Image: Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Silent, 2016 (still), performance: Aérea Negrot.
January 8 – March 15, 2020
Curated by Abigail Raphael Collins, LACE’s 2020 Emerging Curator
Opening Reception: January 8, 2020, 7-10 pm
LACE’s Emerging Curator Program is designed to discover curatorial talent in Los Angeles and gives an opportunity for an emerging curator to partner with LACE. Applicants are reviewed by a panel that recommends a compelling project to the LACE team consistent with LACE’s experimental spirit.
Curator’s Introduction, Abigail Raphael Collins-
SOUND OFF: Silence + Resistance takes up silence as a tool for political resistance. The work by each artist and activist in the exhibition engages silence as a way to honor the inarticulable, defy demands of production, prioritize deep listening, and refuse to incriminate. Rather than negate the importance of speaking up, speaking truth to power, or raising our voices, this exhibition treats silence as a powerful tool of resistance alongside speech.
Listening is central to almost every work in this exhibition, and it’s been central to the process of curating it. In the work I make as an artist I explore gaps and silences carved out by political trauma, but in addition to that solo work I wanted to think in tandem with other artists about the power of silence as a tool for collective action. Curating work at the intersection of protest and silence is a way to listen to other artists and activists about how we can uphold silence together to shift entrenched power structures.
I approached each work with these questions: How does silent protest function in tandem with sounding? How are they interdependent? How is honoring interiority a political act? How is the right to opacity linked to the right to inaudibility? What does an intersectional feminist refusal to speak sound like?
Each work answers and refuses an answer in different ways. Each artist and activist found a different way to transform being silenced into wielding silence, melting down a weapon used against them to forge a new tool.
EXHIBITION ESSAY BY SAMIRA YAMIN
SOUND OFF: SILENCE + RESISTANCE EXHIBITION CATALOG
Artists: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Nikita Gale, Sharon Hayes, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Baseera Khan, and Aliza Shvarts.
Documentation by Chris Wormald.
LISTEN TO ALIZA SHVARTS’ AUDIO PIECE HERE
WORKSHOP WITH KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED
Support for this exhibition provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, CalArts, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and Karen Hillenburg.
