Michael Rakowitz, Behemoth II (2024)

KADIST presents Michael Rakowitz, Behemoth II (2024), in collaboration with the San Francisco Art Fair, April 25-28, 2024.

Michael Rakowitz in conversation with Erika Mei Chua Holum, Assistant Curator, Blaffer Art Museum), San Francisco Art Fair, April 26, 2024, 1-2 pm

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist who often works in the public space, interrogating urbanism, architecture, and memory. Behemoth II is a meditation on the relationship between monuments in the US that have been removed and those that remain.  

The word monument is derived from the Latin verb monere, meaning “to remind,” “to advise,” and “to warn.” From monere, we also get words like demonstrate, to show something; remonstrate, to make a forcefully reproachful protest; and monster. Monsters have functioned allegorically throughout history, often sent from above as a warning to humankind. America’s public spaces are occupied by markers that function less as memorials than as warnings, sculpting centuries of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and imperialism. 

A series of inflatable sculptures, titled Behemoth, invoke the redacted monuments shrouded in black tarps in cities like Charlottesville and Chicago. Perpetually rising and falling, it suggests the ongoing cruelty of deferral and debate around the removal of these monuments, and the desire to preserve them instead of the communities that continue to fight for liberation. 

Commissioned especially for the 2024 San Francisco Art Fair, Behemoth II takes the shape of the Ulysses S. Grant monument that was defaced and toppled in Golden Gate Park in the summer of 2020 during the George Floyd uprisings, and confronts the legacy of Grant.

After the presentation at San Francisco Art Fair, Behemoth II will travel to the Seattle Art Fair (July 25–28, 2024), followed by the collaborative exhibition Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, and KADIST San Francisco in the fall of 2024.