door through July 12th. Marim Ghani is an artist, filmmaker, writer, teacher, and activist, activities that often blur and overlap through her research-based and politically engaged practices. Interested in the intersection between place, memory, history, language, loss, and reconstruction, her work has been supported by everyone from the Soros Foundation to Creative Capital, the Experimental Television Center to Art Matters, and recent public commissions from Creative Time, and the Arab American National Museum in Detroit. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including at Documenta 13, two Sharjah Biennials, MoMA, and the Tate Modern to name just a few. A graduate at NYU and SVA's MFA program, she lectures widely and her writing appears in international art, media, and political outlets. Her most recent solo exhibition is on view at the St. Louis Art Museum through July 8th. And as an author and illustrator of children's books, Christopher Myers combines drawing, woodcut, collage, and photography to create contemporary, compelling images that, along with the stories, they accompany combat the lack of diversity in children's literature. An issue he drew attention to in a widely shared New York Times article, The Apartheid of Children's Literature, last year. Myers has worked collaboratively with his father, noted children's author Walter Dean Myers, on numerous projects over the years, including 1998's Award-winning Harlem, before going on to write and illustrate the equally-claimed Black Cat. Most recently, he won the Coretta Scott King Book Award for Best Illustrations for Firebird, ballet dancer Misty Copeland's autobiographical children's book. A graduate of Brown University and the Whitney Independent Study Program, Myers also works regularly in fine art and fashion contexts. The video and installation he made in collaboration with the propeller group was one of the most talked-about and recommended stops at Prospect 3 in New Orleans this year. So we are really honored to have such an amazing group of artists with us who all have such great projects to talk about, so we look forward to hearing you speak. Thank you. Since Iris is up first, do you want to, I don't know how we should do, Myers is up first, but I can also go first, so sir. We have to exit this to get Iris. Good evening everybody, I'm really excited to be here with these two wonderful artists and brilliant minds and amazing friends and collaborators for a long time. I'm going to briefly introduce a couple of projects that I've worked on with Chris and Mariam and then I'm going to give it over to them so that we can really hear used tonight to really hear about their projects which are I feel rich, complex and very rewarding. So I have known Chris and Mariam for a combined probably like 40 years actually. I think I've known Mariam for 16 years and Chris for maybe 24, so 23, 24. So our collaborations have been, have arisen organically from our intellectual synergy, our overlapping areas of interest and also our interest in working collaboratively, non-hierarchically with history and with combining image and text. So those are some of the key ways in which our work takes shape. So I'm going to talk a little bit about two projects that Chris and I did together. The first one was in 2008. It was an installation that was comprised of numerous sculptural and painting pieces that was on view in Shanghai. And both of us were interested in the ideas behind a certain mythology of a group of saints, the Mahasiddhas, who attained enlightenment through transgressing boundaries and engaging with objection among other things. So it was this combination of transcendence and objection that we were interested in investigating the intersection of and also in having fun in the process. So here is one installation shot and then there's a detailed image of this piece. Do you want to say something about this? A very common image with the Mahasiddhas. And this is also an image that comes up in other cultures understanding of sainthood is the flayed body, flesh, the skin that's taken off the body. So in Christianity and in Catholicism you have Saint Bartholomew and you've seen images of as he stands just his muscles holding his skin. And oftentimes you'd have these Mahasiddhas saying that they had reached enlightenment while being wrapped by the skin of a dead person, which is this again this absolute objection but then this absolute raising of consciousness and that the intimate relationship between those two processes was very important to us. Yeah and we had we'll talk more about the nuts and bolts of making our work but this project involved lots of fun steps like finding a sewing machine in Shanghai with a bunch of teenagers which Chris can tell you about later. Along the along the lines of the idea of thinking about materials that are both abject and beautiful we worked with hair both human and artificial hair. Chris was talking to me a lot at that time about the idea Michael Taussig's idea of matter out of place. That's not Taussig, it's Mary Daly religious studies person. But Michael Taussig references it a lot. Okay no no I forgot thank you I stand corrected. So basically that that was very interesting to me in regards to looking at hair as a as a signifier of femininity and beauty when it's on the head and as a symbol of I guess objection or excretia when you see it on the floor on the subway platform or anywhere else off the human body. So that was that was another piece that we worked on while while we were there and the piece in the back is also one of our works. And there's this idea this often happens when you see things that that both valorize and demonize people of color and you'll have this beautiful relationship between the abject and and the exquisite or the transcendent. So you have like grills as a thing or like both like they're gold so they're transcendent and they're but they're also abject like there's also an objection to them which is very interesting. And yes and that the idea of of both like celebrating the bling while severely typing and restricting the subject that produces that. And this is a final piece in the in this installation. I wanted to share one one other installation with me so something that I think connects all of our works is trying to put our finger on the pulse of untold stories and looking for ways to bring unarticulated narratives unapproach to subjects to life through our imagination and also our historical research. So the trying to visualize something that is invisible or absent is something that's really near and dear to my general project. And one of the things that we this is another project that we did it was the project is called haunted documents. And do you want to say something about that? So in the early days of photography when there was this moment in which photography was being taken unquestioned as documents of something real you know so they were used in court cases in those early days photographers who are all liars you know that there's this beautiful moment in which photographers say we're photographing ghosts we're photographing spirits we're photographing spirit mediums. And so these photographs became well known and fairly popular and we we were interested in that again there's a there's a duality in that where there's an absolute belief in the scientific but there is also a belief in some spiritual world and how what is the relationship between those two and the seeing the unseen at the center of it. And I think this is this was really interesting compelling for me too because you see this also in early film and silent film that before film and photography developed an indexical relationship to reality and started to function as a transparency through which something was objectively rendered they were actually quite playful and fantastical in how they the how these media were treated so the idea of the fantasy and the myth actually guiding the development of these particular forms was interesting to me. So these are evidence of people's exorcism so people would have spiritual trouble they would sit in this room with the photographer go through the sands and then they would be provided evidence that whatever matter it was that needed to be excised from the body was actually excised. And so we decided to look at that as a form that we could then play with from there like that that this thing that was like the evidence of charlatanism in that we wanted to think of that in and of itself as a form so these are some of the takes that we had on this seeing the unseen the rendering the invisible somehow visible. And in in this process so this the the context for this piece the setting is a subway tunnel this one is on sea so we were interested in this idea of a liminal space space a threshold space between inside and outside between body and spirit between matter and the immaterial. So all of the places in which these images were created were also somehow threshold spaces. Rooftops. And in our process of working on this project it was it was an intimate one in which the subjects of the photographs were also people that we knew well and some of our friends so the the relationship with the subject and the intimacy there was also part of it. As well as there's also a thing about hand work with all of the work that we've done together we're both hand and so that that's that's kind of central to the way we think is that it's that these all of because the traditions that we're thinking about are embodied a lot of the things that we think about. And we're both interested in the the histories of the materials that we use in our work. They're their previous histories their current histories and also thinking about their future histories. So okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna now move on to talk about Index of the Disappeared which is a very long-term ongoing collaborative project that I've been working on with Mariam. The project began in 2004 and it began also organically we were both asked to contribute an artwork to a show that had as its theme artists curators choose artists who then respond to something in the Republican National Convention. Something that was not discussed at the Republican National Convention. And so we both immediately gravitated toward this issue of post-911 detention and deportation. So the piece the first piece we did had two parts so this is the first part of it and then Mariam's piece which was actually a video was installed concurrently to this right next door. So part of the way in which our project functions is also in its public address and in the way in which we engage public space and also passerby viewers. So this for me this idea of the undercurrent the simultaneous undercurrent of another narrative of disappearance and for both of us came to mind as we would walk around New York seeing this which would be images of people who had disappeared due to the World Trade Center collapse and knowing at all the same time that special registration was happening people we knew were being profiled activists were getting in trouble some of the cases which are still going on today. So the project has continued for 10 years because the post-911 landscape is a web that keeps weaving itself and is now weaving itself on domestic territory more obviously than ever. Sure I can talk about this project so in 2008 Creative Time was doing their sort of multi-city project Democracy in America and we were invited to do a project for the the end of this the endpoint of this project which was the Convergence Center at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and we found this one room at the Armory which was actually the room that was once the headquarters of the the administrative headquarters of the National Guard Regiment that used to be based at the Park Avenue Armory and the shelves actually still had the labels on it that were used by the administrative like yeah by the administrators of this regiment so they were you know sort of perfect for they gave us this idea to basically do this kind of exploded archive installation where we did a site specific and site responsive installation of documents from the archive and added a whole series of new documents related to military codes of conduct and especially to issues around Abu Ghraib and the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and yeah basically it was dressed up as if it were an office that had just been abandoned in the middle of an internal investigation and I mean just to step back a little bit one of the key aims of our project is to create an archive around these erasures and absences so how do we do that we research particular narratives of individuals we do a lot of work with legal documents we look at the language we look at the way in which the body disappears both from the physical world and then disappears again through the process of redaction or surveillance or detention so or the ways in which those erasures and redactions enable disappearances of physical bodies through their concealments so this is a detail image of the site so we use we use the architecture of particular sites in putting our works together that was at the Park Avenue Armory and this is a piece that was shown at the Buffalo Public Library this is an installation and here's the second part right this was a parasitic archive basically where we mixed some of our primary source documents and a kind of reimagining of the environment of the library with resources that we curated from the library's existing collection and this image is an image of a prison in Afghanistan with testimony handwritten and inscribed into the barbed wire that was a stuff that we researched and found that was detaining narratives right first person testimony about black sites in Afghanistan um I'm gonna go a little more quickly but I'll leave a lot of images here this you can actually see on the web so please go explore it yes this is a Guantanamo effect which is a web project we did for creative time reports and it was at a point after we had been um taking online material and making it material making it physical translating it into the physical world for a long time annotating it selecting it sharing it with you yeah and then we decided um it might be time to put it back online to think about how we could take this very idiosyncratic arrangement of material that we had been doing for the physical index archive and translate it back into an online venue but in a way that would preserve and and how to use the form yeah and how to use the form and the structure of our interaction with the web to reveal the layers of information that remain hidden under our very abstracted thoughts around these concepts so basically you could click on any of these cards and you would receive more information this is an image of Omar Kader who was just granted bail this week and he was the youngest person to be detained at the age of 15 at Guantanamo and this is a letter that he wrote to his mother all of this information is in the public record this is an image from a powerpoint presentation that is shared with young workers of the FBI and CIA showing them how to bury a muslim person powerpoints are a remarkable trove of imagery about what is happening in post-911 policy and very chilling really you can imagine at that this is actually part of the official HR kind of training for people is so the the cards also involve language so you could actually click on all of these and get access and archive of articles and documents and they also include textual fragments that we felt were very poetic and powerful that were taken from our research this one for example is from a poem that was written in Guantanamo these poems that were scratched on to styrofoam cups with prisoner's nails and then smuggled out by their lawyers and this the idea of state-to-state agreements is about the fact that many people remain like permanently stuck there because no government wants to actually take responsibility for taking care of the human beings or that when agreements are made for transfers it's not necessarily a release it's more like a transfer from one state's custody into another with a series of different assurances made by the receiving state about surveillance for the rest of a person's life for example or continuing to remain in a halfway house or a number of like diplomatic assurances that are made that involve basically bloons being granted by the u.s in exchange for these prisoners being received using the human body is a poker chip yeah basically so i just show you a few more images and then we move on so that we can hear their discussion it's a window outdoor window installation that we did at NYU and this is part of our residency at NYU and this is another website it's called radicalarchives.net and you can look at it this is part of a conference that we put together okay all right okay so Chitra asked us to talk about other collaborations because you know we happen to be people who collaborate quite a lot i think you kind of get a taste for it and one of my long-term collaborations apart from index of the disappeared is with the choreographer and performer Erin Ellen Kelly who may have gotten here already yeah okay yeah so she's here as well and we've been working together for nine years on a series of projects that we refer to as performed places and i'm going to show you there was a path you had to walk there was a rank for every house for every room everything named and the names made an order and the order made a space there she was in her place placed in her room chief in importance the room itself the frame to the picture the shutters closed tight against the possibility of carnage i myself i myself i myself this is my room what had happened the year before the year before that was hardly more than a reflection of a rim of a glass set down on a varnish table a ring a year last year last year was already dimmed into vague reflections of memories the cottage loaned by a friend and cooking meals on a camp stove holding out against something that was later to be more completely shattered as against something to be too early shattered they were moved rather than moving hedged in by comment by precise and precisely aimed poisonous arrows by words that meant nothing but that stung all across the surface of life ambushed they dodged it was a blithe arrangement they might have made a success of their experiment they both wanted to be free they both wanted to escape they both wanted a place where they could browse over their books they had friends in common they had common aims Americans in london superficially entrenched they were routed out by the sound of aircraft she stumbled down the iron stairs of the hamstead flat and bruised her knee just in time to see the tip tilted object in a dim near sky that even then was sliding sideways and even then was about to drop Leviathan a whale swam in city desk above suburban forest it was a black gas she might have broken her leg as he filled a basin from the bathroom her mind which did not really think and canalized precise images realized or might have realized that if she had had the child in her arms at that moment stumbling as she had stumbled she might have no she did not think this she had lost the child only a short time before but she never thought of that a door had shuttered it in shuttering her in something had died that was going to die or because something had died something would die but she did not think that and he lifted the slightly tainted bowl of water and said poor julia poor judy and it didn't matter that the papers couldn't pay them for translations any longer and rave said he might as well enlist his give up his time to chart statistics why not he said might as well he said and she did not shout how could she oh god enlist then go go go go go but still he went and she was dragged along with him bumping over the steps and over the ocean a creaking trunk wrapped up in twine the protest stopped up in her mouth it was shutting her as other things were shutting her because the war will be over the war will never be over after he enlisted she found the room near the castle but then he had not yet gone and this was after the child and they were just where they had been except for a gap in her consciousness a sort of black hollow a cave a pit of blackness a black nebula not yet concentrated out into clear thought the surface was as the surface had been only colder shivering she received the dregs of what had been not openly resentful you will always regret it if you do not have this child and then september and the news the shock and the fall into darkness you're susceptible to shock a face swimming in white you should not have another child until the war is over if the wound had been nearer the surface she could have grappled with it it was annihilation itself that gaped at her i'm sorry as if that could possibly mean anything did i hurt you judy okay so let me unpack a little bit for you the process of collaboration on this particular project so this is called to live and first of all it's an adaptation of a novel by hd the the modernist images poet hill to do little and second of all it's a site responsive project that was made on governor's island during a residency a swing space residency in the lmcc space on governor's island that erin and i had jointly so it comes out of a series of different impulses and the first was you know just this time spent on the island where both of us started to have a kind of feeling about the island um and the feeling that we had was a very strong feeling about women waiting for wars to end um and it was attached to these houses these these military houses and this long history of the island as a military community going back to the revolutionary war and stretching all the way into the 1960s and it's a very kind of complicated twisty sort of thing that you feel when you're inside these houses where they're decaying and the decay seems to match this feeling right um this feeling of like waiting in war and women who are like pacing you you can almost see them when you're there um so we both spent a little time in these places we we spent time walking around the island we started thinking about what we could possibly do there we researched the history of the island we thought about particular periods in its history world war two seemed particularly interesting because there had been actual prisoners who were held on the island there were also conscientious objectors who were imprisoned on the island there were wac's like women who had joined the army who were there was a regiment of them there there were also women who were wives who were waiting there and there's this whole kind of thing where like every military community is kind of like an island already and how much more so if you're physically on an island you know um so uh then we started to think about how to actually um build a narrative out of this and then i took a trip to berkeley and i was in a second hand bookstore and i stumbled across a copy of this book and when i had been researching the conscientious objectors i had uh seen a mention of this book in a footnote where it said bid me to live the novel is the best drawing room war novel ever written um and what that means is it's a novel that's about war with no war in it um where it's all about what happens on the fringes of war to people who never directly participate in the war and it's all about these kind of aftershocks that ripple out from a war and it's all about the way that war changes us and the way that waiting for a war to end changes us and changes our expectations of life um and it's especially about and this is kind of unfashionable i think but it's especially about the way that the people we become during war are strangers we become strangers not only to each other but also to ourselves and what that actually does to our ability to love and you know that's a kind of a very deep thing so i found this novel i said let's adapt this novel um and from there it becomes a process of improvisation where the collaboration with erin she's completely basically in control of casting dancers thinking about how the movement interacts with the spaces which we we talk together about which spaces to use and for example that that enclosed porch where there's that really intense scene um that was something that erin felt really strongly about she had been improvising there for weeks um and i wasn't sure about it i was like i don't i don't know i don't know about this space this house doesn't speak to me really and then we got in there and i was like oh my god you're right this is we have to use this this is really really important so you know there's this give and take in the collaboration also where each of us is bringing something different um so in this particular piece i was sort of suggesting things that had to do specifically where i saw i need this to be there to match something in the text and then erin was saying we need this for the feeling we need this to be there to bring this particular emotion um and then she and i and these other dancers would just start to improvise in response to the space and all of that collaboration comes into making the final piece um so we've made a lot of different projects in different places i'll just like very quickly flip through some images um to show you that and then we'll go over to chris so this is the um the piece that's up in saint louis right now which is called the city in the city and uh it's another collaboration with erin it's based on a book by china meville a sci-fi noir um it's narrated by uh a man derrick glaney who's very involved in the activist movement um miss orian's organizing for reform and empowerment and um it's also i worked with a couple of students at washu um and it's it's really draws a lot from erin's knowledge of saint louis because she grew up there um so my city is a fragmented my city is a broken my city is a box my city is a collection of various lines my city is a dysfunctional my city is a monster but my city is okay and that's there's an excerpt from it online if you're interested in hearing more this is a project we made together on the southwest coast of norway which has a phenomenal choral score by kassim nakvia composer we've been working with also for nine years um this is a piece we did for documenta 13 um and another one we did for the sharsh by anneal nine um and when we did in new mexico where it was just the two of us driving out there on this crazy road trip um with no idea of what we would do when we got there and then um just kind of sorting it out like partly on the trip there and then just like kind of driving around finding places thinking of things to do there are very quickly sewing costumes together sometimes literally in the car on the way there and so to the previous note of you have to really like the person and be able to so exactly exactly that's actually really important sewing skills and really liking each other a lot a number of years sewing yeah it's very very important and this isn't a gutted mcdonald's on 57th street um and then this is in a forest in germany so wide range of places that we've gotten to go together and explore together and really have this kind of you know intense like mutual improvisations together i think it's the best way to talk about it okay that's me done yes there you are um so excuse me that i'm not all power pointy but we got some pictures so the idea when when chitra approached me and she said let's talk about collaboration uh the first thing that sort of struck me was the idea that so much of what we do is about acknowledging the fact that collaboration is part of our everyday lives already you know in in general the the we're in the theory world we've talked about the death of the author and the death of the singular author over and over and over again i think what what it's all pointing to is that retroactively we need to understand that nobody does it alone if you're an itinerant painter in the medieval ages that paints hands sometimes you'll see paintings in the medieval times of without hands because they're waiting for the itinerant painter to come by who does pay hands very well um that's a that's a historical example of the idea that collaboration is is well misunderstood even as we are re embracing it today uh and i think that the other thought that i was having when you were saying hey talk about collaboration was that collaboration deals very well with absence it deals very well with thinking about absence so when you when you have the illusion of a singular voice there is also the illusion of completeness of a complete thought being but once it becomes a dialogue there's the implication of absence that there are thoughts that are not being shared that there are thoughts that are being shared only for the purpose of the collaboration that absence is i think of central importance to all three of us because so often that absence is us literally that absence is often to say women's work african-americans bodies um any number of marginalized people we are that absence so um i'm going to show you three kinds of collaboration that i've done outside of the collaborations that i've had the pleasure of working with tifferon and i'll also talk a little bit about the absence that's at the core of them um so this is a piece that i did recently at the prospect biennial in new orleans um early in the mornings in saigon in vietnam where i'm spending time you'll hear funeral marches and you'll hear them and they will remind you so much of new orleans they'll remind you who if you've been in new orleans i mean if you've been in saigon and you're black and you've missed black people for quite some time because you've been there for five months and all of a sudden you hear jazz you'll run outside the door and you'll look for the brass band is this coming up there and you'll say to yourself who is this what what is going on what is this history here from that myself and uh vietnamese film collective named the propeller group we built a funeral procession that left from saigon and arrived in new orleans for the prospect biennial these were drawings i did as it's sort of a a way of selling the idea of talking about what i wanted to do um the the through line that runs in this very um circuitous route from african-american jazz musicians reaching france in the war war one through a guy named james reese europe um he he comes with his brass bands and then the brass band tradition moves from france to all of its colonial holdings this is then picked up by vietnamese folks who then you know that this is why you have this parallel development um and that it happens at funerals which again there's there's an absence there a very literal absence that is also mimicked by the absence of a historical context so when you ask the jazz musicians in vietnam um hey where do you get this tradition from they say china they say um well we don't know where it comes from it's been around forever mind you they're using these french instruments they're using them in a very specific kind of improvisatory idiom so these here are um i these are some of the instruments that i built in vietnam um and they're played by vietnamese players then i i commissioned a score to be made by uh some jazz musicians here and gave the instruments to some musicians in norland so this this is a sort of pointing out of the absence we we inscribe a circle around the various absences that are at play both the absence of history the the death at the center of it the absences of uh guess we see some other absences and i think that the absences of this journey being tracked this kind of transcontinental journey and how all of these places connections remain buried for us now so that's so that's one set of collaborations so and it ends up being not only a collaboration between the credited artists the propeller group and myself but it's also a collaboration between the musicians the people who helped me make those instruments and i think that this is something that you often in terms of absences that we're talking about you often don't hear about who helped you make this how did this happen everything that we make is somehow it passes through hands upon hands upon hands the largest absence that you see consistently referred to in contemporary art is labor we want to see the work appear on the wall magically but where is all the labor and that labor is something that's super important to me as well so here's an example can i do it in some sort of way that i could just think i'm not a mad person this is a collaboration for you right now mariam's the best one actually i see look perfect you should be did it open the wall or did it not open the wall no i think it just opened one so okay thank you so much mariam okay so this is a collaboration of a sort um i'm working with the diaries of baslav nidzinski the classical dancer in the 1917 this dancer who pretty much founded modern dance um kept a journal and he kept a journal as he tripped into schizophrenia the journal is heartbreaking and beautiful and i love both the text and the subjects of the text which include everything from gender dysphoria to guns war and these sorts of things and what i did was i took failure failure is a specter in his life all the time and i think a specter in art but what i did was i did intricate drawings of what kind of shadow puppets i would like to have i took them to master shadow puppet makers in jog jakarta indonesia those guys were excited to work with me because these were these were new idioms for them but at the same time there was clearly a lot of respect for their art art art form what they do they cut them from the leather cured the leather made did some of the really complex engineering of the puppets this is one of them this is the guy who hand paints all the leather and we made together we made these shadow puppets so this is the workshop of the guy who hand paints the leather the guy who cuts the leather is different the guy who makes the handles is different and when we talk about collaboration and especially when we talk about collaboration as a sort of a a new thing we forget that there's these long long traditions of art being made by many many people all at once so this is you'll see the skeleton of this puppet these are these are how how they make the puppets cut from paper based on my drawings then these are the final puppets um and how they work within with translucency with space so this is that that that that one puppet that you saw earlier but naked now you see it closed um and one of and i and i wanted to show this work primarily because when i got to indonesia i found that there was a very very different understanding of what it meant to be a collaborator because nobody there made things um on their own and everyone knew this at the same time there were often artists there are many many contemporary artists that i like i love their work and they'll take credit for what they do but they often even the most big-time uh indonesian contemporary artists a guy like Agus Soagi or um the Ruin Rupa these guys even these Harry Dono they collaborate with younger artists often and help them you know increase their profile and i thought that that idea that there are these non-western histories of collaboration that we need to acknowledge um and that in so many ways that all of the the new collectives that we deal with um the the fashion for collectives in the contemporary art world is really just catching up with this much longer tradition the last um the last collaboration the last collaboration that um i wanted to talk about draws on another tradition a very long tradition of um collaboration that you know because the contemporary art world that's great um the contemporary art world is is late theater music performance often they have these well thought of traditions of uh collaboration that deal with absence as well um so this is a collaboration with an artist who's also in the audience canizah shawl and um it's a translation into performance of the egyptian book of the dead so this is um it's a it's like sort of a formula the egyptian book of the dead going forth by day in its original text with the west it's from the egyptian book of the dead um and it's there's a formula of what happens when you die what is the the ritual of death how do you tread traverse the afterlife um and so i was brought on as a collaborator for the director canizah shawl and we worked to find in that in that gap of translation that translation builds gaps translation in that in that gap there's there's a there's a beautiful absence that speaks to death that speaks to what what is missing and leaving that space creates that space for the absent in that act of translation um and so this is a collaboration not only between me and the director but it's also a musician uh justin hicks actors like william nadalon who has worked with peter brook for other and other performers so uh filmmakers so we're bringing together all of these forms in order to again trace the outlines of something and i think that when you're talking about the index of the disappeared or you're talking about you know the these ectoplasm based photos that we did we're always tracing the outline of something and i think that collaboration really really does that work well um in a way that the illusion of a complete voice that comes from a single artist can never do and and the gaps the the almost like asymptotic structure of translation of almost getting there and never quite reaching the exact point that that little tiny gap that always remains is very fertile ground with adaptation as well yeah so thank you guys so we should just we can just open it for questions i had a whole bunch of questions but i think you guys could also ask some questions we're very happy to talk about any of the projects or any aspects of the processes or any of the conceptual frameworks or no touched on this a little bit previously but um there's in our current moment there's so much uh interconnection and actually inextricable connection between the disappearance of bodies and the language of the law and how we think about the language of the law and the power of law and order i mean we can see that in our project and we can see that when we turn on the news and go for protests every day so we i think that's one place in which we're very interested in how the body gets kind of itemized into language and also what remains unquantifiable actually which i think we all look at there is an idea also that the body is inscribed and the body doesn't really exist without being inscribed and that i think is something that we're all interested in both what is lost in that inscription of the body in and that there is something lost in that translation into text um and and what to do with that loss it is something that we're both i think we're all fascinated with i mean i think in my work with erin one thing that has been really one thing that has come up a lot in this use of the body with language are these questions around misreading and deliberate disjunctions between the text that's presented and the movement that's presented at the same time so i think you know we've always tried to insist on the fact that this inscription of the body into language is often it's often an inscription that is incorrect or that is an inscription into a place that is the wrong place right so you know one way to do that is to create these deliberate disjunctions in the films between the text and the image or the sound and the image or different ways in which these things can like sort of jet up against each other and sort of rub against each other and produce these sort of discomfort the slight moments of discomfort and i mean i think we see this in literature and classical forms of sacred text and we also see people performing this on a everyday basis in terms of how they choose to you know appellation way in which we categorize ourselves or we don't categorize ourselves how we bristle against being categorized how we bristle against our bodies being slotted into certain kinds of what's fascinating to me though is the idea that that there is that there would ever be a correct way to be to be inscribed and i think that that's you know you often hear this in in many places about what kind of appellation people choose as if somehow any appellation would be a correct translation and there is something to be said on one hand of i want to choose my translation but on the other hand there should be always a kind of understanding that loss is at the center of translation yeah but i think you know because in a conversation in a collaboration there's always a conversation there's always this kind of biological element behind the scenes of a collaboration i think often that surfaces somehow into the work itself and that's why the element of language comes in and becomes such a strong part of the work because we're always in this constant conversation with each other right and you see that in actually many many artistic collaborations the way in which language inflects at the how image and text work together what about you guys very happy to see that some of that work is being centered and resuscitated both in a more mainstream art arrangement of objects such as at the new whitney as well as in thinking about these historical and political issues i mean i think i think that the other unfortunate um i guess move that i've seen kind of happen between in the interplay between collaboration and absence has been um at least for myself as a young artist within a feminist art canon where many um movements that couldn't be ascribed to the masterwork of one individual and many many players who are very important in these larger movements especially collectives of people of color have kind of um been not disappeared but have definitely taken a backseat in um art history and i think that that's also something that you know we we are thinking about actively that in the visual art world um it is hard actually in for institutions to quantify collaboration i mean they usually one person gets invited or the other it's hard to figure out who who is it really that's what the institution wants often is some kind of address to the individual so um i think that's another kind of consequence of of the collaboration and maybe the death or the um the limitation of the afterlife of certain works that i would have never ever seen if i hadn't seen the wax show and then you realize how many which was a show that was um a feminist revolution show that was of art in the 60s and 70s curated by Connie Butler and it was at ps1 and you realize how much of the work in that has actually influenced all of us without even having looked at it firsthand and so much of it was collaborative so i think that you bring up something really important the idea that um collaboration is between the artists it's very very open it lives in this this queer space of simultaneity which is really beautiful but then once that that that simultaneity hits the institution it then must be cataloged it then must be put into put within the strictures of the institution and you see this very much happening within as as performance art ages out to be to become uh collected you see that it then becomes reduced from this really living floaty thing into well how do we collect a performance score you know this is what we'll buy of this of this of a carolish name it or um uh hannah wilkie you know what do we what what is left over from hannah wilkie something we can buy she did it this is how it worked yeah i think for us in the beginning of the index i think also we talked very deliberately about the political choice to collaborate in response to something political um and i think one of the reasons we've been able to sustain working on such difficult issues for such a long time is because we work on them in the space of the collaboration i think to think about these things for such an extended period of time as individual artists would have been impossible and i think it's it's the space of the collaboration and the strength that you're able to draw from each other and also the the time that you're able to take away from it by passing it back and forth you know that allows you to continue engaging you know with issues that can be really overwhelming in their darkness you know and yeah yeah i think i mean for us also when we started our work it was a super i mean it wasn't a pre-internet but i think maybe i had just gotten my computer or it was definitely not a time where i could go on to the ACLU website and download 10,000 pages of documents one had to ask somebody for the pamphlet that the you know immigration services NGO had put together that your friend was working at or ask your friend who was a lawyer to give you information that was already released and so i think for us our other collaborators and participators are definitely people who work outside of art and one of the one of the other kinds of collaborators we work with are our friends who are criminal justice lawyers and attorneys who work on racial profiling of Muslim communities in New York of trans women being labeled as sex offenders in New Orleans and on Guantanamo yeah Guantanamo detainees communication management units and they also feel that being able to have a discourse about their work in this context is a relief for them because it is it is very difficult and heavy to think about the dark parts the dark side of absence and there's also this i think this illusion today that we have some kind of completeness of information i think because of the internet there is the illusion that somehow all of that it's all there for us everything and it's nice to deal with artists and non-artists to kind of you know resurrect that kind of information that cannot be cataloged so easily be it you know the legal work of uh an alexiaca cleus or Ramzan Khasem or the like the the years of experience in the hands of an old man in indonesia see there's one in the back i can't play them because they are playable yeah they are playable it was interesting the vietnamese musicians um had a hard time with them they're they're professional musicians that travel around to funerals but the young guys in new orleans they really got down with them because they're used to i think dealing with broken instruments so i i i believe that there is a a lay understanding that with the internet all information is somehow accessible um and and and it's and and that lay understanding i think um does then have repercussions that go in other directions like our fear of surveillance or our thought that you know that that we're being monitored at all times you know uh this that the the constant facebook message that you get that says um i i relinquish i i do not relinquish my copyright on everything that there is some thought that um we are in the information age and that all information is somehow accessible to us and as simple as everybody from primary school to grad school thinking that researching is just googling it i mean that is part of this idea of the knowability of okay just gonna google it and then we'll figure it out so for to for the the go forth piece um there is all of this research being done here about uh the book of going forth by day but all of that changed and was really enriched by a trip to egypt to be in the architecture of the tombs which was a realm of knowledge that i know personally i had not thought of in the same way but beforehand i realized that there was knowledge in the spatial kind of configuration of tombs that was really useful for making the project and you talked about that too the knowledge of the site yeah the knowledge of the site is really important and then of course there's like this somatic knowledge there's this phenomenological piece you know to of course the work that i do with erin a really important part of it is the phenomenological experience of the place which is why there's always a body in the work to reproduce that for the viewer and you know part of what working with a performer so closely for so long has taught me is that there is knowledge in the body that isn't anywhere else right and you can't reproduce that and in some ways it can never be translated