Open Bodies
Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions, Public Programs
A series of programming in San Francisco that examines the shifts in dilated time, ritual, memory-keeping, and community-building in artistic practices in the years 2020-2024
The year 2020, and continuing through the present, began with the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which continues to expose systemic inequities disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. Extending this reckoning across arts and cultural institutions, many arts and cultural workers, especially frontline employees, were furloughed, while others were tasked to envision new forms of engagement to welcome new publics to their online and hybrid programs. The public programming of Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions continues this desire towards knowledge-sharing and insists on the potential of collectivity on the local and global level. The concurrent exhibitions in Houston and San Francisco and their related public programs are guided by Judith Butler’s notion of intertwinement and interdependency as ethics in order to untangle forms of oppression toward liberation.
Open Bodies
Public programs affiliated with Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions continue the exhibitionary desire for knowledge-sharing and the potential of collectivity and collaboration on the local and global level. The pandemic exposed systemic inequities disproportionately affecting marginalized groups. Extending this reckoning across arts and cultural institutions, many workers, especially frontline employees, were furloughed, while others were tasked to envision new forms of engagement to welcome new publics to their online and hybrid programs.
The programs in San Francisco are titled Open Bodies and extend across the city in collaboration with arts and cultural organizations. The series is conceived as a collective body that tends to various organs, perceptive faculties, and phenomenologies: sound/listening, body/movement, and language. Acting as ears, limbs, and tongue to the exhibition body, Open Bodies reflects on the transformation of physical and social bodies through sound, dance/choreography, and the reverberation of familial and collective language.
Open Ears, in collaboration with The Lab
On view November 7–9 and 14–16, 2024, 12–5 pm
Location: The Lab, 2948 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103
Open Ears considers the social and political dimensions of sound as pathways of resilience, through the toppling of monuments and rematriation of looted museum objects.
Renowned Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s Behemoth II (2024) (co-commissioned by KADIST and San Francisco Art Fair) is an inflatable sculpture mimicking the form of the Ulysses S. Grant statue in Golden Gate Park that was toppled in 2020, The sculpture invokes recent global movements to “redact” controversial, colonialist monuments by shrouding them in black tarps. The work is also juxtaposed with sound artist Asha Sheshadri’s video Portmanteau (2021), which takes the form of a virtual museum tour set in empty pandemic-era museums, focusing on the looted objects they housed. Set to a distorted soundtrack that recalls the sonic impact of the toppled monuments, Behemoth II cycles through “inflated” and “deflated” sounds. The commission returns to San Francisco after presentations at the San Francisco Art Fair, Seattle Art Fair, and the Blaffer Art Museum in 2024.
Listening from the Gut, a listening session with Joe Namy
January 11, 2025, 2–5 pm
Location: KADIST, 3295 20th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
Listening from the Gut is a collective listening experience that uses music and deep listening as a tool for community building and resilience from systemic injustice. Joe Namy will invite a group of artists, poets, and musicians to come together to share and talk about sounds, songs, and recordings that are meaningful to them in response to the themes explored in Namy’s audio-video sculptural installation Half Blue (2019), followed by a wider collective discussion with the audience.
Half Blue, on view at KADIST San Francisco is a poetic exploration that reflects on the increased militarization of the police and the justice system. It takes its point of departure from the artist’s cousin Khalid Jabara, who was murdered by hate crime in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2016, leading to the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act passed by the US Congress in 2021. The sound composition in Half Blue is a polyphonic elegy, interpolating news reports of Jabara’s murder with R&B and hip-hop tracks, vocal compositions by Arab musicians Alya Al Sultani and Halim El Dabh, media sound bites that target Arab Americans, the voice of Eric Garner’s daughter Emerald Snipes, and excerpts from artist Etel Adnan’s book of poems The Arab Apocalypse and poet Marwa Helal’s Census.
Open Arms, in collaboration with Weaving Spirits Festival and CounterPulse
February 6, 2025, 8 pm
Location: CounterPulse, 80 Turk St, San Francisco, CA 94102
A transformation of physical and social bodies through dance/choreography reflecting on Indigenous sovereignty, the sculptural work of Jeneen Frei Njootli (2SQ Vuntut Gwitchin, Czech, and Dutch), casino chips fall out of you, broken hearts and baggies too (2021) will temporarily move from KADIST San Francisco’s exhibition to CounterPulse. The program will inspire new choreographic works by two-spirit dancers in collaboration with Weaving Spirits, a festival of two-spirit performances.
Njootli’s sculpture reckons with histories of displacement and the ongoing struggles that Indigenous peoples face. The work calls into question the cultural practices, traditions, and Indigenous rights that are still being inhibited or denied by continuing assimilation policies.
Open Tongue, in collaboration with McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern
February 15, 2025, 3–5 pm
Location: KADIST San Francisco, 3295 20th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
A multitude of voices echo through the pages of the literary publication McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue #77, weaving together stories that explore the intimate intersections of language, memory, and community. The program will bring these themes to life, featuring a reading by the award-winning author of Dead in Long Beach, California, Venita Blackburn, who will be joined in conversation by Rita Bullwinkel, editor of McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern and author of the novel, Headshot, and Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award, that delves into the intricacies of time, ritual, and the shared practices of memory-keeping that bind communities together.
Learn more about the exhibition Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at KADIST San Francisco and the Blaffer Art Museum