Artists Space

After La vida nueva
Curated by the 2019–20 Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Independent Study Program

August 7 – August 31, 2020

Blotted smoke-dots curve across a vast blue sky, spelling out the phrase "MI DIOS ES PARAISO", above a jagged skyline of red brick buildings. The photograph is taken from the vantage point of the Flushing Airport, where a pile of debris, which appears to be torn-up asphalt, and a few puddles litter the runway. Three planes are parked in the lower fourth quadrant.
Raúl Zurita, documentation of La vida nueva, 1982. Courtesy the artist. Photo by Ana María López. [Blotted smoke-dots curve across a vast blue sky, spelling out the phrase "MI DIOS ES PARAISO", above a jagged skyline of red brick buildings. The photograph is taken from the vantage point of the Flushing Airport, where a pile of debris, which appears to be torn-up asphalt, and a few puddles litter the runway. Three planes are parked in the lower fourth quadrant.]

On a sunny, cloudless day in June 1982, five decommissioned World War II planes took off from Flushing Airport in Queens, New York. In white smoke-dots blotted across the sky, they typed out a poem, "La vida nueva", by the artist and poet Raúl Zurita as he and a group of friends and artists looked on. The work referenced the 1973 U.S.-led military coup against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and the subsequent dictatorship in Chile. After La vida nueva takes its name from this work of Zurita's and turns back to this era that was full of the promise and violence of the new, to bring us a sense of a moment in time lost and imperfectly recovered. Through video, installation, sculpture, poetry, performance and archival documentation, the works explore constructions of self and nation by sifting through the unstable terrain of the past. Drawing on histories and archives of feminist, queer, and Third World liberation movements and responding to the uneven forces of neoliberalization, the artists suggest the pursuit of a new life that is concomitant with new ways of being together.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, After La vida nueva consists of an expanded catalogue, available for download, and an online component, hosted by Artists Space, where a weekly series of “spotlights” of different works in the exhibition will include screenings, archival documents, images, and text.

The exhibition features works by Amelia Bande, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, Renée Green, Rummana Hussain, Caroline Key, Alan Michelson, Rashaad Newsome, Catalina Parra, Cici Wu, and Raúl Zurita.

August 8 – 15: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Renée Green, Caroline Key, and Cici Wu

August 16 – 23: Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, Alan Michelson, Rashaad Newsome, and Catalina Parra

August 24 – 31: Amelia Bande, Rummana Hussain, Third World Gay Revolution and Juan Queiroz, and Raúl Zurita

Curated by Weiyi Chang, Sofia Jamal, Colleen O’Connor, and Patricio Orellana, the 2019–20 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows of the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Renée Green, Caroline Key, and Cici Wu
August 8 – 15

A mouth silently forms the shape of the eight Korean vowel graphemes while video noise or ‘snow’ threatens to drown it out.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, still from Mouth to Mouth, 1975. Video, black and white; 8 minutes. Courtesy University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. [A mouth silently forms the shape of the eight Korean vowel graphemes while video noise or ‘snow’ threatens to drown it out.]

Mouth to Mouth, a video piece by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha made in 1975, illustrates the possibilities of language when address becomes incomprehensible. Cha does this by pulling apart the two elements necessary for speech: the physical body and the immaterial voice. This split is made within the audiovisual medium itself—Cha's editing works against the convention of synchronized audio and video tracks—which the artist maps onto the tension between orality and writing. Her video begins with a slow pan across eight Korean vowel graphemes, followed by a sequence of close-up shots of a mouth silently enunciating each of the eight vowels that alternate with passages of video static.

*Due to the shift to a virtual exhibition platform, we are only able to show a still from Mouth to Mouth.

A two-page spread from the novel Dictée shows four diagrams of a human larynx and neck on the left-hand page and a page of writing from the novel on the right.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (New York: Tanam Press, 1982), 74 - 75. [A two-page spread from the novel Dictée shows four diagrams of a human larynx and neck on the left-hand page and a page of writing from the novel on the right.]

Cha’s profuse practice includes writing as well as art and demonstrates a vested interest in the communal possibilities of such in-between spaces. Her most famous book, Dictée (1982) is an avant-garde novel that takes as its point of departure the Japanese occupation of Korea (1919–1945). The novel’s title is derived from the French word meaning “dictation,” though it also designates the exercise of typing spoken words, a practice typical of the early stages of learning a new language. Blending Korean, English and French, Dictée's use of language challenges the notion of a “mother tongue,” rebuking the use of language as a cultural and political weapon in constructing ideas of the nation, which often silence dissident ways of being and speaking in the world. To the deconstruction of language presented in Mouth to Mouth, Dictée adds a preoccupation with language learning and translation particularly as part of a crucial, if ambivalent, aspect of the process of identity formation.

A dilapidated wood shed is shown partially covered by large mounds of earth. Fingers reach out from the lower-right corner to caress the image.
Renée Green. Still from Partially Buried, 1996. Video, color, sound; 20 minutes. Courtesy the artist, Free Agent Media, and Video Data Bank. [A dilapidated wood shed is shown partially covered by large mounds of earth. Fingers reach out from the lower-right corner to caress the image.]
A television box monitor displays a diagram connecting Robert Smithson to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and the past to the present and the future.
Renée Green. Still from Partially Buried Continued, 1997. Video, color, sound; 36 minutes. Courtesy the artist, Free Agent Media, and Video Data Bank. [A television box monitor displays a diagram connecting Robert Smithson to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and the past to the present and the future.]

The complexity of historical returns is foregrounded in Renée Green’s Partially Buried (1996) and Partially Buried Continued (1997), which are two works in a three-part series that weaves an intertextual collage between the artist’s family history, American political events, and American art. In Partially Buried, Green returns to one of Robert Smithson’s earthworks, Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), a project executed at Kent State University (KSU) that inadvertently became a symbol of the Kent State Shootings (which took place later that same year) when a student painted “May 4 Kent 70” on the shed’s lintel. Green’s video relates Smithson’s earthwork to her mother’s experience of being a student at KSU during this time.

Partially Buried Continued reprises the themes of art and politics, as well as personal and public histories, by focusing on Green’s father and particularly his experience as an American officer during the Korean War. Green creates a montage of the Polaroid photographs taken by her father during his deployment with ruminations on Cha’s Dictée, combining this with original footage shot during Green’s own visit to South Korea as part of a commission. As in Cha’s practice, Green plays with the use of spoken versus written language through the interplay between the videos. The art-historical citations of Smithson and Cha, alongside the makeshift genealogy Green constructs from her parent’s memories, become an integral way of situating the artist herself within a historically specific yet nonlinear continuity.

A bulbous light-hued pink sphere-like object rests upon a white plinth. When in use, a red light on the object blinks to signal that the object is functioning correctly.
Cici Wu, Foreign Object #1 Fluffy Light (anonymous), 2018. Handmade opalescent glass, CDS photo-reflectors, white and orange LED indicator, switch, chargeable battery, electronic board, memory cardboard. 4.5 × 4.5 × 4.5 in. (11.43 × 11.43 × 11.43 cm). Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal Gallery. Photo by Joerg Lohse. [A bulbous light-hued pink sphere-like object rests upon a white plinth. When in use, a red light on the object blinks to signal that the object is functioning correctly.]

At a rare screening of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s unfinished film White Dust from Mongolia at the Museum of Art and Design in New York in 2017, artist Cici Wu attended with a prototype of her project Foreign Object #1 Fluffy Light—a portable light-reading device that translates light-waves into binary code that is then recorded on an SD-card. Wu’s act of bootlegging Cha’s film also becomes a point of abstraction, one that can be thought of as the attempt to extract Cha’s unfinished work, to recall an image lost to history. By not faithfully reproducing the fragments of Cha’s film that do remain, Wu’s work also questions the necessity of the image in its documentary mode, its scopophilic making visible of the subject. The abstract images reflect on the (im)possibility of historical transmission and objectivity. Neither Cha nor Wu are able to see or produce the images they desire, and their respective projects exist in the realm of the unfulfilled.

Read an interview with Cici Wu and Yong Soon Min from the exhibition catalogue.

White text on a black screen reads: “From there, he learned to speak in sign…”
Caroline Key. Still from Speech Memory, 2007. 16mm film on video, color, sound; 23 minutes. Courtesy the artist. [White text on a black screen reads: “From there, he learned to speak in sign…”]
A man wearing a grey polo shirt sitting in front of a sky blue wall signs in Japanese sign language.
Caroline Key. Still from Speech Memory, 2007. 16mm film on video, color, sound; 23 minutes. Courtesy the artist. [A man wearing a grey polo shirt sitting in front of a sky blue wall signs in Japanese sign language.]
White text on a black screen reads: “An additional interpreter was needed to translate my father’s Korean into English.”
Caroline Key. Still from Speech Memory, 2007. 16mm film on video, color, sound; 23 minutes. Courtesy the artist. [White text on a black screen reads: “An additional interpreter was needed to translate my father’s Korean into English.”]

In Caroline Key’s film Speech Memory (2007), the artist uses her own family to consider the ways in which imperial power is normalized through the control of language. The bulk of the film’s narrative is told through a dialogue between Key and her father, which is spoken in Korean but translated into English subtitles that appear printed over a black screen. These moments highlight the act of translation and are interspersed with untranslated footage of Key’s father signing a form of pidgin Japanese sign language. Having never formally studied Japanese sign language, Key’s father learned only basic sign by communicating with his father. Together, they developed their own language—both a product of necessity but also the result of the brutal effects of colonialism and its tendency to enforce monolingualism in the construction of national unity.

Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab, Alan Michelson, Rashaad Newsome, and and Catalina Parra
August 16 – 23

Eleven brown bags of varying sizes are displayed on a wall, pinned so that their mouths hang open slightly. Charcoal rubbings on the bags trace out corporate logos and other words and phrases.
Alan Michelson. Permanent Title, 1993. Wax, muslin, charcoal. Overall: 144 x 144 x 9 in. (366 x 366 x 23 cm). Courtesy the artist. [Eleven brown bags of varying sizes are displayed on a wall, pinned so that their mouths hang open slightly. Charcoal rubbings on the bags trace out corporate logos and other words and phrases.]

Read an interview with Alan Michelson from the exhibition catalogue.

Permanent Title is an installation consisting of charcoal rubbings on waxed muslin burial sacks taken from buildings constructed atop former settler burial grounds in Lower Manhattan. The sacks index icons and signage of multinational companies, such as Chase Bank and McDonald’s. Michelson draws attention to the dominance of real estate interests and corporate agendas over ancestral reverence in capitalist, settler cultures. The work contests the ongoing erasure of history and the specificities of place under neoliberalism. The title of Michelson’s work, which refers to the legal document that confers property rights over land to the title-holder, ironically asserts the erasure of community ties in both Indigenous and settler communities via the privatization of property under capitalism.

A woman uses a shovel to dig a shallow rectangular pit in a grassy field. Four burlap sacks filled with earth lay to the left side.
Catalina Parra, Fosa común, 1984. Installation at Art Awareness Gallery, Lexington, New York, USA. Courtesy Archive, Catalina Parra, New York. [A woman uses a shovel to dig a shallow rectangular pit in a grassy field. Four burlap sacks filled with earth lay to the left side.]
A rectangular pit resembling a mass grave is shown lined with bags of excavated sand. Barbed wire stretches across the pit and a shovel lays to one side. The site of the pit appears to be recreational, with a lake and picnic benches visible in the background.
Catalina Parra, FOSA, 2001. Installation at Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Courtesy Archive, Catalina Parra, New York. [A rectangular pit resembling a mass grave is shown lined with bags of excavated sand. Barbed wire stretches across the pit and a shovel lays to one side. The site of the pit appears to be recreational, with a lake and picnic benches visible in the background.]

Catalina Parra’s FOSA captures the excavation of an ongoing series of land-based installations. Recalling a mass grave strewn with barbed wire and surrounded by amorphous burlap sacks, FOSA creates a space to mourn those who disappeared during General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, while also serving as a place for public gathering and commemoration. Located in the Atacama Desert in the north of Chile, one of the driest and harshest climates in the world, FOSA documents the third and largest iteration; earlier versions were installed in Lexington, New York and Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1984 and 2001 respectively.

Spanish and English translations of the poem “Justo antes del amanecer.../Just before sunrise...” are written in alternating lines in grey and black on a white background.
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab. The Transborder Immigrant Tool, 2007–ongoing. Pages excerpted from The Transborder Immigrant Tool publication. Courtesy the artist, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and University of California, San Diego. [Spanish and English translations of the poem “Justo antes del amanecer.../Just before sunrise...” are written in alternating lines in grey and black on a white background.]
English version of the poem “You can survive without eating anything for three weeks in hot weather…/En climas cálidos, puede sobrevivir hasta tres semanas sin comer nada...” is written in the top-left portion of the page while the Spanish version is written in the lower-right. A grey line of varying widths divides the two languages.
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab. The Transborder Immigrant Tool, 2007–ongoing. Pages excerpted from The Transborder Immigrant Tool publication. Courtesy the artist, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and University of California, San Diego. [English version of the poem “You can survive without eating anything for three weeks in hot weather…/En climas cálidos, puede sobrevivir hasta tres semanas sin comer nada...” is written in the top-left portion of the page while the Spanish version is written in the lower-right. A grey line of varying widths divides the two languages.]
The Spanish translation of the poem “La cholla, o cactus saltador, se agarra.../Cholla, or jumping cactus, attaches...” is shown above a thin grey horizontal line, below which appears the English translation of the same poem.
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab. The Transborder Immigrant Tool, 2007–ongoing. Pages excerpted from The Transborder Immigrant Tool publication. Courtesy the artist, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and University of California, San Diego. [The Spanish translation of the poem “La cholla, o cactus saltador, se agarra.../Cholla, or jumping cactus, attaches...” is shown above a thin grey horizontal line, below which appears the English translation of the same poem.]
The English translation of the poem “When everything—including this cell phone—fails…/Cuando todo—incluyendo este teléfono móvil—faile...” appears above the Spanish translation. Two grey lines of different thicknesses cross to form an X-shape on the right of the page.
Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab. The Transborder Immigrant Tool, 2007–ongoing. Pages excerpted from The Transborder Immigrant Tool publication. Courtesy the artist, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and University of California, San Diego. [The English translation of the poem “When everything—including this cell phone—fails…/Cuando todo—incluyendo este teléfono móvil—faile...” appears above the Spanish translation. Two grey lines of different thicknesses cross to form an X-shape on the right of the page.]

The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) is a multi-media artist-activist intervention developed to assist border crossers through the treacherous Anza-Borrego Desert along the U.S.–Mexico border. Repurposed cellphones are programmed with a unidirectional GPS system that directs crossers to water caches left by charitable organizations, while multilingual prose poetry containing valuable survival information about the desert and its flora and fauna plays intermittently. TBT maps the Anza-Borrego Desert while at the same time countering the cartography of the State and circumventing the legal practices of governments which exert mastery over the land and the movement of bodies under its jurisdiction. Pages from The Transborder Immigrant Tool book are reproduced here.

Download The Transborder Immigrant Tool texts and documents.

A group of five performers dressed in red and white monochromatic outfits stand in front of microphones gesturing with their hands.
Rashaad Newsome. Still from Shade Compositions, 2012. Video, color, sound; 50 minutes. Courtesy the artist. [A group of five performers dressed in red and white monochromatic outfits stand in front of microphones gesturing with their hands.]

Read an interview with Rashaad Newsome from the exhibition catalogue.

Shade Compositions is a performance series launched by Newsome in 2005, for which he casts a local ensemble of self-identifying women and femme artists who perform sounds and gestures based on the act of throwing shade (expressing contempt or disrespect for another person). Shade Compositions (2012) is a video piece based on a performance produced at SFMOMA, during which an ensemble of seventeen performers snap their fingers, roll their eyes, smack their lips, and perform other sounds and movements that highlight the expressive dimension and unstable meanings of these non-verbal gestures. Newsome has described these works as an investigation into Black vernacular, with a particular focus on how some of these gestures become appropriated within popular culture while others remain largely stigmatized or even associated with stereotypes of Black women.

Amelia Bande, Rummana Hussain, Third World Gay Revolution and Juan Queiroz, and Raúl Zurita
August 24 – 31

Characteristic, expressive handwriting on a page spells out phrases such as “All Power to the People!” and ”Seize the Time!” in both English and Spanish.
Third World Gay Revolution, “Come Out in Third World Lingo,” back cover of Come Out! 1, no. 7, (December/January 1970 – 7). Courtesy Archivo Moléculas Malucas. [Characteristic, expressive handwriting on a page spells out phrases such as “All Power to the People!” and ”Seize the Time!” in both English and Spanish.]

Read an interview with Juan Queiroz from the exhibition catalogue.

Third World Gay Revolution (T.W.G.R) was a short-lived collective that developed out of the Gay Liberation Front. Included here is a poster from 1970 made by the group printed in Come Out! magazine with the words “Come Out in Third World Lingo”. Their usage of Third World indexes the broader project of Third Worldism largely taken up in the United States through the liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s to refer to people of color, specifically communities claiming diasporic belonging while identifying outside of nationalistic categories. As indicated by their 1970 manifesto, their goals extend well beyond the isolated issue of sexuality, instead identifying anti-imperialism as central to a queer struggle. Juan Queiroz, a Buenos-Aires based queer archivist, activist, scholar and editor, has traced their chronology and preserved some of their archival materials in his independent archive and publication Moleculas Malucas.

Amelia Bande stands in front of wall covered with posters and gestures towards her eyes as she says, “We wore masks and protective eyewear at the protests in Santiago.”
Amelia Bande. Stills from El estallido / The Outbreak, 2020. Recording of a live performance held over Zoom on August 7, 2020. Stage design and camera collaboration with Rachel Higgins. Courtesy the artist. [Amelia Bande stands in front of wall covered with posters and gestures towards her eyes as she says, “We wore masks and protective eyewear at the protests in Santiago.”]
Amelia Bande sits on the floor next to a pile of stones and leans on a cement block while holding a white rock in her hand. She sings, “it brings landscapes where I am not.”
Amelia Bande. Stills from El estallido / The Outbreak, 2020. Recording of a live performance held over Zoom on August 7, 2020. Stage design and camera collaboration with Rachel Higgins. Courtesy the artist. [Amelia Bande sits on the floor next to a pile of stones and leans on a cement block while holding a white rock in her hand. She sings, “it brings landscapes where I am not.”]

El estallido / The Outbreak is a video of Amelia Bande’s performance done over Zoom for the opening of this exhibition on August 7. Bande’s intermedia performances investigate the political economies of intimacy and dependency, generally breaking the fourth wall to reflect and ask questions about the kind of community formed in the improvised and temporary space of performative togetherness. Using humor and songs, she reflects on global political situations, including recent protests and activism in Chile against neoliberalism, Black Lives Matter and police brutality, and the coronavirus pandemic.

Read Amelia Bande’s El Estallido / The Outbreak from the exhibition catalogue.

Rummana Hussain stands in an open courtyard cradling half a papaya in her hands, her mouth wide open in a silent scream. Behind her, indigo powder is scattered across the pavement.
Rummana Hussain, Living on the Margins, 1995. Video, color, sound; 28 minutes. Courtesy Rummana Hussain Family Collection. [Rummana Hussain stands in an open courtyard cradling half a papaya in her hands, her mouth wide open in a silent scream. Behind her, indigo powder is scattered across the pavement.]

Living on the Margins is a video piece based on Rummana Hussain’s 1995 performance at the National Centre for Performing Arts in Mumbai. Widely referred to as the first performance artist in India, Hussain’s turn to performance was directly motivated by the events of the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition and the growing intensification of communalist violence backed by a Hindu-nationalist government. In this performance, Hussain slowly paces around the open courtyard in ghungroos, an anklet with bells tied on the feet in Indian classical dance, carrying props such as a halved papaya and a head of a vacuum cleaner periodically stopping and opening her mouth wide in a silent scream. Hussain embraces the simultaneity of personal and public histories in her work, situating herself in relation to these narratives through her activation of Indian cultural and religious traditions.

A yellow industrial machine rests atop a pile of rubble and stone. Across the clear blue sky, sky-typers write “MI DIOS ES MERIDA” in white smoke-dots.
Raúl Zurita, La vida nueva, 1982. Video, color, sound; 27 minutes 42 seconds. Videography by Juan Downey. Courtesy the artist. [A yellow industrial machine rests atop a pile of rubble and stone. Across the clear blue sky, sky-typers write “MI DIOS ES MERIDA” in white smoke-dots.]

In this rarely-seen cut of video documentation from 1982, Chilean poet and artist Raúl Zurita’s poem “La vida nueva” is skytyped in Queens, NY. Dedicated to all minorities of the world, Zurita transformed the typically private act of reading poetry into a communal ritual that enabled a potential connection between people distant from one another. The poem’s writing in the sky over Queens signaled a crossing of national borders in the way it treated Spanish itself, challenging the correlation between language and nation as homogeneous elements. “La vida nueva” deploys short lines and simple phrasing, using words that appear or sound nearly identical in English and Spanish, including “CANCER” and “GHETTO” as well as “MI,” “ES,” and “NO.” At the same time, the inclusion of words such as “PAMPA” or “CHICANO”—which refer to the peoples of Argentina and Mexico respectively—also index the particularity of place and ancestry.

After La vida nueva

After La vida nueva: Book of Archives

After La vida nueva: Book of Gossip