Open Ears
KADIST is collaborating with The Lab to present an off-site exhibition in conjunction with Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions as part of the Open Bodies public programs.
The exhibition will be open for free public viewing at The Lab from Thursday through Saturday, on November 7-9, 14-16, and 21-23, 2024, from 12-5pm.
The public programming of Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions continues the 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.
The programs in San Francisco are titled Open Bodies and extend across the city in collaboration with local arts and cultural organizations. The series is conceived as a collective body that tends to various organs, perceptive faculties, and phenomenologies. Acting as the ears, the limbs, and the tongue to the exhibition body, Open Bodies reflects on the transformation of physical and social bodies through sound, dance/movement, and familial and collective language.
Learn more about Open Bodies
Open Ears
Open Ears considers the social and political dimensions of sound, as it interweaves personal and collective histories and actions in relation to cultural artifacts. While the toppling of monuments and the rematriation of looted museum objects are not typically associated with sound, Open Ears brings together the works of Michael Rakowitz and Asha Sheshadri, allowing for a close listening that can act as a pathway of resilience.
Michael Rakowitz’s Behemoth II (2024) is an inflatable sculpture mimicking the form of the Ulysses S. Grant statue in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco 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 presented in dialogue with 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. Sheshadri’s distorted soundtrack is syncopated with the sonic impact of the toppled monuments, taken up by Behemoth II, as it cycles through “inflated” and “deflated” sounds. Behemoth II is co-commissioned by KADIST and San Francisco Art Fair, and returns to San Francisco after presentations at Seattle Art Fair, and at the opening of Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston in 2024.
Open Ears is the first exhibition to be installed within The Lab’s newly excavated space in the historic San Francisco Labor Temple, which now encompasses the entire 1914 footprint of the Main Auditorium and Assembly Hall. This interstitial site-under-construction will host exhibitions throughout early 2025, inviting artists to join in dismantling and reimagining boundaries and prepare for a renovation and restoration of The Lab next year.
Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist working at the intersection of problem-solving and troublemaking. Drawing upon extensive research on cultural objects and events, Rakowitz weaves together complex histories and unlikely symbols in his sculptures, installations, participatory workshops, films, and architectural interventions. Through his critique of the ongoing forces of colonization, Rakowitz brings attention not only to the value of cultural artifacts that have been lost, looted, or destroyed but also to the people who have suffered from continuing violence. His works asks viewers to reconsider the relationships between hospitality and hostility, provenance and expropriation, and to confront the complicity of cultural institutions and audiences in geopolitical matters.
Asha Sheshadri is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice intertwines memory construction, questions of citation and translation, and explorations of psychogeography. In her recordings, videos, and performances, she synthesizes her own voice with cinematic sound, excerpts from writers she admires, ethnographic strategies, and recovered and recycled letters, as well as photographs from personal and public archives and research-driven fictions. These sources expand and collapse into one another to critically engage with the parallels and boundaries between personal and political histories.
Established in 1984, The Lab provides significant funding, time, and space to traditionally underrepresented artists. Located in the historic Redstone Labor Temple in the Mission District of San Francisco, The Lab presents hundreds of artists, with thousands of visitors annually for events and exhibitions ranging from experimental music and sound practices, poetry and literary arts, theater, visual arts, film and expanded cinema, and multidisciplinary work.