Writing.
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“A Reflection on Disappearance” (exhibition brochure)
Children of the War
The Harriman Institute at Columbia University, New York, New York
2024Co-organized with the Russian American Cultural Center, Children of the War was an exhibition by artists Michel Gérard and Marina Tëmkina organized around the publication of their new artist book titled Boys Fight. The text for this publication originated in 2014 in reaction to Russia’s initial invasion into Ukraine and was completed amid anxiety about the presidential election in the United States. The texts are written in the language of absurdity grounded in a feminist critique of the persistent presence of war. Gérard’s drawings taken from the French dictionary Petit Larousse, published in Paris in 1942 during the Nazi Occupation, appear alongside Tëmkina’s texts. The artist was a small child then and it was encouraging for him to look at the images of athletes playing traditional male sports. In imagery of fighting cavemen, fragmented dinosaurs, sportsmen, and combative games, Gérard contends with the dissonance between play and violence, strength and growth, and word and image. These original drawings are presented at the Harriman Institute for the first time.
This exhibition focuses on the traumatic consequences of war for children’s psyches. What images and feelings does our conscience carry throughout life? Why do we, the children of the war and post-war period baby boomers, return to this experience of the family and collective traumas again and again? The exhibition includes Tëmkina’s cycle of twelve texts “Children Who Starve” about the psychological self-negation as a result of food deprivation that children of the war experience.
The essay appears in the exhibition brochure alongside texts by Tëmkina and curator Regina Khidekel. I was assistant curator.
More information: https://harriman.columbia.edu/event/exhibit-children-of-the-war/
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“Overture”
Carl/Karl: Three Takes on Heidenreich
Carl Heidenreich Foundation
2023A new publication from the Carl Heidenreich Foundation, Carl/Karl: Three Takes on Heidenreich advances the existing scholarship on Heidenreich’s work by examining his late works of the 1950s and 1960s through the lens of his years in exile and his immigration to the United States.
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“Listening to Abstraction: On Postwar Silence in Aesthetics, Sonics, and Dreams”
Carl/Karl: Three Takes on Heidenreich
Carl Heidenreich Foundation
2023A new publication from the Carl Heidenreich Foundation, Carl/Karl: Three Takes on Heidenreich advances the existing scholarship on Heidenreich’s work by examining his late works of the 1950s and 1960s through the lens of his years in exile and his immigration to the United States.
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“Michel Gérard : le flux de matière”
Exhibition catalog: Michel Gérard, sculpteur, et Marina Tëmkina, poet-artiste : Ensemble
Musée de l’hospice Saint-Roch
Issoudun, France
2023museeissoudun.tv/exposition.94.exposition-michel-gerard-marina-temkina-ensemble.html
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“Na Chainkua Reindorf and Simone Leigh at La Biennale di Venezia”
Dissolve
April 17, 2023This essay examines the hybrid space where textiles meet architecture, unraveling national iconographies and insignia through works at the 59th Venice Biennale by artists Simone Leigh and Na Chainkua Reindorf. In installations of glass beads and raffia thatching, respectively, these artists propose a fluid notion of the nation that is personal, gendered, clandestine, and subversive.
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“Earthworks, Coal Mines, and Michel Gérard’s Geological Investigations of the Underground”
Dissolve
January 30, 2023This essay rearticulates the Anthropocene as a visual experience which moves one toward obscurity; we are in an optically-centered era that employs strategies of obfuscation to cover, stratify, and sanitize its contaminated landscapes.
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A poem by Marina Tëmkina with images by Michel Gérard (Introduction)
Dissolve
October 4, 2022This announcement introduces Dissolve’s online publication of Marina Tëmkina’s poem “Boys Fight.” Here, one finds a taxonomy of masculinity in Tëmkina’s inventory of big boys, old boys, mainstream boys, golden boys, and girls who look up to boys—all combative, doing intellectual battle, raging and sparring, and driven. Tëmkina’s lines are paired with the mixed-media drawings of Michel Gérard, which take their cue from an illustration of boxing techniques in the Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré, a popular and practical French-language encyclopedic dictionary first published in 1905.
Co-authored with Kathryn Barulich.
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“Future Orientations: The Planetary Horizons of Land Art”
The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
University of California, Los Angeles
September 15–18, 2022The conference theme — Edge Play — addressed the experience of our locations. The conference encouraged the exploration of edge ecologies, edge effects, and different forms of limits in contemporary art and culture — horizons, boundaries, cliffs and coasts, sidewalks and ledges, as well as pain and pleasure thresholds.
The conference paper “Future Orientations” considers the conference theme and its examination of horizons, periphery, and limits in the context of the planetary. How have artistic and literary practices engaged with the real and imagined unknowns of extraterrestrial space, the alien/other, the distant future, and speculative fictions? In contrast to the corporate futurism of privatized space exploration, how have artists and makers worked across the geomorphic, geopolitics, astrophysics, and science fiction to redefine concepts of ‘the edge’ and the periphery as interconnected and urgent explorations of the terrestrial and social?
This proposal foregrounds in particular the work of French-American sculptor and installation artist Michel Gérard. Born in 1938 just ahead of the 1940 occupation of Paris, much of Gérard’s work has possessed a direct or tangential relationship to war, occupation, the unconscious, and bodily sustenance by means of its material and site-specific considerations.
Information: artsofthepresent.org/conferences
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“The Bureau of Longitudes Restored”
Dissolve
February 22, 2022This announcement prefaces the restored Bureau of Longitudes (Volume I), which has been archived online at Dissolve’s main site. As many emerge from their slumbers and the isolation of the past few years, Dissolve has been busy. Dissolve has taken this period to resurface its 2016–2018 archive of writing, including The Bureau of Longitudes.
Read: dissolvesf.org/news/2022/2/22/the-bureau-of-longitudes-restored
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Hadar Kleiman artist website
Accompanying text
2022–2023
Read: hadarkleiman.com -
“¡Ojo! An Update from Dissolve”
Dissolve
June 15, 2022Dissolve was on an extended hiatus from 2019–2021 and is pleased to return with new projects, offerings, and a fresh digital patina. This update from Dissolve offers a wander through the website full of Happenings (news), Musings (essays, interviews, and reviews), a Salon (of offerings), and Past Issues, some of which we have recollected and re-released here.
Co-authored with Jackie Valle.
Read: dissolvesf.org/news/ojo
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“Hadar Kleiman: Gambler's Paradise” (exhibition text)
Confessional
Agatha's Studio, Buffalo, New York
2021Gambler’s Paradise takes the split form of a confessional booth to address themes of sin/serenity, escape/gambles, and heaven/hell. The show explores the fluidity and range which exists within dichotomies. By partitioning the space into opposing dioramas filled with the tropes and symbols of emoji culture, New Age-ism, and Las Vegas casino aesthetics, these symbols blend to create allegorical fantasy worlds open to the viewer’s interpretation.
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I:
“Walter Benjamin on the Conflict of Exile”
Carl Heidenreich Foundation
February 23, 2021We enter, fleeing is a series of essays drawing inspiration from the work of the literary critic Walter Benjamin alongside discourses in visual culture and contemporary art. The series considers postwar painting and abstraction in the context of diaspora, exile, and migration.
II:
“On the Dictatorial Perpendicular”
Carl Heidenreich Foundation
March 3, 2021Part II of the series looks at the use of text in Carl Heidenreich’s paintings in the context of Benjamin’s notion of the “dictatorial perpendicular.” Although it occurs sparingly throughout Heidenreich’s body of work, text is often used to signal political urgency, a rupture in everyday life, or violent and disorienting experiences.
III:
“On Rosalind Krauss and Horizontality”
Carl Heidenreich Foundation
March 15, 2021In arguing against the “dictatorial perpendicular” and the commercialization of writing, Benjamin enacts a future argument made by the art critic Rosalind Krauss on the shift from the vertical to the horizontal. In Heidenreich’s later work and particularly his Alaska series, his paintings convey this horizontality: they are no longer the vertical, bounded plane of small apartment windows, vision scratched out or covered over but instead spread organically, open up fissures, offer limitless territories, and propel the viewer into the infinity of horizontal space.
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“Interview with Lydia Ourahmane on her exhibition”
CCA Wattis Institute
February 2020Artist Lydia Ourahmane reflects on her exhibition at the Wattis Institute. Ourahmane’s exhibition positions faith and belief as the invisible mechanisms that organize bodies within space, reflecting on writer Georges Bataille’s notion of the sacred through her mother’s still-in-process memoirs. The artist shares her artistic process in this short interview. Watch to hear what inspired the exhibition title صرخة شمسية Solar Cry and how Ourahmane sees the blue filters covering the gallery’s windows altering the experience of the art and sound works in the exhibition.
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“Ed Aulerich-Sugai’s Julian Series: An Interview with Scott McHugh”
San Francisco Arts Commission
Ed Aulerich-Sugai Collection & Archive
2019A screening of the video took place on May 29, 2019 on the occasion of the event “About Ed: a reading and conversation with Robert Glück, Alla Efimova, and Daniel Ostrow” at the San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery. This event was organized in conjunction with the group exhibition With(out) With(in) the very moment at the SFAC Main Gallery (April 18–June 22, 2019). Curated by Margaret Tedesco, the exhibition includes eight artists who reflect on living during the Gay Liberation Movement through HIV/AIDS activism.
The video is available as part of the recording of the event. Skip to 12:54.
Watch: https://vimeo.com/340742060
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“Interview with Anthony Huberman on Vincent Fecteau’s exhibition”
CCA Wattis Institute
September 2019Director and Chief Curator Anthony Huberman shares his perspective on Vincent Fecteau’s exhibition of new work at the Wattis Institute. Focusing on the role of impulse and intuition in the artistic process, Huberman explores the emotional tenor and degrees of abstraction in Fecteau’s papier-mâché, acrylic, and mixed-media sculptures.
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“Interview with Cinthia Marcelle on her exhibition”
CCA Wattis Institute
November 2019Artist Cinthia Marcelle takes 11 minutes to share a window into her artistic process. Watch the video below to learn how she develops participatory structures that embody both order and chaos, what collectivity might mean today, and why she selected Oswald de Andrade’s 1937 script A morta (The Dead Woman) for her exhibition at the Wattis Institute.
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“Interview with Abbas Akhavan on his exhibition”
CCA Wattis Institute
May 2019Artist Abbas Akhavan sits down with curator Kim Nguyen to share a few thoughts on how time figures in his work, why he’s using the ancient building material cob, and what to make of the empty museum vitrines and disarrayed compositions within his exhibition at the Wattis Institute.
Co-produced with Kim Nguyen.
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“Interview with Akosua Adoma Owusu on her exhibition”
CCA Wattis Institute
May 2019Filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu talks about the cultural practice of hair styling in her Hair Trilogy films and about how the influence of W.E.B. Du Bois and Michael Jackson connects to her most recent film. The four films are included in her exhibition at the Wattis Institute.
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“Interview with Rosha Yaghmai on her exhibition”
CCA Wattis Institute
January 2019Artist Rosha Yaghmai and Wattis curatorial fellow Naz Cuguoglu discuss psychedelic spaces, playing with scale, a spider’s view of the world, and the process behind Yaghmai’s exhibition at the Wattis Institute.
Co-produced with Naz Cuguoglu.
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“Kill Holes and Other Negations”
Ixiptla IV — Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances (ed. Mariana Castillo Deball)
Bom Dia Books
2018Ixiptla IV – Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances is a journal about trajectories of anthropology initiated by Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball. The publication takes the form of a highly visual magazine with essays by anthropologists, archaeologists, artists, and writers, including Ursula K. LeGuin, John Cage, R. H. Barlow, Christopher Squier, and Matthew Robb. The publication explores the tension between indeterminacy and narrative within archaeology and art.
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“E’ch Pi El and Ar E’ch Bei: Aztec Gods Haunting ‘Weird Tales’”
Ixiptla 4 – Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances (ed. Mariana Castillo Deball)
Bom Dia Books
2018Ixiptla IV – Feathered Changes, Serpent Disappearances is a journal about trajectories of anthropology initiated by Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball. The publication takes the form of a highly visual magazine with essays by anthropologists, archaeologists, artists, and writers, including Ursula K. LeGuin, John Cage, R. H. Barlow, Christopher Squier, and Matthew Robb. The publication explores the tension between indeterminacy and narrative within archaeology and art.
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“Scattered Light: Ephemeral Action, Protest, and Circulating Imagery”
Dissolve
February 14, 2018Ephemeral, political interventions seem to toe the line between protest and art, while not functioning as either. Citing works of contemporary art, political theory, and media studies, ths article ponders the possibilities of these actions as digital media, exploring how they morph while circulating virally. When considering digital actions in the context of visual culture, the visual image might have more power than one would think.
Read: dissolvesf.org/pre-histories/scattered-light-ephemeral-action-protest-and-circulating-imagery
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“Shaghayegh Cyrous with Kathryn Barulich and Christopher Squier” time/difference: Part 1
Dissolve
September 28, 2017time/difference is a series inspired by the exhibition Eleven and a Half Hours. The authors hold near and will continue to focus the political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s ideas concerning the space of a singular person who exists between each and all people; that by being born, we are involved in a plural situation, a community, in which any action of one—even breath—cannot exist without another. This project is open in content and form, doing the deliberate work of unraveling of thought, exchanging ideas, and collaborative breath and production. An interview between Shaghayegh Cyrous, Kathryn Barulich, and Christopher Squier on the exhibition Eleven and a Half Hours sets time/difference in motion.
Shaghayegh Cyrous is an artist and curator whose interactive time-based investigations, participatory projects, and video installations create a poetic space for human connections.
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“Torn Seams and Sound Scores at Gallery Wendi Norris”
Dissolve
April 7, 2017Gallery Wendi Norris’ exhibition Seeking Civilization: Art and Cartography ostensibly questions how mapping practices have been reformatted to reflect changes in citizenship, power, and nationhood. The exhibition draws its frame of reference from Robert Storr’s 1994 exhibition Mapping at MoMA, which included one of the same works featured here. The refrain by seven artists—the majority living within the rapidly shifting geography of the Bay Area—is one which situates us within a complex of overlaid cartographies, which cannot be delineated by the clear partitions and broad strokes of traditional mapping. Instead, these artists transform the flat surface of various maps into rugged terrain, full of fissures and interruptions.
Read: dissolvesf.org/re-views/2017/4/6/seeking-civilization-art-and-cartography-at-gallery-wendi-norris
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“Footnotes on the Ostrich Feather Wedding Dress Project: Wearing the Beast”
Dissolve
February 9, 2017Footnotes is a project of studio visits and artist interviews. It examines the spaces and detritus of artists’ studios to ground discussions of artwork in their process, references, and inspiration.
In the Ostrich Feather Wedding Dress Project, Joanne Easton and Lorna Stevens invited thirteen artists to respond to an ostrich feather wedding dress as a material and symbol: its textures, terrors, and broader connotations. In the process, the project became an experiment in a symbol’s potential to shift its meaning across contexts, uses, and purposes and to become newly defined, enigmatic, or irregular through the transformations of the artists involved.
Read: dissolvesf.org/inter-views/2017/2/8/footnotes-ostrich-feather-wedding-dress
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“Surgical Experiments in the Medium of Collage”
By Carolina Magis Weinberg and Christopher Squier
Dissolve
February 8, 2017Alongside Irena Azovsky’s collage animation, a poem or perhaps another collage, but of words, thoughts, and ideas.
Read: dissolvesf.org/issue-3/surgical-experiments-in-the-medium-of-collage
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“Foreword to Issue 3: Touch”
By Christopher Squier and Julian Wong-Nelson
Dissolve
February 8, 2017For the third issue of Dissolve, the authors examine the theme of haptics—or touch—as it relates to specific sites, spaces, works, and their tangents. As the editors, we began to see touch materialize around us as we wrote—and read—about the various ways it mediates our experience with visual culture and the world. For us, touch was invoked locally in the art galleries and institutions we visited while feeling our way through this issue.
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“Susan Silton,” “Close Encounters with the Archive,” and “Radio Towers and Telephone Constructions”
The Elephant in Another Room, or Notes on Disembodied Voices
San Francisco Art Institute
Spring 2015Taking up the life cycle of a key modern technology—radio—this exhibition and catalog take up the way cultural voices have freed themselves from the physical limits of human speech. With a nod to the pre-history of radio in Victorian seances, the phonograph, and the telephone, the exhibition documents and imagines how disembodied voices have fueled language and dialogue from afar. What does it mean to transmit that most intimate and daily of human exchanges—the speech act—across a distance where bodies are no longer present in the same space, if those voices occur in the same time?
Read: issuu.com/inanotherroom/docs/theelephantinanotheroom2015
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San Francisco Art Institute
Spring 2015Designed to coincide with a seminar at the San Francisco Art Institute, the volume coincides with an exhibition (March 9–March 21, 2015) inspired by the artistic community that established itself leading up to the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Contributors include Kathryn Barulich, Erik Beltran, Brian Dean, Libby Nicholaou, Ben Smith, Christopher Squier, and others.
Out of print.
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“Clay Days: An Interview with Matt Goldberg”
Dissolve
November 2016An interview with Matt Goldberg about his drop-in ceramic classes at SOMArts Cultural Center. Goldberg is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 2015) and the University of Colorado, Boulder (BA 2012). He received the Recology Artist Residency (2014-15) and the Palo Alto Art Center’s “45 Days of Clay” Residency (2016). His ceramic and assemblage sculptures remix American pop cultural icons through a comic, cut-and-paste aesthetic.
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“Carving Nightmares: Clark Ashton Smith’s Sculptures Within the H.P. Lovecraft Circle”
Dissolve
September 2016A ghastly chalk oval—a totemic monster in miniature with ringed, chiseled eyes and an elongated nose carved down to a puckered, screaming mouth, the tongue comically protruding. The small figurine is a stone carving in talc by writer Clark Ashton Smith, one of the masters of weird fiction—a field whose introduction exchanged the earlier ghoulish and vampiric stock characters of the ghost story and horror genres for some of the earliest science fiction and fantasy creations, including Azathoth, Shib-Niggurath, and Cthulhu.
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“Introduction to Bling Bling Marketing by Hadar Kleiman”
Dissolve
September 2016This introduction to Hadar Kleiman’s essay for Dissolve examines the symbolic and historical weight of the diamond. Kleiman’s sculptures offer unwieldy wooden diamonds on a grand scale that parody the advertising pretenses surrounding engagement and marriage ceremonies, a practice Kleiman developed around artifice and modes of presentation within fabricated spaces. Her work reinterprets the absurd luxury of cities like Las Vegas to understand and undercut their cultural significance in eerie scenes of empty gambling tables, dismembered plaster hands, and flickering green neon.
By choosing to recreate the form of a diamond at an impossible scale from polished wood—a material susceptible to mold, fire, and everyday damage—Kleiman reveals the charade in the marketing scheme “Diamonds are Forever,” placing them centerstage in the modern arena of divorce and disappointment. The four Cs of gemstone quality in Kleiman’s work can only stand for Capitalism, Commercialism, Counterfeit, and Contrivance.
Read: dissolvesf.org/issue-2/bling-bling-marketing-the-economics-of-diamonds
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“Footnotes: An Interview with Alice Combs”
Dissolve
June 19, 2016“Footnotes” is a project of studio visits and artist interviews. It examines the detritus and milieu of artists’ studios as an alternative approach to discussions of process, reference and inspiration, alongside the physical spaces devoted to working. It begins with photographing elements of the artist’s studio which might peak one’s interest, avoiding finished work. Subsequently, the interview takes each of these photographs as a point of departure for a conversation.
A number of these pieces appeared in Dissolve. Others were produced in collaboration with arts nonprofits, including the Carl Heidenreich Foundation, the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries, Kadist, and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art.