Ayanna Dozier on the Sacred Labour of a Whore

Installation view from Get on Your Knees, Jesus Loves You by Ayanna Dozier at Microscope Gallery. Photo courtesy of Microscope Gallery.

By Gladys Lou

Ayanna Dozier is an artist, writer, and scholar who approaches sex work as a sacred form of labour. For her, erotic labour is not just performed, it is studied, historicized, and positioned alongside artistic and mystical practices as a site of spiritual, intellectual, and emotional expertise. Drawing on biblical narrative, Black feminist theory, and personal experience, Dozier traces the porous boundaries between submission and autonomy, resistance and care. Her work asks: Why is spiritual labour exalted, domestic labour expected, and erotic labour condemned, especially when all three are so often enacted by the same gendered and racialized bodies?

In a scene from Dozier’s recent narrative short film Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water, the dominatrix Anna jokingly asks her friend Danielle over the phone, “What would men do without us?” to which Danielle wryly replies, “What would their wives and girlfriends do without us?”Across Dozier’s work, women’s bodies glided through moments of prayer, performance, and cathartic releases: whipping, crawling, and pole dancing. Their movements are at once solemn and seductive, devotional and defiant, collapsing the gateway between the holy and the wild, between heaven and hell.

I first encountered Dozier’s work in her 2025 solo exhibition Get on Your Knees, Jesus Loves You at Microscope Gallery. Projected in loops of film and housed within cathedral-shaped frames, the installation, Doing It for Daddy, staged a sensual encounter where Christian fundamentalist iconography, BDSM aesthetics, and intimate postures become all entangled.

The architectural motif of the cathedral frame operates more as a formal device than a spiritual symbol. Dozier remixes these ornamental silhouettes, often used to house pious slogans in evangelical décor, and fills them with scenes of erotic gesture. By doing so, she stages a confrontation between the idealized, sacred image projected onto figures like Mary Magdalene and the lived realities of labour performed through and upon women’s bodies.

In our conversation, we discuss the politics of women’s labour, the history and nuances of sex work, and why deploying the term whore, for its ability to cut through identity categories and recognize those outside of solidarity groups, can reveal the realities of labour that are often silenced or marginalized.

Ayanna Dozier, “Doing it for Daddy,” 2024, 16mm film, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York.

Gladys: Your work addresses multiple forms of labour, from sexual, spiritual, to gendered. Can you speak more about how you understand labour in relation to the body, particularly as a form of devotion and resistance? How do you personally define labour within your practice?

Ayanna: To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes from Angela Davis, referencing Marx: labour is like fire, it’s tangibly felt, but you can’t grasp it. I think that resonates with how I’ve been thinking about labour, especially as it relates to the gendered body. This came through strongly in my last solo show.

I’m interested in the contradictions around labour and how they manifest through gender. In the church, for example, prayer is considered a woman’s labour because it’s biblical. As women, you’re not afforded much autonomy beyond that. In the church I grew up in, it was heavily structured so that if you were an unmarried woman, you’d become a “prayer warrior.” Men could be pastors; They could take on public-facing roles. But women? You got married, you had babies, and your role in the church centered around reproduction. So, what is a woman’s labour to God beyond childbirth? It’s prayer.

And I took that very seriously. I was good at praying. But here’s the contradiction: as someone in a gendered body, regardless of whether I fit into mainstream beauty standards or not, my body was still seen through a sexualized lens. The very labour I was encouraged to do — being on my knees, getting into a state of spiritual ecstasy — was seen as inappropriate or even erotic, so then you’re punished for it.

That tension between condemnation and ecstasy is what undergirded the exhibition. What does it mean to be punished for the kind of transcendence your body seeks? You’re conditioned to pursue it, but also forbidden from fully accessing it. That’s where I find an important analogy to sex work.

Sex is labourious. It requires skill. We live in a sex-negative society, one that doesn’t advocate for sexual education. People are expected to enter these mostly heterosexual unions already knowing how to have sex, how to please their partners, how to keep them satisfied. Meanwhile, sex workers develop actual skill sets. They edify the body. You have to be deeply perceptive as a sex worker, not just “do” sex, but understand it, guide someone through intimacy, through shame, through discomfort, toward pleasure.

And yet, we don’t consider that labour. We dismiss it, we vilify it. Even though it’s something we claim to value within romantic partnerships, we undermine those who practice it professionally. That contradiction between sex, service to God, and gendered labour is what the exhibition tried to explore. It’s like, you can do it, but don’t do it too well. Because then it becomes too provocative, too threatening. And once it becomes threatening, it must be condemned. It’s always this constant push and pull.

Detail view from Genesis 38:14-15, 2025 by Ayanna Dozier. 16 mm film still. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Gladys: In your artist talk, you described God as a ‘non-consensual dom. ‘ Could you elaborate on what this metaphor conveys about the dynamics of authority and submission?

Ayanna: As individuals, as human beings, I don’t think subjugation is necessarily a bad thing. History shows that people have long craved subjugation. Look at kings and monarchies. There’s something innate in the human experience about wanting to surrender to something larger than yourself. That can be ecstatic, even transformative. There’s beauty in being able to serve or to devote yourself to something that claims to know better, to offer relief from suffering.

What I challenge is when institutions weaponize that impulse, when submission becomes a tool of control or degradation, particularly in how it interacts with self-worth. That’s what I wanted to explore in the exhibition: this tension between ecstatic devotion and systemic cruelty, especially for women. There’s something deeply erotic and spiritually resonant about prayer. And when you strip away the dogma, it’s not unlike meditation, quieting the body, focusing the mind, speaking your desires and intentions out loud.

But within the church, you’re often taught that you’re undeserving of the very connection you’re trying to cultivate. In the New Testament, especially in Paul’s letters to early churches, two to Corinth (1 & 2 Corinthians) and two to Timothy (1 & 2 Timothy), there’s this recurring emphasis on human unworthiness (“You have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body” 1 Corinthians 6:20). You’re devoting your time, and yet constantly reminded that you don’t belong, that you’re lucky to be here.

That’s where the phrase I used, calling God a “non-consensual dom,” comes from. It’s funny, but it’s also serious. What does it mean to be conditioned to want to serve, but told that your service is never good enough? That you’re inherently unworthy, and that’s the whole point?

Detail view from Doing it for Daddy, 2024 by Ayanna Dozier.16 mm film still. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Gladys: In your work Doing it for Daddy, you’ve depicted the ritual of anointing pastors as emotionally intense, even carrying an erotic charge. How do you approach the balance between sensuality and spiritual devotion, especially when these acts are typically presented as sacred? Also, how do the differing biblical accounts of anointing inform your film?

Ayanna: Biblically, there are contradictions, especially in the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all recount more or less the same events from Christ’s life and miracles, but from different perspectives. Each writer brings their own interpretation of what they’re witnessing. Take the scene of Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus: it appears in all four Gospels, but with striking differences.

In Matthew, it’s a single, almost chaste verse: she anoints his feet and gifts the perfume. The act becomes more embodied and intimate with each retelling (this also changes depending on the translation but for this purpose I am speaking of the New Kings James Version). Mark focuses on the cost of the perfume and Peter’s disapproval. In John, it’s Mary of Bethany anointing Christ’s feet and wiping them with her hair. By the time we reach Luke, the account expands to four or five verses. Luke portrays a “sinful woman” performing the act with intense emotion, describing a woman crawling to Christ, her tears falling on his feet, pressing her cheek to them, pouring perfume, and drying them with her hair.

The act of anointing is devotional, but also, undeniably, erotic in its intimacy, especially in the way Luke and John describe it. That contradiction lives in the text itself. What’s considered sacred is so often also sensual, but the church can’t tolerate that ambiguity. That’s what I’m drawn to, biblically, visually, symbolically, and what I try to hold in my work. I like those contradictions, and I lean into them technically as well. That’s part of the surface gag of the film: it was shot in double 8mm, all in-camera, and purposefully constructed so that two simultaneous images oppose each other, printed onto 16mm film. This forces the audience to watch four projected images at once on a single strip, a construction meant to reveal the hypocrisy in all of it.

Gladys: Can you talk about some of the key inspirations and philosophical or cultural references that inform your work, especially how you engage with Christian narratives, and the portrayals of desire and self-love?

Ayanna: The Faust myth, sometimes it’s called Faustus, sometimes Mephistopheles, goes by different names depending on the version. It’s a very popular folktale: someone makes a deal with the devil in exchange for knowledge, power, or eternal life. In some versions, Mephisto is the name of the devil; in others, Faustus himself becomes a kind of devil figure. But at its core, the story is always about bartering with the devil for an extended or enhanced life, only to find that life ultimately unfulfilling.

It’s a very Christian kind of propaganda. The moral is always that true satisfaction comes not from surrendering to yourself or your flesh, but from surrendering to God. The flesh is weak. And what I love are the films that challenge that, suggesting this surrender to desire, to the body, to pleasure, can actually be a wondrous, fulfilling experience.

There’s a film by Jess Franco from 1968 called Succubus, though it also goes by the title Nymphomaniac in some versions. The protagonist is an S&M performance artist, doing bondage theater, and we come to realize that the devil is seducing her not to punish her, but to help her embrace her gifts: the power to dominate, to force submission, to destroy men. What he offers her is a life of philosophy and freedom: freedom from masculinity.

By the end of the film, she enters a dream state with the devil, who says something like, “My beautiful Faustian bride, now we will pursue earthly pleasures together.” And I love how that’s framed not as a tragedy, but as something positive. It’s a twist from the idea that spiritual servitude to God is the only “good life,” while you only get one life in the flesh.

There’s a term in Christian theology: homo incurvatus in se—a life turned inward. I used that phrase as a title for one of my artworks in the show. It’s considered a negative concept in Christianity, a threat to God, because it suggests centering the self over divine authority. Historically, Christian fundamentalism, via the Reformist doctrine, has often been against education, against art, against self-expression because these things open us up to our bodies, to each other, to difference.

There are many passages in the Bible that discourage empathy, even though people like to say, “But what about Christ’s teachings?” Christ’s compassion was conditional. He believed in forgiveness, yes, but only if you chose God. If you didn’t, you were damned to go to hell. That damnation was seen as justified. Pleasure, sex, and bodily joy—these things open us up. They make us more empathetic, more generous. And that is a threat to a religion built on servitude.

That’s what the Faustian parable warns against: don’t seek philosophy, don’t study knowledge, don’t write, don’t make art. The real purpose of life is to give yourself to God. And the greatest enemy in the Faust myth isn’t the devil, it’s self-love. That’s what I find so interesting, and what I try to explore in my work. The actual threat to Christianity isn’t the devil. It’s the question: What if we just love ourselves?

Ayanna Dozer. Detail view from Forgetting You is like Breathing Water, film still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Gladys: In your recent short film, Forgetting You is like Breathing Water, there’s an overlap between physical intimacy and emotional vulnerability, especially in the final scene, where the man confesses his struggles to the dominatrix. Do you think sex work could be a form of therapy or self-reflection?

Ayanna: My clients often treated me like their therapist. It was shocking when I was 21 and had men in their fifties telling me about their marital problems. There’s a certain humour in that, because it’s a weird situation. I’m retired now, but I’m still doing research on it, and it hasn’t changed. My conversations with friends who are still in the industry reveal that it’s the same: clients unload and project so much onto you, and you have to be good at accepting that.

Then, it can feel like a type of therapy. It’s a job where you need to be okay with yourself because you’re dealing with people projecting their problems and opinions about you. I recently curated a film series at Anthology called Women, Workers, and Whores on Film. One of the shorts in the program, “Whore Writers” by Tall Milk, interviewed sex workers who are also writers about their experiences. One of them, Stoya, an infamous porn star, wrote a book called Philosophy of the Pussy, where she talks about having clients, mid-session, project their reasons as to why “[she] probably does this.” It’s messed up, but the point is, you have to understand that the sense of projection and entitlement is part of the job.

Sometimes, it has less to do with the physical act of sex and more to do with how you manage the emotional load and understand the root of your client’s issues. It’s like a therapist’s role, in a way. You use sex, which is broadly defined here because it happens in dominatrix sessions too, that do not center penetration, where it’s not always about physical pain, but rather a dynamic of control. It’s the same in escorting, which sometimes isn’t about sex at all but just being a companion for the night. It’s all part of the larger industry.

In this line of work, you have to figure out quickly what your goal is. Not just to get paid, but if it’s your day-to-day job, to get hired again. You need to understand when to break the script of what you thought your job was and adjust when doing the job. That’s what the film was getting at: a woman who is also in need of the type of care and consideration that she gives to her clients.

I don’t believe that gender and race are stable, singular categories to symbolize. And I don’t think being a “whore” is a stable category either.

 

Gladys: How did you approach bringing the complex emotional and power dynamics between the dominatrix and her client to life on screen, especially in portraying their connection while maintaining the boundaries of the work?

Ayanna: The film starts with her heartbroken, which is why we spend so much time with her in the beginning to give us a sense of her life outside of her job. Then, as her client talks, she realizes she understands exactly what he’s going through. She sympathizes with him. She understands the intersection of desire and loss that she, too, is experiencing. That’s why we get that flashback to her own breakup. She gives him both a spiritual and physical release, one that is traumatic to the body but mentally ecstatic.

I wanted to keep it clear in the film because, often, when sex workers are portrayed on screen by non-sex workers, they bond with their clients in a way that feels unrealistic. Like, “Call me by my real name.” In the film, even the client thinks her real name is Faith, but the audience knows it’s Anna because of her previous conversation with her friend. There’s still that boundary, that pretense, because safety comes first. But that boundary doesn’t make the experience any less real or impactful.

In other films, the sex worker might cry and say, “I’ve been heartbroken too,” but no, that’s not it. She’s still doing her job, but she also understands that he needs what she’s giving him because she, too, needs it. Whether he recognizes that as her bonding with him is beside the point. He gets what he needs, but she and the audience understand that she’s also connecting with him while keeping the structures of the job intact. He’s projecting onto her, and she’s projecting onto him.

And in the context of dominatrix work, or sex work in general, people often assume that power dynamics don’t shift, but they do. Power changes all the time. There are so many negative assumptions about sex work, and in the past, I used to feel like I had to defend it. But now, I’m tired of having to do that. Sometimes, it’s messy, but that doesn’t invalidate the work.

Ayanna Dozer. Detail view from Whore in the House of the Lord, 2024 by Ayanna Dozier. 16 mm film still. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Gladys: I’m curious about the use of the word “whore” in the title of your film, A Whore in the House of the Lord. It’s a term that’s often weaponized to degrade women, so why did you use it in your work? I also know that in your art practice and community work, you’ve encountered many confrontations. How do these experiences shape your views on the intersections of race, gender, and sex work?

Ayanna: In my opinion, the term “sex worker” doesn’t quite capture everything. It’s a useful way to describe the industry to people outside of it, and it’s certainly better than the police term “prostitute.” Some sex workers may call themselves prostitutes, but that term originates from law enforcement. It’s always been tossed around by the police, and even though it’s sometimes embraced in a more affectionate sense within the community, it’s still loaded.

I like the term “sex worker” in the context of organizing, especially around labour. But let me tell you: the number of people who have screamed in my face, yelled at me, or kicked me out of labour and leftists organizing spaces because I bring up sex work is a lot. I had an experience three months ago where this guy just turned bright red and went off about how sex workers are basically getting paid to be raped and they have no agency. He was like, “They’re all trafficked. How could you advocate for them? They need to be in jail.”

It’s encounters like that which have made me double down on the term “whore.” Because no matter what, whether I’m retired or not, in these encounters, I’m always reminded, as journalist Melissa Gira Grant says in Playing the Whore (2014), that once you’re a whore, you’re always a whore. You can’t escape that. You can’t fit into a neoliberal framework of labour rights because people in those spaces will remind you that you’re a whore. Using the term “whore” allows us to cut through identity and understand that it’s a specific configuration of experience that’s only fully understood by other whores.

Gladys: Can you expand on what the term represents in terms of identity and labour within the sex work community?

Ayanna: I don’t believe that gender and race are stable, singular categories to symbolize. And I don’t think being a “whore” is a stable category either. Deploying that term gets at the disenfranchisement and displacement that happen across those gender and racial divisions.

Because I exist at two visible intersections of Blackness and gender, I’ve always felt dissatisfied by this idea that I should mobilize around a shared experience of a universal Black womanhood. That doesn’t take into account my light skin or being cis and thus that I’m perhaps not the best person to speak on behalf of dark skin or trans women as part of that assumed universal marker of Black womanhood. It also doesn’t address the divisions within and how some Black cis women can be incredibly transphobic and conservative.

When I start to frame the work that I do as a “Black whore,” it allows the audience to grasp these very violent fractures across identity. Looking at Black whores reveals some very poignant disenfranchisements of Black women at the margins like how Black trans women are disproportionately affected by sex work.

For example, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey from 2015 and the Visual AIDS Day Without Out pamphlet: Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings document from 2017 estimated that roughly 40-50% of Black trans women have done sex work and often take up the labour because of gender discrimination in the workplace. A report by Amnesty International indicated that 40% of people detained in the United States for sex work are Black women. An average of 60-80% of street-based sex workers are Black women, according to this decriminalization report, street-based reporting by Coyote based in Rhode Island, and Melissa Gira Grant’s statistics in her 2014 book, Playing the Whore, and across multiple news articles. Hacking/Hustling also outlines some of the policing towards street-based sex workers with regards to race.

This is why I deploy the term “whore” both in solidarity, having been one, and as a recognition that other terms don’t allow us to get to the heart of the matter. We can use other terms and hope someone will see our humanity, but they probably won’t.

Ayanna Dozier, “A Whore in the House of the Lord,” 2024, 16mm film (still). Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery, New York

Gladys: You referred to your work Genesis 38:14–15 as a “partially non-consensual collaboration” with James Turrell. Could you explain what you meant by that and why you reference his work? And considering you weren’t allowed to perform at the original site, what does that reveal about institutional control, power, and exclusion in relation to bodies and visibility?

Ayanna: I like James Turrell’s work, but I’m also critical because he represents a broader issue in the art world: white male artists often acquire public land for private projects. Most of his Skyspaces are on private land, and Roden Crater is an example. So, these are not truly public spaces.

The only Skyspace Turrell has that’s genuinely public is the one in Chicago, owned by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)’s architecture school. But it became “too public” when unhoused people started sleeping there. As a result, it’s the only Skyspace Turrell has more or less disowned. It’s not even listed on his official website anymore.

All his other Skyspaces, including the one I shot at the Walker Art Center, are private. This ties into what we call the “public sphere,” which speaks to the privatization of spaces meant to be public but, in reality, exclude certain groups: unhoused people, people using substances, those with mental illnesses, and sex workers. That’s what I find interesting about Turrell’s Skyspaces: they are part of this idea of the public sphere, but the only one that’s truly public is the one he has abandoned.

Access is an important issue. What does it mean for me to visit a site on public land that’s historically connected to sex workers? Turrell calls his Skyspaces “holy” and “spiritual,” and I agree with that. But I also see erotic labour as sacred and transformative, and in that sense, you’re literally on territory that I feel connected to more than you do.

Most modern art buildings and districts occupy land with deep ties to sex work. As Anne Gray Fischer writes in her book The Streets Belong to Us, many downtown centers in the U.S. are built on land from which sex workers, often racialized, were displaced, arrested, and removed. For example, the area around Gansevoort and Washington Streets, where the Whitney Museum is now, was once where Black trans sex workers worked. Times Square and Boston’s South End were also sex work areas. The South End now houses the ICA.

The title of the piece references Genesis 38:14-15, which tells the story of the first sex worker in the Bible. She’s kept outside the city, yet her labour is essential to the city’s wellbeing. Using Turrell’s Skyspace alongside this history highlights the larger forces of modernity, architecture, gentrification, and erasure.

This interview was edited for clarity and length. You can find more of Ayanna’s work on her website or Instagram.

Between the Senses and Horizons

“Tracing Memories”, Samina Hassan Laghari, 2023-24, Diptych video, 10 minutes. Photograph by the author, courtesy of Articulate Studios.

By Jabeen Qadri

Horizon is Home at Articulate Studios, Lahore, Pakistan, curated by Quddus Mirza, featuring artists Abdul Haadi, Samina Hassan Laghari, Salar Marri, Seema Nusrat, and Farooq Soomro. The exhibition ran from December 23, 2024, to January 5, 2025.

Dec 24. 5.45 pm. Shalimar Town, Lahore.

I’m still not accustomed to the sun setting this early. Despite being here for almost a month, my mind is operating on my hometown’s time, and I didn’t anticipate the darkness at this hour. Or it may be that my subconscious had a better experience planned for me to view the exhibition. I retrace the steps from the last time I visited this heritage house. It was almost a year ago, but I remember it quite vividly like it was yesterday. I remember having a sore throat in winter and wearing a pink sweater and an Afghan choker, neither of which I’m carrying today. I remember there were some lights leading up to the gallery space, and people buzzing about. It seemed a different place altogether today.

“Asalam o alaikum,” I hear a voice in the pitch-black darkness, as I’m turning off my phone’s torch, seeing the entrance lit and doors open. The guard must be wondering if he greeted a real person or a ghost. I think the same about the guard.

As I enter the exhibition, it is lit up and ready, but with no people, like Marie Celeste, found in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, without a crew or passengers, but with all their belongings intact. The first two works are installed behind curtained rooms. I resisted going inside—the last thing I want is to step inside a dark room—but I find myself immediately drawn to the videos installed and forget about the dark or being alone in this aged building.

Seema Nusrat, 2024. Photograph by the author, courtesy of Articulate Studios.

The exhibition titled Horizon is Home, curated by Quddus Mirza, is an outcome of a three-week-long residency hosted by Articulate Studios in Chitral and Lahore. The artists include Abdul Haadi, Samina Hassan Laghari, Salar Marri, Seema Nusrat, and Farooq Soomro. Horizon as a concept has been celebrated by artists across history, compositionally, conceptually, and symbolically. Mark Rothko, for instance, used horizons notoriously in his colour field paintings. They say about Rothko’s work, “This is not the kind of painting you can talk about – you have to experience it.” [1] And though formally, the horizon functions as a point of separation, a sort of groundedness, that enables the eye to see what is depicted. Yet, the eye of the soul sees beyond the separations. “You feel as though you have been captured by infinite horizons and absorbed into imaginary seas with hallucinatory hues.”  In our daily occupied and chaotic lives, the eye of the soul remains quite suppressed, hidden behind the intellect. The simple act of viewing art is enough to open this suppressed sense. I feel a similar response to Horizon is Home, where my inhibitions are disrupted and I feel lost to the world of the imaginary, contemplating memory, identity, boundaries, and separations.

Inside the dark rooms, video works by Abdul Haadi and Samina Hassan Laghari greet me. I find the dialogue the works create with the building’s structure fascinating. The video projections feel like echoes of the past, the walls adorned with artists’ connection to their homelands, with environmental or geographical contexts. The dark room holds an intimacy; the exhibition soon turns into a confrontation with myself. The silence of the video works is deathly, making the projections more powerful. I feel teleported to my childhood. I notice there are fireplaces in the dark rooms; it’s an aged house after all. I wonder what stories the fireplace tells. At this point of metaphysical experience, I applaud my choice not to visit the opening of the exhibition but rather, to visit it the following day, where I could dive into the experience of the works together with the surrounding space, without human and social interruption. My social anxiety turned out to be my prize after all.

Farooq Soomro, 2024, archival ink print on photopaper. Photograph by the author, courtesy of Articulate Studios.

As I walk further, I find light and still images. I breathe a sigh of immense relief to see familiar monuments and figures, but the confrontation with myself continues, and I can’t escape it. I find destruction, congested houses, bougainvillea, and traffic, all reminiscent of Karachi. These are photographs by Farooq Soomro. No matter where I am, it’s a delight to find a trace of my home. Even though the artist created depictions of other cities and places, he uses the Lahore smog as a metaphor for blurry reality in contrast with a beautiful, blurry landscape of a valley from Chitral. Similarly, Salar Marri’s series of multimedia works Ambiguous Nature of Being is consumed with blurriness in imagery as well as the use of material, which takes me to another sphere of existential inquiry. I regret that to truly experience the ambiguity, I wish I hadn’t read the title of the series. What I see is the blurred boundary between the city I’m in and the city where I come from. It takes me back to my thought a day earlier: would I ever be able to see Lahore (or any other city) for what it is, or would I always compare it with home, Karachi?

Shortly after, I see models of homes arranged like apartments, made with green covers used during construction. The sculptural work by Seema Nusrat highlights the environmental damage caused as homes and trees are being replaced by buildings. I enjoy the placement of the work the most.

“Erosion”, Samina Hassan Laghari, 2024, inkjet print on tracing paper. Photograph by the author, courtesy of Articulate Studios.

Just when I think of leaving, my terrors reignite as I witness Samina Hassan’s print on tracing paper. Not that it was horrible; no, it was quite the opposite. As an artist who loves using tracing paper, I was immediately hypnotised and slightly afraid. The print combines various geographical landscapes, from Sindh and Chitral, depicting the environmental damage. I could see surreal objects and figures coming together in my mind’s eye. Combined with the scale of the work, the aesthetics of the aged building, and my childhood memories already invoked earlier, it reminded me of Count Dracula’s house at the top of the mountain. The isolation felt real and near. At this point, I think of the guard who must be wondering where I went, if I am real. The last thing I want is to be locked inside. I take a final look at Samina Hassan’s print, which is challenging to articulate, so I write a few lines of poetry and leave.

Bushes take me somewhere

They itch, they scratch the edges

Blood rushes, drip by drip

A voice calls me towards it

I’m scared to go, to look in the eyes

This could be home

References

[1] Art Basel. “Mark Rothko in a New Light.” Art Basel. Accessed December 25, 2024. https://www.artbasel.com/news/restrospective-mark-rothko-fondation-louis-vuitton-paris-reveals-lesser-known-aspects-american-painter-work.

Introducing The Old Tai and Beijing Shichahai

Red Bean by Tianjiao Wang. Film still. Image courtesy of the artist.

By Tina Wang and Tianjiao Wang

The Old Tai and Beijing Shichahai (老太和北京什刹海) is an artist duo formed by Tina Wang and Tianjiao Wang. They are interested in important yet often overlooked qualities in the art world, such as the courage to be generous to others and not feel taken advantage of, the question of how to sustain one’s practice within a nourishing environment, and how to make art in a healthy way. They are willing to invest deeply in these concerns. Their work seeks to resist oppression in contemporary life and to foster better expression, storytelling, and sharing. “The Old Tai” comes from Tina’s long-standing artist name, 太太, modified with an adjective for a desire for the wisdom that comes from becoming older, while Beijing Shichahai refers to Tianjiao’s desire to root her identity in her hometown of Beijing.

Tianjiao Wang is interested in acknowledging the presence of things. Through photographing and filming, she anticipates drawing others closer, while simultaneously keeping them perpetually within the realm of the other—without crossing boundaries, without encroachment, without fusion.

TAITAI +/-/x/÷Tina makes perverse dioramas with organic materials in all states of their solidity to emphasize the malleability, humor, and fragility of the human condition. Her ecosystem of movement research for performance that leads to object making (film, photo, and ceramics), which is fed back into the installations, guides her practice.

Tina Wang: Why have you recently become interested in performance?

Tianjiao Wang: It might be because the medium of performance shares many connections and similarities with the filmmaking I’m doing—they both invite the audience, as a collective, to share a period of time together, one that is durational and demands attention. So, the reason I’m inviting you to work with me on this performance is to use the act of doing to gain a more panoramic understanding of a certain unfolding. But I especially want to collaborate with you because I’m reminded of scenes with two female leads in film and television—most directly, Bergman’s Persona (1966)—and the energy that arises between two women. I believe performance, as a medium more immediate than film, offers us a lot of space to explore. I’m curious about something you mentioned before—you described my film as having a certain atmospheric quality in relation to space. You said that’s something you’ve been pursuing in your own practice recently; you also mentioned that it feels like our practices are somehow crossing paths. Can you elaborate on that? What about my work that made you feel this resonance?

Tina: Mhmm! Yes, your videos bring forth this installation quality that I am pursuing in my work with foam and paraffin wax. Maybe this is the perfect time for this collaboration of exchanges in media. Even though perhaps you would not call your work installation, the work that you screened at Roman Susan where viewers sit with the imagery of a landscape that is both familiar and unfamiliar to us feels like one. It is familiar because I have seen trees and been on hikes. But it is unfamiliar because I have not been explicitly to that exact scene you have. The slow speed at which the video moves gives me agency as a viewer, and space and time to take it in and feel.

Tianjiao: In the film Fall 塌, I believe I continued an interest of mine—the idea that the act of viewing can be one of absorption. This state of absorption can act like a catalyst: you might find yourself in resonance with the protagonist, or with the ladybug in their hand, a falling leaf, or the sunset over the Indiana Dunes…The interplay between text and image, and the subtle discrepancy between information and affect, have always been my sources of inspiration. But in Fall, what interests me is the intertextuality between human presence and landscape, or perhaps the refusal to let the human figure be the sole protagonist. The landscape, too, can take a leading role, occupying space with authority, allowing a reciprocal energy to move through the film. From another perspective, I feel that the presence of the characters I’m interested in also becomes fluid in this film. I’m still exploring this aspect, something like the energy connected to a film, and the kind of capacity or state a person brings home with them after watching it.

Fall 塌 by Tianjiao Wang. Film still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Tina: I am with you, making work that can create a world in which people can see and feel themselves in, but is it unfamiliar enough to push their total understanding? Against the strict functions and associations that people, places, and things have in our lives? But I also wonder about my own biases. Perhaps I am still stuck in a specific binary framework of value placement- familiar/unfamiliar, slow/fast, boring/interesting. I make decisions to try to remain in an “in-between” state, but still feel caught in it. What is moderation? There’s a certain pressure of not wanting to be too boring or too interesting. If it is too boring or interesting, it does not allow that kind of absorption you are talking about. In that way, I sense a tremendous, perhaps misguided, sense of responsibility.

Having worked as a performer for others for more than a decade now, I have been in many types of processes. Even if the process of a performance is somatic-based and slower, inevitably, there is a quickening and hardening against the gaze of the viewer. Maybe there is a fear of being boring. Like you said, I am sharing time with my viewers, and I want to be generous. I hope for absorption also, not just what I am doing, but a weaving together of one’s attention and associations of what is happening. Perhaps it’s a shared curiosity? Compared to me, I sense you have less pressure in showing your video works. I feel like I can take the time I need and project myself into them.

Photo by McCall McClellan for TAITAI   +/-/x/÷Tina’s work, Where are the concubines?

Even though I made the “transition” from dancer to performer then visual artist, using the body is still such an important start to my process. I touch my face on a wooden floor and feel support. I sink into a soft pillow and feel my neck ache. And I see myself wanting to recreate a variety of associations of “comforts” for an audience member in an art setting. Do you feel that way when making? Or do you have certain goals/ideal states for your viewers?

Tianjiao: In past screening experiences, I’ve sometimes felt an unprecedented level of nervousness or pressure when showing my film to just one individual. That feeling probably stems from being too self-aware—either because I know exactly what I’m doing in a particular film, or, on the contrary, because I’m acutely aware of my own uncertainty about something. I get anxious about how they might respond. But in a conventional cinema setting, surrounded by complete darkness, it’s different. Maybe the darkness helps—I’m half joking, but maybe it really does. I don’t know who’s sitting in the audience, but I’m also sitting among them. I become part of the audience. I feel comfortable. In those moments, I’m no longer the maker. I especially felt that way with red bean. I was able to simply enjoy watching it.

When I first read Nathaniel Dorsky’s description of how watching a certain film can make one feel healthy, it immediately resonated with me, because that’s exactly how I’ve felt after seeing the work of many contemporary filmmakers I adore. It’s not necessarily a sense of healthy because the film is hopeful, uplifting, or even gentle, but because the combination of medium, technique, and message comes together in a way that makes one feel whole or well.

I was quite surprised that you used the word “comforts”, because I might have thought of safety instead. I can see how your work constantly engages with familiar things in unfamiliar ways, but for me, unfamiliarity doesn’t necessarily bring comfort. I’m not sure if what you’re referring to is more accurately described as emotional comfort. Or perhaps it’s the second half of the sentence—“in an art setting”—that you were emphasizing?

Red Bean by Tianjiao Wang. Film still. Image courtesy of the artist.

Tina: Healthy! I had never thought of that, but perhaps that is what I am thinking of too. Contemporary society asks us to fragment and compartmentalize so much of ourselves, our senses, desires, goals, and the ability to be generous. Seeing a work that can let a person feel absorption (as you mentioned before) is perhaps what I mean by comfort. I don’t expect my audience members to feel comfortable seeing my work. Most of the time, as you have alluded to, there is a feeling of unease and lack of safety.

In my performances, I see myself creating these microcosms of the insane things we do to try to make our lives feel meaningful in contemporary society. I put excess and mess on display because to me, that is the calibration, an in-between state in trying to work through an idea to a final product. We are often asked to either justify the end because of the means or the means for the ends. Perhaps like all the attempts of other artists to queer categories and binaries, I want to queer our definitions of finish, polish, success, finality, and achievement. Things are messy and ambiguous but always visceral in my work because that is something we don’t see much or think of as positive or even productive in the world.

That being said, I also do believe in the need to not just do what gratifies one’s senses. I think that is what is pushing me to make work beyond performance. I have such pleasure in non-verbally showing the gamut of emotions I feel when I encounter something hard (tile) versus something soft (melted wax) as I world-build these performative dioramas. But how do I keep inviting different types of audiences in? How do I also restrain myself in the work to create more contemplative experiences?

The body is not always moving but is always being put on display, asking to be judged in some way. But can its complicated and contradictory “moves” be translatable into an art “object” and retain its mobility? I think and wonder about stillness a lot. How do you make decisions about stillness and motion as you go into the editing suite? Do you find yourself guided by intuition for the most part? Are there moments that you didn’t but felt happy about the outcome?

Photo by Michelle Reid for TAITAI   +/-/x/÷Tina’s work Where are the concubines?

Tianjiao: Sometimes the process feels like hunting—there’s an element of luck involved. But when the camera captures a certain moment, I immediately know I’ll use that shot. That said, there are also times when I get strong footage, but end up letting it go because it doesn’t fit into the flow of the film.

Fall was the first film where I entered the editing suites without having gathered all the footage I had originally imagined. That decision was also intuitive—I just knew that what I had shot so far wasn’t enough to fully form a film. I started editing partly because there was an opportunity for the Roman Susan screening test, and I wanted to try out the experience of both working on and showing a work-in-progress. But that process gave me new insight into the material. It was also in the editing suite that I realized the landscape had gradually started to stand out more than the main character.

I appreciate what you said about “not just doing what gratifies one’s senses.” When I first encountered those durational structuralist films, they felt like a direct counter to conventional viewing rhythms—many of them, to me, were about endurance and reshaping the viewer’s patience. Lately, I’ve been exploring whether a durational film could slow down someone’s metabolism, rather than being long for the sake of being long.

This ties into my thoughts on stillness and motion—not just in terms of visuals, but also conceptually and technically. It’s about how these elements work together to create a particular viewing experience, something that ultimately serves the audience.

Tina: I am now thinking about a recent rejection email from a reputable foundation that compiled the jury’s notes with the help of AI, and a comment that stood out was this: “The intention is clear, but the community impact could be described more directly.” Here we are talking about internal intentions and desires, but of course, there is so much hope for external understanding. I know all the cliches about not depending on one comment or feedback from one organization, but outside of graduate school or group critique settings, how does one know or gain data points to measure that translation from intention to reaction? And how does one trust the feedback of the viewer? I am grateful to you for trusting me and look forward to making this performance with you.

Tianjiao Wang and Tina Wang.

Performance proposal: Our desire to collaborate comes from Tianjiao’s curiosity: can an artist who has always performed independently find a kind of equilibrium when working with someone else, remaining true to themselves while allowing another person to coexist through forms of collaboration, support, or simply presence? Our tentative title centers around the idea of undomestication. Tina has developed a body of work called ‘How to domesticate Tina’ that takes the form of a video and live performances.

Tianjiao will use choreographed poses by Tina to make her body resemble unstable, unreliable pieces of furniture for Tina to interact with. These interactions can be physical or verbal. But because each of my poses can only be held for a limited time before collapsing, Tina will have to find the next “piece of furniture” to engage with.

Since Tina has historically performed non-verbally, her act of domestication will be to verbalize poems of fitting in as she tries to receive support from Tianjiao’s untrained body. The collaboration pushes up against the line between suffocation and support in questioning how to still find belonging as both parties fail at their tasks together.

I’ll Pick the Cyborg: Connective Thread at Ivory Gate Gallery

Connective Thread installation shot. (L to R) Work by: Lauren Seider, Adrianne Rubenstein, and Sam Jaffe. Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

By Samuel Schwindt

Florals dance with armor; aggressive suturing marries fossilized detritus; foreboding becomes forewarning.

The idealized fractured is the idealized subverted — according to Ivory Gate Gallery’s group exhibition Connective Thread (curated by Michelle Alexander). Slipping down concrete steps in the affluent Chicago Gold Coast neighborhood, there’s a lurking, foreboding glamor in the works of Michelle Grabner, Sam Jaffe, Lauren Seiden, Michelle Alexander, Adrianne Rubenstein, and Carmen Neely.

The exhibition statement enshrines the showing as “both the intimate and universal aspects of womanhood.” The nestled below street-level gallery harbors quasi-textiles, papers, and other ephemeral-made-permanent gestures. The works propose a retribution: a re-framing without the frame. The frame, being the body, is absent; and the absences in the show can, and will, inform a liberation.

On the left, a scrunched construction is vaguely body-adjacent, an unstable figure. The steel-y outside hides an interior of blackened, shiny, and cratered skin. Lauren Seiden’s Ultimate Shield (no. 6) is an in-flux armor. The skin is the frame, is the architecture, is the body – a futuristic blending of form, envisioning where the melting of material personas and roles resolutely solidifies into self-defense, allegorically connecting to extraneous forces contorting bodies in space.

Sam Jaffe. I’ll Pick You, 2022. Mixed media on wood. 7 x 22 x 5.5 in. Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

In the middle, Sam Jaffe’s I’ll Pick You is an algae outgrowth, a fossilized specimen of flowers in delicate pastels. It evokes a species of sneaky flora; perhaps one that has evasive or self-protective maneuvers. In a manner similar to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, I don’t want to state this is beautiful. When writing investigations (autobiographical, scientific, poetic) about the color blue, Nelson writes beautifying color choices are, in fact, “murderous to beauty.” Her investigation carries on with the societal cliché’s of women feeling “blue” and the pathologizing that follows. The colors Jaffe’s weaponizes remind me of this line: “If a color could deliver hope, does it follow it could also bring despair?” [1]

Michelle Alexander. The Mother, The Sister, The Pressure. Connective Thread Installation Shot. Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

In the back, Michelle Alexander’s runaway bride is caught by a typical fashion display rack. It’s in a confused state (positively) of becoming—ready to be pulled for a fitting, yet also an archaic object. The staples-as-stitching propose an aggressive, immediate fix. Maybe the gown ripped, and before walking down the aisle, an assistant stapled skin. There’s a profound absence in the piece: an absence of an experience that happened long ago or maybe won’t happen at all. On a site visit, the artist told me the dress reflects pressures—familial, social—to get married, and the fears she may never embark on that traditional female rite of passage.

Michelle Grabner. Untitled, 2024–2025. Glazed porcelain and oil paint. Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

In the back, Michelle Grabner has a knack for coaxing the ordinary into the glinting sacrosanct. The sculptures on the floor at the back are a surprise house-party guest; one who maybe wasn’t invited but lovingly welcomed upon arrival. A doorstop is a disruption next to the immortalized ceramic cleaning supplies; a measure to keep a conversation open, like when one is departing a house and has their foot slightly in the door (but their body is angled out). There’s a romance towards the labor history; a beauty seeking demystification in scrubbing the final soap suds from the previously murky sink.

To the side, Carmen Neely’s Remember is a ripped diary entry, petrified in its moment of creation but excavated for the present.  The lithograph is brainstorming sketches tracing existential dread. The text ranges from half-cursive scriptures such as “Your work will survive this” and “You will survive this.” The final statement on the right leaflet-made-lithograph is a ligature. It echoes reminisces in the show on the cruelty of stagnation: “The heaviest borders are clenched tightly…. Anticipating release by your own muscles.”

Carmen Neely. Remember, 2023. Lithograph on paper. 12.5 x 14.75 in (framed). Photo by Jonas Muller-Ahlheim.

Threaded together (sorry, I know) are manifestations of utopia: I can’t help but think of automaton constructs, post-human musings, or retrospections on a past that unfurls into a questionable future. The group exhibition becomes a reckoning in this way, resonating with Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985). The artworks operate as fictions blended with social reality, where science fiction tangles with societal oppression. Haraway wrote that the women’s movements of the late 20th century were key in unearthing a collective consciousness of resistance within tight seams, and the cyborg metaphor liberates through “imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.”[2] The real and the socially constructed become an “optical illusion,” and the cyborg embodies an “intimacy with a power” not born from the history of sexuality (cue Foucault, of course). In this way, the exhibition draws on material manipulations rooted in traditional craft—sewing, quasi-ceramics, printmaking—to conjure an uncanny, future female body basking in dangerous glamor.

Connective Thread lurches towards luxury, rooted in a morose meditation. While there are harbingers of despair contained in the gallery (a runaway bride, for example), they showcase a solace in standing resolutely. It’s almost ritual, almost kink: a slow summoning that borders on spellcasting. It purports to be a fix of the ways women are viewed in an all-consuming patriarchy. But it becomes a stitched revenge salute in the end; an acknowledgement and a wink, like when you rough scrub a coarse edge to get a glinting smoothness. Smoothing the rough edge doesn’t provide it autonomy; perhaps accentuating the seam does.

Check out the closing reception of Connective Thread on Friday, June 6th, 5:00 – 8:00 PM at Ivory Gate Gallery (Chicago, IL). You can also view the exhibition by appointment on June 7th and 8th.

[1] Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle: Wave Books, 2009. P. 12.

[2] Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late 20th Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. P. 6.

Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? In Conversation with Furqan Mohamed

Exhibition visitors at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

Interview by Adi Berardini

What can our fears tell us about one another? Could embracing our fears instead of keeping them at arm’s length connect us closer together?

Furqan Mohamed curated the exhibition Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? as part of this year’s Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts presented with Charles Street Video, featuring artists Nahomi Amberber, Saysah, and Farah Ghafoor. The exhibition asks what we are afraid of in the pursuit of justice for all workers and how workers are often painted to be monstrous or terrifying under the logic of capitalism. What does it look like to embrace the monstrosity? Through a multi-sensorial approach, Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? touches upon how labour can leave one feeling like a ghost and a shell of an embodied human. Together, Mohamed and the artists explore the haunting in the fight towards liberation in a labour landscape steeped in white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, and imagine what mending this could look like.

Furqan Mohamed is a writer, educator, and arts worker from Toronto. Her work has appeared in Room Magazine, Maisonneuve, mimp magazine, Canthius, and The Local, where she was an inaugural Journalism Fellow. Her digital chapbook, “A Small Homecoming,” was published by Party Trick Press in 2021. She is also the creator of the “Who’s Afraid?” reading series, which shares a December birthday with her.

Furqan Mohamed at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

Adi Berardini:  How did your curatorial vision for Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? take shape? How does it relate you to your Who’s Afraid? poetry and writing series?

Furqan Mohamed:  I started with the reading series where writers that I know or writers that I want to know and work with are invited to share work based on the themes of fear. So, whether they are afraid or if they’re the ones who are used to being feared. We’ve had maybe a dozen events so far.

I think a lot of racialized folks, a lot of Black and Indigenous people, and women and queer folks, know what it’s like to be the object of other people’s fears. I think especially as a Muslim living in a post-9/11 world, it’s hard to not talk about fear in relation to being feared. Or what it’s like to have fears that are not always honoured or not always recognized or fears that are seen as less important than those of others. It’s the question of “Who exactly gets to be afraid?” And the response was beautiful. So many forms of writing came out of that. There were poets, people who wrote for the first time and shared in front of an audience for the first time in our series of flash fiction short stories, really beautiful pieces of prose.

I was blown away by how immediate and visceral it was. Everyone was just like, “Yes, I wanna talk about fear. I’m afraid all the time.” And for me, I think that resonated. But also, because fear is often so discussed as something to overcome, people are always thinking of how they’re going to face their fears and how they’re going to overcome them. And there’s less of an emphasis on just honouring them or sitting with them and naming them and being like, “I’m terrified.” And we’ve been given every reason to be terrified in a time of genocide, and a time of climate catastrophe, of late-stage capitalism. Seeing that I work with children, [it’s the feeling of] being afraid of what we’re leaving them and afraid of the treatment of our elders who are still with us. I think sometimes a crucial step in organizing is to be able to acknowledge that because you can’t gather with people or work with people unless you’re willing to accept all of them, including their fears.

Fear is a weaponizing tactic used against people. Fear has been often used to prevent people from gathering, from seeing one another, from being with one another. It’s used to halt and stifle and stop people from connection. I think that investigating that is also important. The reading series is fun for me to honour a literary tradition as a writer and a reader. Octavia Butler very much comes to mind to focus on, whether through poetry or through fantastical fictions.

Then I had been working or in conversation with Mayworks Festival. I had a writing poetry workshop activity at the last festival last year, and people of different ages, backgrounds, and abilities, and various relationships and experiences with writing and poetry came out. We had written this collective poem together on this super tall piece of fabric canvas. People were starting and stopping at different points on the banner and coming up against each other in beautiful ways. I remember being moved by that and appreciative because it was different than our traditional poetry reading. Even though I’m coming from spoken word and poetry and oral performance, there was that give and take with an audience. There’s a relationship there. But this one was even more involved, where after I was done connecting fear and poetry and labour, attendees then started to speak back to me and respond to these prompts and speak to one another on this living document.

Visitors at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

This collective poem took things to a whole new level for me. I learned so much going from a traditional literary series that I still love, and I’m interested in, to a more involved kind of collective practice, to then being asked to apply as a curator as this year’s festival took shape. That was like a whole new kind of learning curve because I come from a teaching and facilitating background and then I come from a reading, performing, and writing background. I consider things like beauty, space, and material, but I’m currently in the pocket of Big Child.™ I’m not someone who makes things with their hands unless you count like craft in a kindergarten classroom or a grade four or five science or social studies project.

When it comes to a practice in visual arts, I come more from like a scholarly and appreciative lens. I’m the person who writes about them; I’m not the person who considers them in this space or curates them. And then I was suddenly in that role and having a wonderful time because certain things are quite similar. For instance, when you’re setting up for a reading, you think about where the mic stand is and where the chairs are going to be, and accessibility and where people are going to sit and hear you from, and in a classroom, you consider space and place.

When you invite people to listen to a reading, you do a lot of the prefacing for them. At every Who’s Afraid? I explain where I’m coming from. I talk about Edward Said and Orientalism, I talk about Octavia Butler. I talk about what we’re afraid of, what fear means to me, and then the writers come up and there’s a throughline. But at a visual arts show, there’s a curatorial essay, but I’m not there. When people come in to see the show, the artists aren’t there. People just come in as they please. They may or may not finish the essay. They will read Farah’s poem on the wall. They will listen to Saysah’s soundscape. They will read and admire Nahomi’s collage. But where they take it, there’s less holding my hand and following me as we think this through together. It is left to so much interpretation and I think that impacted that transition for me going from a reading series to a visual arts show, but it was a transition that I enjoyed.

Exhibition visitors at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Work by Saysah. Image credit: Blue MBK.

The exhibition weaves together themes of alienation, liberation, and how labour can leave us feeling like a ghost in our own bodies. How did you approach curating works that engage these complex ideas?

For me, it was important for the show to make people feel aware of themselves. I think sometimes this can be the aim of the artist and curation, and it can be beautiful. However, sometimes you can get lost in the work and you as the subject kind of disappear into the world that the artist and the curator in the space have made for you.

I wanted it less to be about making you disappear and forget where you are and who you are for a second. Less about escapism and more about “I’m really aware of my own body right now and myself and my relation to this space.” Immediately as soon as you go in, the space is dark and you are aware of the light changing and your eyes adjusting, and the sound immediately through Saysah and Farah and the curtains. You’re aware of entry and where you can and can’t go or where you can and can move through. I think that my first consideration was this and the other themes were able to flow through that. You can’t think about alienation without first thinking about yourself and about where you are in the space that you’re in.

Artists Nahomi Amberber (left) and Saysah (right) at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

I think that the fun thing about fear is that it does make us uncomfortable sometimes. When you are uncomfortable, you ask where that is coming from and then there’s that search for comfort. That’s where a lot of interesting opportunities can happen and can arise. Nahomi and Saysah are both talented artists in their own ways. They’re also partners in real life, which is a cool element of the show, to see in their process. They both wanted to talk about isolation and about how fear can make us feel separate. They also wanted to talk about how collective fears give people a reason to come together, how fear is both a halting and mobilizing force and what that means for labour justice in particular. Nahomi and Saysah drove home the storytelling that we do around fear in their work. Whether it’s a parent to a child or an elder in an organizing space to a young person, they [demonstrate] the warnings that we give one another, and the cautionary tales that we tell. Often, that is meant to encourage and guide people as they organize against injustice, but it is also a real source of anxiety and fear.

A visitor at the the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Work by Nahomi Amberber. Image credit: Blue MBK.

Nahomi cites their father and the stories they grew up hearing as part of their collage. I think those feelings are embodied and showcased by Saysah’s work with the projection and the soundscape that takes over the space because you are looking at them manipulating their own face and body in different ways that make you aware of your own. It makes you conscious of [how] fear manifests itself and where it comes from.

One of my favorite elements is this peephole. There’s a door in Charles Street Video with a peephole, like one in an apartment door, and a monitor behind it. As soon as you look in, these eyes are looking right back at you and a pair of headphones with some sound that Saysah included. For me, that speaks to that connection. Whether it’s Nahomi talking about their father and them, or it’s in an organizing space between one another as comrades, or people who work together, or it’s a stranger at a protest that you lock eyes with.

I might be afraid of you, and you might be afraid of me, and we might be terrified of one another. But I need you, and you can’t look away from me, and I can’t look away from you.

I think it talks to this forced feeling that we have no choice. We’re all afraid and have to be looking at one another—There’s accountability in that. I might be afraid of you, and you might be afraid of me, and we might be terrified of one another. But I need you, and you can’t look away from me, and I can’t look away from you. As terrifying as it is part of that collective spirit also comes in with the overhead projection that Saysah has installed as well, where people are invited to move the elements around on the overhead projector and answer some of the prompts or perhaps draw some cutouts and leave them for someone else to play around with, that kind of collaborative process with fear as well. I might not understand everything you’re afraid of, and you might not understand everything I’m afraid of, but I have to sit with these feelings regardless, and I need to be aware of them. Sometimes you really need someone else to spark that awareness in you.

Lastly, I think Farah’s poem ties everything together beautifully when she uses the old fable of a sheep and a wolf to explain the dynamics between the oppressed and oppressor, like a worker and a person in a relationship with them through an oppressive or dominating way but uses this language of care and false comfort. Like you don’t have any reason to be afraid, your fears aren’t real, and you should find comfort and solace in this unjust system. It’s very seductive with fear. It’s completely human and I don’t blame people sometimes for giving into fear a little bit. Maybe not siding with the wolf, but finding comfort or hiding behind the wolves in their lives, whether those wolves are big or everyday and small because fear can do that to people.

But as far as a kind of cautionary fable poem, I think it really interrogates that and asks us to think beyond that false comfort and understand that we have one another and have no reason to be afraid of one another. But that, of course, requires us to acknowledge our fears in the first place.

I think with the different sorts of elements of visual elements or sound in this space, you can hear Farah’s poem in a sound shower. You have to get to a certain point in the space to hear it. Then, when you step away, you are again surrounded and bathed in a soundscape. There are lots of times, whether it’s with the curtains or with the sound or with the headphones playing with public and private, the individual versus the collective is what it means to address and find comfort in the false stories that we tell around fear of the sheep and the wolf or the true stories that we hear from our elders, from Nahomi and her father. [It explores] the kind of discomfort that comes with fear, but also the childlike wonder of hiding under a blanket with a flashlight and being super scared. This is scary, but we’re okay. People were doing that together with the overhead projector at the opening night and revert[ed] to a very childlike state.

I also think that there’s a base human emotion around fear that I think encourages people to revert to a kind of innocent, vulnerable version of themselves that I think then is receptive to things like collaboration, receptive to things like a collective response to fear, and finding comfort in one another in that way. I think there’s so much happening all at once, which you hope for in a visual experience and art exhibition.

Poet Farah Ghafoor at the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Image credit: Blue MBK.

Each artist—Nahomi Amberber, Saysah, and Farah Ghafoor—brings a distinct practice rooted in personal, political, and sensory experience. How did their individual voices shape the curatorial direction and what dialogues emerged between their works? I think you’ve touched base on this already, but if there’s anything you’d like to add feel free.

Farah is a talented poet and has read for Who’s Afraid? before, during the second or third event that we had. She often considers capitalism, worth, and value in her work. And I knew that I wanted to work with her because she was already exploring those themes in her poetry. And she comes from the finance world because of her day job. The ways that we talk about human life in relation to the value of a dollar. How much a life is worth and how much a human being is worth for things like insurance. I think the Mayworks building in Toronto is neighbours to the Workplace Compensation Board. The people who compensate workers or lawyers for people to get compensated for an accident on the job. They will help you figure out how much your leg is worth or how much your arm is worth if you injure yourself.

Oh, that’s ominous.

I know. I think about how haunting that is and how ominous that is. And there was a previous show, I think it was last year or the year before that talked about how much a body is worth and more explicitly explored that question.

I remember hearing that and thinking about how disembodying that is and how quickly one can turn into a zombie or a person who is no longer full, but a collection of parts valued based on use. Who decides what use looks like and what is valuable and what isn’t? How could you ever possibly quantify what a human body and a human being is worth? But people do that.

I remember speaking with Farah about how that kind of system is then normalized quietly in a subtle way. We all have to get up for work everyday and participate in the system that is willing to dispose of us when we are no longer useful. We’ll often provide these kinds of false concessions and false comforts to keep us satiated so that we don’t engage in acts of resistance or so we don’t question these systems, and we don’t work together to create new ones. And I think narrative and storytelling are so important. And that story that capitalism tells us about how much we are “worth,” and how some people are worthless. And how we are only worthy or become worth something when we engage in X, Y, Z, or that our labour is not ours and belongs to someone else.

That narrative is a very real and strong one. The state tells stories and capitalism tells stories, and it tells these stories to keep us in place. And then you have these alternative stories, right? This world-building has to happen. There’s this adrienne maree brown quote that I love where she says that “organizing is like science fiction.”1 Like you do kind of have to bring people where you are to believe them so that they believe you.

Whether it’s imagining abolition, imagining a free Palestine, or imagining what it would look like to house everyone in the city. Or what it would look like for everyone to have a living wage what it would look like to not give in to Amazon and these big guys that think that we need them more than they need us. That takes quite a lot of storytelling to bring people there. It takes a lot of narrative-building and a lot of world-building that requires a lot of care at the same time.

And Nahomi and Saysah also bring that forward with their works, whether it’s the sharing of the intergenerational poem that Nahomi embroidered on fabric. I think about embroidery and textile work as being this very traditional form of labour, often done by women, particularly marginalized women, and racialized women. And what it means to sit somewhere and stitch something over and over and how that repetition is determined to tell that story. Like, I’m going to sit here and I’m going to weave and I’m going to thread and I’m going to commit this story that my father told me to textile because it means so much to me—I want people to come and be involved and be in this story with me and experience it with me. And the collaging of that photo over again, this beautiful family photo in different frames. I think that speaks to honouring and committing of memory of not being willing to let go of this ghost or this narrative.

And with Saysah’s projections, it’s the only light emitting in this space which is important because it is dark sort of everywhere, except the small lights used to light the poems. Most of the light in the room because it’s dark, is coming from the projections to call and pull people in. But also, to ground people and make them aware of themselves when they’re engaging with these stories to be very present. When they go to play with the overhead projector, I think people then take that awareness and are in the space together contributing to the creation of a counter-narrative. Another kind of campfire story that we tell one another in the pursuit of labour justice.

Visitors at the the opening reception of Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? Work by Saysah. Image credit: Blue MBK

You already beautifully weave your influences throughout. But who are some other artists or writers or thinkers who have influenced you in thinking the thinking behind the exhibition?

I have a poem on my phone that I want to pull up, so I don’t forget.

The poem is “12 Questions” by Bhanu Kapil. She asks:

Number one, who are you and whom do you love?

Two, where did you come from? How did you arrive?

Three. How will you begin?

Four. How will you live now?

Five. What is the shape of your body?

Six. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

Seven. What do you remember about the earth?

Eight. What are the consequences of silence?

Nine. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

Ten. Describe a morning you woke without fear.

Eleven. How will you have you prepared for your death?

Twelve. What would you say if you could?2

All of those questions that the poem asks are what I want people to ask when they’re at the show, of themselves, of their neighbour. It’s a poem that I think about so often. But I also think about, for me as a Black writer as a person concerned with subjectivity, what makes a person denied their personhood and what are the things that people need?

I think a lot about beauty, which I think you also have to do as an artist. And about how fear is often an ugly thing. Whether it’s being made to feel ugly under the gaze of someone else, to be watched, or to feel like something is just undesirable to talk about. A fear that’s just too ugly to even bring up or have a conversation about. I’m interested in that no longer being the case. I don’t want us to be afraid of watching; I don’t want us to be afraid of looking.

I want us to look at each other, whether it’s looking at the peephole in the eyes or staring back at you, or you’re looking at another person who’s come in to see the show at the same time. I don’t want us to think of our fears as being ugly or undesirable things. They’re important, they’re valuable. They’re like a guide, a talisman. Our fears are sacred and important. So yes, that Bhanu Kapil poem, Edward Said, always Octavia Butler. And then I think Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe always and Dionne Brand, always reading Dionne Brand.

How do you envision the exhibition inspiring viewers to reimagine and reflect on their own relationship to labour and work?

Like I said earlier, I want people to be aware of themselves when they go to the show, and to be very internal and reflective. I also want people to know that while we are not our jobs, while we are not our work, while we are people first and we have value outside, work is often the first place people can become radicalized and become acutely aware of their own conditions and then be able to form solidarity with people. Whether it’s immediately in their own workspace, in their field of work, in their kind of labour whether that’s in a union or not, or in the pursuit of one or international. [It’s] understanding how different tactics of oppression often are linked in the sense that the same people make and purchase the same weapons that are used against incarcerated folks here and then incarcerated folks in Palestine, or people suffering in Kashmir or Sudan or Congo. [Realizing] the narrative in stories that are told against or used to justify the suffering of Indigenous and Black people across the world.

I think labour justice in particular is this special thing because it encompasses so many other justices, like labour justice is a racial justice. It is a gender justice. It is climate justice. And I think this exhibition makes people think about their own workplaces. Whether you’re a writer and you’re signing on or an artist and you’re signing on to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), or it’s making you think about Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) or it’s making you think about if you’re afraid to say Palestine in your workplace.

Are you afraid to ask your colleagues about what recourses you have if you experience sexual violence or wage theft in your place of work? And who can you turn to, and what’s stopping you, perhaps from asking for more for what you deserve? What’s stopping you from divesting from unethical practices or creating a new ethical way of existing with your neighbours, with yourself, with folks around the world? I would hope that that’s what people can take away from the show is an acute awareness of themselves in relation to where they work, how they work, and what possibilities there are to organize.

One of the things that I love is when I go to a protest and I see the teachers or the nurses contingent or the health care workers contingent. Or on the back of the Mayworks postcards, there’s all the union logos and numbers and locals. Or when you see different intergenerational workers and young workers connecting.

There is something that’s really intimate about labour. We are not our jobs, but we often identify with them quite a bit, and a lot of important relationships are made through our labour. I hope that people can experience that reflection internally and externally when they go to visit.

You can check out Who’s Afraid of Labour Justice? at Charles Street Video until May 30th, 2025, as part of Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts.

  1. adrienne maree brown, 2024. “all organizing is science fiction”, FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America, Daniela Alvarez, Roberta Uno, Elizabeth M. Webb ↩︎
  2. Kapil, Bhanu. (2001). The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. Kelsey Street Press.  ↩︎

Feminism, Grief, and Politics: The Mosquito is Dead by Hannah Höch 

Hannah Höch. The Mosquito is Dead. 1922. Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Photography by Robert LaPrelle, Kimbell Art Museum.

By Alexandra Hulsey 

Did you know that all mosquitoes that bite are female? It feels unfair. Something so annoying, invasive, and evil… shouldn’t be a woman. We wouldn’t bite, rage, and feed off blood like that—unless we had a reason. But even then, well-earned. 

Hannah Höch painted The Mosquito is Dead in 1922, right in the murky middle between World War I and World War II. It’s a strange, uncanny painting—surreal, uncomfortable, poking at something it never fully names. Höch made it after her breakup with Raoul Hausmann, a fellow Dadaist and, frankly, a classic early-20th-century art-world misogynist. So naturally, people interpret the work as a breakup painting. 

Is the mosquito him? A bloodsucking, lingering nuisance finally dealt with? Or is it her? 

Here’s why I question it: the mosquito isn’t squashed. It’s not a splatter on a wall, not a curled-up carcass stuck to someone’s ankle. It’s laid out, stomach-down, all legs intact, splayed gently like a pinned specimen or a creature that simply… stopped. In real life, mosquitoes often don’t die of natural causes. We end them. They get slapped, swatted, smeared. So, how did this one die? Did it starve? Fall from the air? Give up? 

While I’ve never been a mosquito’s first choice, I’ve still been bitten by them in my past. I know what it’s like to be drained, to carry the echoes of something that ended badly. The Mosquito is Dead feels like a soft allude to that: something dead but not resolved. A kind of quiet violence. A grief that hums instead of screams. Not unlike the undercurrent of the rise of fascism and, in turn, the Second World War. 

To the left of the mosquito sits an hourglass—but it’s doing something bizarre. Sand fills the top half, while the bottom curves into a downward concave shape. There, Höch suggests a faint sense of movement with a delicate, wispy brushstroke. Gravity has gone off-script. The sand clings to the sides like glue, dripping with eerie slowness. It makes me think of how time feels after trauma: suspended, disobedient, looping. Höch’s hourglass doesn’t measure time—it resists it. It longs to undo something. To rewind.

At the center stands a small, jointed figure. It resembles a drawing mannequin, but the longer you look, the less certain that becomes. It’s standing stiffly on a pedestal atop a circular base, its limbs angular and awkward: one leg steps forward, its torso twists to face us, and its head tilts at a sharp angle. One arm is bent behind its back; the other might be raised or abstracted entirely. It’s as if the body is trying to perform something expected of it, but doesn’t quite know how. Maybe the mannequin is a stand-in for how women are expected to perform, contort, and behave under pressure. Stiff but delicate. Controlled. 

The Mosquito is Dead isn’t just about personal heartbreak—it’s layered atop an unravelling world.

To the right of the mannequin, a bare tree juts up, its few branches impaling three large leaves. To the left, a thin black flag hangs on a tall pole. The tree doesn’t offer shelter or growth—it feels surgical and barren. The black flag isn’t waving. It’s more of a quiet signal of grief, or warning, or resignation. 

This is where Höch’s genius hits hardest. The Mosquito is Dead isn’t just about personal heartbreak—it’s layered atop an unravelling world. The personal and the political fold into one another. The painting doesn’t solely depict ‘loss’, it distorts the very tools we use to measure and explain it. Time, posture, symbols—all slightly off. 

Höch’s mosquito might be more than just a bug: Maybe it’s her ex, maybe it’s the patriarchy, maybe it’s history itself. All I know is she lets it die its own death. She leaves it whole. And that feels important. 

Höch was later included in the Nazis’ 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, where her work was mocked as immoral, un-German, and dangerous. And yet—she kept making it. She kept pointing out how gender, war, and nationalism are tangled in the same systems of control. Her art was never safe. It was never meant to be. 

The Mosquito is Dead doesn’t yell. It murmurs. It lingers. It’s grief that won’t resolve, wounds that refuse to close. It’s about endings that don’t truly end. And that rings timely and true now. 

The Mosquito is Dead is currently on view at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of Modern Art and Politics in Germany, 1910–1945, an exhibition that traces how German artists responded to one of the most volatile eras in modern history. The show runs through June 22, 2025.

The Weeds Always Come Back: An Interview with Laleh Motlagh

Laleh Motlagh. Installation image at Chicago Art Department, Image courtesy of the artist

By Samuel Schwindt

I clichély joke every Chicago “fools spring” that the perpetually pending warmth makes me a houseplant desperate for a little sunlight (to restore my sanity). I tossed this joke to Laleh Motlagh for the first time meeting her, unbeknownst to her prolific plant practice. Her solo exhibition at Chicago Art Department, Cultivating Dispersal, curated by Cecilia González Godino, arrived quickly after our first encounter.

The histories Motlagh contours are intricate and delicate. In her searching and longing for a plummeted past, her artworks become counter-monuments: antithetical structures of subversion, unpredictably rooted in her body and flora-heirlooms (house plants and weeds). I wanted to know from Motlagh, herself: how do the tendrils of our consciousnesses, collective or personal, invade place, time, and objects? And how do our memories of memories supplant?

Laleh Motlagh. Still image of video performance The Loss, courtesy of the artist.

In a homecoming to a mutated space, Untitled, Motlagh precariously filmed herself where her family home in Iran once stood (it was demolished by developers). In the sequel piece The Loss across the room, she wears the same all-white garment and scarf, now kneeling in her Chicago backyard. The scarf plays a major role: she says it ties back to the patriarchal society she grew up in, filtered through the layered oppressions against women in Iran. The video pair acts as a feedback loop.

Laleh Motlagh. Still image of video performance Untitled, courtesy of the artist.

Samuel Schwindt: What history could be there still if the house was plundered for development? What remains?

Laleh Motlagh: This house was where I was born and raised. That same year that my parents moved there, and I was born there, my father had planted three trees in front of the house. When I went back in December of 2024, I went and found the neighborhood, found the house, and one of the trees was still there, right? But the house isn’t.

It’s all that memory, that time that’s embedded in that tree, standing up.  I decided to stand in the video. The tree also has this form of standing.

This was very controversial because there are so many political issues in Iran now. There’s so much surveillance, especially regarding women. People are afraid of cameras.

Even [while I was] shooting this, the neighbor came out and started giving me a really hard time.

SS: I’m thinking a lot about the word “embodiment” with your work. The tree is still absorbing all the oxygen, the environmental factors of the surroundings as it grows and changes. You did that with your past in place and self, politically with Iran and inhabiting that history within your body.

LM: It’s migration. There’s always the question of where home is, right? And I feel like these videos really create this dialogue back and forth. And continue to wrestle with this idea of there it is. Is it there? Is it somewhere between?

Laleh Motlagh. Installation image of Untitled sculptures, Image courtesy of the artist

Contained in wood-plank frames and dangling from the ceiling, plant detritus swirls and shrugs. They become a simulacrum of plant boxes. The debris is from her backyard, and rather than discarding, she replaces weeding with harvesting and harnessing.

SS: Tell more about how you think conceptually about framing and its interaction with the plants?

LM:  It’s an ephemeral structure, but the frame is always going to be there. I don’t modify. I don’t transform, I don’t change it in any form or any shape. It stays as is, and then I bring it to the studio, I hang it — it dries.

And then when I install it, pieces fall off. It’s very much like a letting go process, right?  Even though structures come in, like with the house being demolished and rebuilt.

SS: Yes. Even if you pull up all the weeds in your backyard, they do always come back. That root structure is still there. While this is a fleeting gesture, it doesn’t have pessimism in it. These will come back in that space. Just as you returned to this space (gesturing to the video of Motlagh in Iran), it becomes a reminder of time again.

LM: And resilient. I think of this with women in Iran. How resistant and resilient they are, and how they continue to tackle and resist against oppression. They don’t get stopped.

There isn’t a stopgap. It’s like there’s a continuous pushing. In the fall of 2022, the Woman Life Freedom Movement, nationwide protests took place in Iran, which was against women’s compulsory hijabs. It still continues.

Even though with all the resistance, with all the oppressions, with all the surveillance and arrests, and execution of women in Iran or the Middle East, they really are incredibly resilient. And I sometimes find it hard to have that sort of resilience here.

A lot of times, I look at these entanglements, how they are structured, and how they hold themselves. And how they have this life cycle. That they die out and come back out, die out, and come back out every year after year. It just reminds me very much of that movement.

Laleh Motlagh. Quiet Chaos (lines), image courtesy of the artist.
Laleh Motlagh. Individual drawing in series Spring 2022 – Fall 2024, image courtesy of the artist.

In spring 2022, as the war in Eastern Europe began and as the world felt like it was unraveling, Motlagh turned to her potted plants in her house and studio. She drew them as a quiet form of connection, tracing their contained, melancholy presence. In the fall of 2024, she returned to the same drawings, layering gray over black.

In the back corner is Quiet Chaos (lines),  a cartographic tracing on paper is then secured sacredly in a frame. The drawing depicts two jade plants (one brought by her father when he immigrated, the other gifted to her years later in Chicago).

LM:  Again, it’s that displacement, that migration. Being in one pot and figuring out ways of a home, of survival. Can these two cultures, my two cultures, reside next to one another? What does that space feel like for me?

SS: It’s a gesture of archiving, too. But the drawings hammer in that when we remember things, we don’t remember the actual event. We have the memory of the memory of it. And there are constantly disguising layers.

But you’re not upset with that either. You’re finding beauty in that process and processing it.

LM: It’s very internal, but I am processing it.

—

Motlagh and I took a brief break from recording and meandered to a coffee shop down the street. While waiting for our order, she showed me an image of her as a child in Iran, beside a seemingly giant planter box in her living room, larger than her. The distortion in perspective stuck with me, from the small to the large: how things live in people’s minds, then the actual object or experience. I began recording again when we returned to Chicago Art Department.

SS: On our walk, you mentioned that your practice with plants is the personal made into the global.

LM:  They go across cultures, religions, and time, right? And again, it’s that kind of leveling of the playing field that they create for us and let us be in there. As I was saying earlier, plants teach us about ourselves if we have the patience to observe and learn from them, and not be so human-centric, and see other beings in our surroundings.

You can see more of Laleh Motlagh’s work on her website or Instagram.

Messy Babies and Mother-Monsters: Liz McCarthy’s Post-Natal Overload

Liz McCarthy: THE EXPECTANCIES. Roman Susan Art Foundation, Chicago, IL, February 2025. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.

by Matt Morris

“I want more happy children in our country and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”

–Vice President JD Vance,
            National March for Life Rally,
          Washington DC, 24 January 2025

“Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?”
                                                                        –Helen Lovejoy, The Simpsons

Liz McCarthy

THE EXPECTANCIES

Roman Susan Art Foundation

February 8, 2025 – March 1, 2025

Babies are messy—literally and symbolically. Conceptualizing infancy—not to mention reckoning with the material realities of reproduction, birth, and the various interdependencies denoted by the newborn body—is to attract a morass of projections and urgencies. These stem from intersecting or opposing frameworks for selfhood, society, power relations, affect, mortality, sentimentality, crime, and whatever other facile means with which the experiment of civilization attempts to apprehend the facts and meaning of life and death per se. Treacherous as these territories may be, Liz McCarthy’s recent exhibition THE EXPECTANCIES on view at Chicago’s Roman Susan Art Foundation delivers this collision of symbolic orders to the fore. The artist has installed an uneasy nursery populated by ceramic infants onto which all sorts of charged collected objects have been adhered, watched over by a group of impassive masks assembled from shards of bricks and solder. The sculptures are also functional, operating not only as vessels to hold and carry sign chains of identities materialized but also through an array of holes across the figures, they operate as musical instruments—whistles that McCarthy encourages audiences to activate and play.

In their approach to these forms and their referents, McCarthy excites the perversity of our societal tendency to overload such evidently helpless and vulnerable newborns with an excess of associations and so many pressures to represent/perform/identify. A non-exhaustive annotation in no particular order of babies vis-à-vis today: capacities for reproduction as biological determinism; miscarriages; access and rights to abortion; genders assigned at birth and subsequent debates around gender-affirming care for minors; parenting; the stigmas and systemic attacks lavished upon single parents, especially Black and Brown mothers; Down Syndrome, spina bifida, anencephaly; fort–da, Melanie Klein’s ‘good mother;’ D.W. Winnicott’s ‘good enough mother;’ filicides from Medea to Casey Anthony; ages of consent; puberty, Bat Mitzvahs, Bar Mitzvahs, quinceaneras, Peter Pan complexes, YA coming-of-age novels, psycho-sexual coming-of-age cinema; adult baby fetishes; Pizzagate conspiracy theories; and the bizarre spate of late nineteenth century deaths of infants and nannies that was eventually attributed to poisonous arsenic used in the fashionable green colored wallpapers of the period. Reconciling even this limited account of disorderly associations is a nightmare of free-floating signification; I am so self-conscious about what the points I do and don’t include here say about me as a childless cat queer. I don’t think Audre Lorde meant it this way, but after the fact of her claim that “We can learn to mother ourselves,” it now means that offspring or not we can all be bad parents.

Liz McCarthy. Ubermensch (II) Whistle, 2025. found infant superhero costumes and artist’s infant memento clothing on glazed porcelain with epoxy putty.
Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


McCarthy shares in the press materials that they were pregnant at the time the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and becoming a parent within that political landscape served as context for the impulse to build babies that are literally instrumentalized. The scrutiny and play with which they have approached babies as cultural signs serves as a basis for proposing queer/ed notions of selfhood as assemblages and always fragmentary. Ubermensch (II) Whistle, 2025, dresses a porcelain-and-epoxy putty figure in deconstructed elements of superhero costumes made for babies; the nearby Femme Frill 1987 (II) Whistle, 2025, is dressed in pink and white lace ruffles extracted from clothing the artist wore as a baby. These and other little bodies are displayed on lilac stands in a maternity-ward-cum-baby-store-showroom that offers whimsical and monstrous form to an ethical inquiry that perambulates around babies as signs within intricate political, psychological, erogenous, intergenerational, and materialist systems, while also inscribing a vocabulary of objects with tender reflections of the first years of parenthood. 


Liz McCarthy: THE EXPECTANCIES. Roman Susan Art Foundation, Chicago, IL, February 2025. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


Even reified into concrete sculptural form, patina, presentation, and use within McCarthy’s prone populace emphasize the always already and ongoing instability of even parent and child and family unit as roles. Scholar John D’Emilio has marked out a concise history of compulsory heterosexual reproduction and family unit as the primary means of production in the early US colonies: “The white colonists in seventeenth-century New England established villages structured around a household economy, composed of family units that were basically self-sufficient, independent, and patriarchal…Men and women needed the labor of children. Producing offspring was as necessary for survival as producing grain. Sex was harnessed to procreation.”[1] Thereafter, a confluence of economics, affect, manufacturing, and social progress sets in parallel the advances of capitalism and the social possibility of lives—homosexual or other others—divested from het norms, “Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unity, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity—an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction.”[2]

Liz McCarthy. Femme Frill 1987 (II) Whistle, 2025. Artist’s infant memento clothing and epoxy putty on glazed stoneware, detail view.
Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


It’s worth remembering that some of the most deeply held convictions about what babies and families are categorically have emerged only recently in the wake of modernity and industrialization. It is crucial then to understand that McCarthy here shows babies as constructs, upsetting a singular, efficient psychoanalysis of subject-object relations with figurative sculptures laden not only with the exchange values assigned to art within cultural economies, but also dimensions of use value in puncturing the ceramic infants’ genitals, nipples, and fists into mouthpieces for whistle play. What comes to mind for me are the contested relationships between persons, places, and things inflamed by what Peter-Paul Verbeek calls the ‘moralizing technologies’ of the ultrasound and other key medical practices during pregnancy and birth: “All of these technological mediations generate a new ontological status for the fetus. Ultrasound imaging constitutes the fetus as an individual person; it is made present as a separate living being rather than forming a unity with its mother, in whose body it is growing.”[3]

Liz McCarthy. Memory Worn Whistle. Various memento objects from the artist’s childhood collections and epoxy
putty on glazed community studio reclaim stoneware. 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and Roman Susan Art Foundation.


Often all the paternalistic presumptuousness, cultural debates, headlines, and orienting devices does reinforce perceived conditions of isolation. Yet this overlooks a priori interdependencies of all life outright that is so deftly evidenced by a life growing inside of a life to which it is intimately connected. Needing is one of the only conditions of the space between birth and death about which I feel certain, and it’s also so scary so much of the time. The babies McCarthy presents are inflected with all the pathos and vulnerability involved in need—in the flailing limbs, exposed intimacies, and collaged materials from a life of ID cards, hair clippings, childhood toys, crafts, costumes, and heirlooms, the artist lays totally bare the dangerous feeling too-muchness into which we are all born, and capacities for compassion and empathy for which that condition begs.

Analyst, artist, and my go-to thinker for the most sensitive and elaborate deconstructions of the maternal, Bracha L. Ettinger, maps the trauma and treacheries of needing, the risks of too little and too much, “Anxiety of abandonment and devouring [by the Ready-made mother-monster] digests and elaborates anxieties of being invaded, dominated and penetrated.”[4] Ettinger characterizes the ‘mother-monster’ as a phantasmatic scapegoat caretaker blamed for the sheer overwhelm of a world defined by ecological meltdown and governed by madness. McCarthy edges this tension to the precipice in the moments between picking up the baby whistle sculptures, ‘playing’ them by placing mouth to nubby mound genitalia and blowing, then putting these doll-like effigies down and walking away.

The meaning-full sculpted babies on display are complemented with several more elusive, abstract, and haunting Face Façade pieces: masks floated across walls and above doorways, composed from silver solder and broken pieces of Chicago common brick—a rough, gritty building material made from clay dredged from the city’s river that came into use following the Chicago Fires of the 1870s and were produced consistently until the early 1980s. In a body of work full of varied mementos and cultural artifacts, this brick perhaps most profoundly evokes the ways meaning and determination are inherited from the histories and other power structures that precede us. In the logic of these works, the self is never singular or independent, never the neoliberal ideal of an alienated unit of capital; rather, babies or subsequent adults who try to mask and repress their own unresolved infantile impulses are characterized most of all as unmanageable excess, both held and made to hold, performative, fantastical, and fragile in the face of immense, compounded forces that would seek to define. Contending with what artist and writer Lise Haller Baggesen describes as “that real feeling of containing and carrying somebody, of the whole oceanic interiority that entails,”[5] Liz McCarthy fosters a zone of objects and actions with which to comprehend what has been done and what is undone in the radical simultaneous operations of giving birth and being born.

[1] John D’Emilio. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print, pp. 469.

[2] D’Emilio. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” P. 470.

[3] Peter-Paul Verbeek. Moralizing Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Print, p. 24.

[4] Bracha L. Ettinger. “(M)Other Re-spect: Maternal Subjectivity, the Ready-made mother-monster and The Ethics of Respecting.” Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1), 2010. P. 18.

[5] Lise Haller Baggesen. “Mother of Pearl.” Mothernism. Chicago: Green Lantern Press, 2014. Print, p. 131.

Eternal Transcendent and Some kind of we

Robert Flack, Robert Flack: Eternal Transcendent, 2024-2025, installation view at the AGG. Curated by Dallas Fellini. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Art Gallery of Guelph

Curated by Dallas Fellini

Robert Flack, B.G-Osborne [Oz], Benjamin Da Silva, Mirha-Soleil Ross,

Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, Cleopatria Peterson, and Daze Jefferies

By Mattea Schouten

Robert Flack emerged in the Toronto art scene in the early 1980s. His depictions of the human form grew increasingly mystical as the decade unfolded, gradually introducing acid colours and psychedelic patterns into his artistic process. Flack began depicting the image of a figure superimposed over flat tie-dye backdrops and floating through space, a development that marked the beginning of his interest in the metaphysical. Flack learned he was HIV-positive in 1988, a diagnosis that profoundly influenced his work in the years that followed. Between then and his death in 1993, Flack delved into spirituality as a means of imagining transcendence beyond his physical self and the systems that failed to provide the care he needed. Empowerment is Flack’s final body of work, a collection of photomontages that reflect the artist’s developing awareness of his mortality and his desire for something beyond the physical realm. Shown alongside an exhibition dedicated to films by transgender artists from two generations, Flack’s work communicates a broader narrative of queer inheritance, particularly in relation to the lasting influence of those lost to the AIDS epidemic.

As part of the Art Gallery of Guelph’s visible storage initiative, Flack’s series has been presented alongside four of the artist’s cibachrome prints in the Eternal Transcendent exhibition. The Empowerment series, which makes up a majority of the exhibition, is constructed of seven photographs. The images form a spiritual map of the human body, superimposing hand-drawn designs over photos of the seven energy centers along the spine. Flack’s cibachrome prints depict circular labyrinths overlaid on barely discernible micrographs, the visual contents obscured by Flack’s use of a highly magnified lens. Flack’s chakra portraits are presented in order from left to right and his cibachrome works are arranged around the series along a narrow hallway connecting the collection to its sister exhibition, Some kind of we.

Robert Flack, Ascent (Chakras), 1990-1991, colour, 103.5 cm x 79.4 cm. Purchased with assistance from the Ontario Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation and an anonymous donation, 1992. Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection at the Art Gallery of Guelph. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Ascent (1990-91) is the first image from the series and displays the first chakra, representing safety and stability. Its location at the base of the spine is depicted in Flack’s photograph of a man’s backside. The photo is coloured in a rich purple and decorated with a multicoloured spiral design composed of dollar-store jewels. This image simultaneously speaks to Flack’s interest in spirituality, and to the gay community surrounding him. His undeniably queer representation of beauty and power in Ascent came at a time when public perception of gay men was still heavily stigmatized as a result of the AIDS crisis. Today, Ascent can be remembered as a bold and shameless response to the heteronormative culture which had denied Flack both safety and stability during the epidemic. Crown (1990-91) is the final piece from the Empowerment series. The image represents the seventh chakra, dedicated to spiritual transformation and a connection to the divine. Flack’s photomontage combines an image of the top of a man’s head, dark against a deep blue background, and a circular floral design hovering above it. Though this work is more ambiguous than others in the series, Crown is distinctly queer in its gender-bending combination of cropped hair, navy blue colouration and floral decoration. Crown is the closing statement of the series, encapsulating Flack’s interest in themes of enlightenment, divinity, and queer self-expression in a singular photo.

B.G-Osborne [Oz], Daze Jefferies, Benjamin Da Silva, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, Cleopatria Peterson, Some kind of we, 2024-2025, installation view at the AGG. Curated by Dallas Fellini. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

Down the hall, Some kind of we presents video works by transgender artists, creating a soundscape that leaks into the hallway and adds an audio component to the viewing experience of Eternal Transcendent. The physical proximity between the two exhibitions makes it impossible to experience one without experiencing the other. Gendertroublemakers (1993), a short film by trans artists Mirha-Soleil Ross and Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, is projected onto a wall and brings forward candid conversations between the women about their sexual experiences with gay and straight cisgender men, as well as with other trans women. Cut between intimate clips of the women kissing in bed, they interview each other and describe the ways in which their sex lives and personal lives have transformed as their identities evolved.

polished (2016) is a two-channel video by contemporary artists B.G-Osborne [Oz] and Benjamin Da Silva in which they discuss trans-for-trans relationship dynamics, mental health struggles, and substance abuse. They offer nuanced perspectives on transitioning while they sit in a bath together, drinking wine and shaving their faces. The couple’s conversations and the video formatting of polished echoes that of Ross and MacKay’s Gendertroublemakers. Some kind of we offers a space for dialogue between a queer past and a queer present, visually demonstrating the inheritance of queer ideas and art forms within the community.

B.G-Osborne [Oz], Daze Jefferies, Benjamin Da Silva, Mirha-Soleil Ross, Xanthra Phillippa MacKay, Cleopatria Peterson, Some kind of we, 2024-2025, installation view at the AGG. Curated by Dallas Fellini. Images by Toni Hafkenscheid.

United, Eternal Transcendent and Some kind of we serve as an homage to queer survivance and continuity. Using Robert Flack’s yearning for transcendence as a vessel to communicate the community’s continuous fight for progress, and Gendertroublemakers and polished as examples of the direct passing down of artistic legacies and ambitions, the Art Gallery of Guelph is successfully transformed into a space for reflection on how far the queer community has come in the last 40 years. The collective memory and artistic projects of those who were alive during the AIDS crisis continue to influence generations of queer creators, and though Flack passed away in October of 1993, he has since been solidified within the Canadian art historical canon. His first posthumous solo show at the Art Gallery of Guelph since his passing, Eternal Transcendent exemplifies the ways how Flack achieved a form of transcendence. Flack’s chakras have bore witness to the end of the 1980s/1990s AIDS crisis in North America and the decades that followed. If an art piece carries within it something of its maker, then Flack surely has transcended the confines of his body and transformed into something permanent and unkillable.

Unruly Images: In Conversation with Carly Ries

Carly Ries. Centerfold (2nd Edition) spread. 2023.

By Emma Fiona Jones

Carly Ries is an artist and curator working with images, photo books, and archives. I was first introduced to them by photographer Justine Kurland at her Dumbo studio, where the group show Garden—featuring a photo book, video installation, and window transparency by Ries—was on view from December 14, 2024–January 8, 2025. The exhibition grew out of an experimental workshop run by Kurland and Speciwoman founder and director Philo Cohen that Ries participated in.

In 2019, they published the first edition of Centerfold, a photo book juxtaposing Ries’ portraits and botanical photographs with strategically manipulated images drawn from 1980s pornographic magazines depicting lesbian scenes enacted for male pleasure. Images are interrupted with overlays and made multiple through the use of vellum pages, shifting the dynamic between subject and object.

I recently sat down with Ries in their Bed-Stuy studio to discuss Centerfold, gender, the gaze, and the physicality of the image.

Carly Ries. Centerfold (2nd Edition) spread. 2023.

EFJ: Tell me about Centerfold. How did the project first come about?

CR: I’ve always been interested in the power dynamics of who’s looking at who, and the agency of the person being photographed. I loved trying to find the ways that the models in the pictures were slipping outside the bounds of the directions given by the photographer on set. They were doing these repeated gestures. Everything was shot on film, everything had to be orchestrated and choreographed—so you can see this boredom seeping in. But in that boredom, sometimes you would see that the two women who had been placed together might have a natural way that their bodies were falling together, in the way that would happen if you were spending time with your coworker or your friend doing this repetitive scene. But there was a physicality and an intimacy between the participants that wasn’t sexual—or it could’ve been—but that was intimate, that was outside of the gaze, that was visible but because it was so separate from what the purpose of the images are. The people who were making the porn or the people who were buying it weren’t going to notice it. But it was there.  I was looking for the things that slipped outside of the gaze, but that were visible all along.

I was looking for the things that slipped outside of the gaze, but that were visible all along.

And I put the images in conversation with my own images that I had made with a friend of mine, Ruby, who’s also an artist. I’d done this set of portraits of her that I didn’t know what to do with when I made them. I was like, these are intense. They don’t belong with anything else. And when I encountered the pornography, I was like well, this is the counterpart. Because there’s a friendship between me and my fellow queer artist, and beyond being a willing participant in what we were doing, she was a full-blown collaborator in the pictures. They wouldn’t exist without her. Same with the models in the pornography. The pictures wouldn’t exist without their participation and creative contributions. Having her as a counterpart highlights the subjectivity of the individuals, because she’s a known person, whereas they’re all a cast of many different characters, and there were repeating people.

Carly Ries. Centerfold. 2023.

EFJ: In Centerfold, there seem to be these protective layers built in, these mechanisms that redirect the viewer’s gaze.

CR: [I didn’t want to] show you the thing you would expect to see. I thought of it as: if the models were to come across my book now, how would they feel, seeing their images? I didn’t want to enact a violation. But I also don’t get rid of nudity or sex. I just use the layering of images to camouflage. Things are visible, but lightly obscured. I like playing with the seen and the unseen.

EFJ: How do you view your relationship with your own subjects or collaborators?

CR: I’ve always thought of them as collaborators because the images don’t exist if they’re not there to help me make them. But I consider them subjects too because I author the images. I’ve been photographing people nude since I was a teenager. I did a project photographing older women. I always said, if you’re willing to be photographed, you can leave on as much clothing as you want. The idea was to take these embodied pictures. So, from the jump, someone can choose what they’re comfortable with, so that’s the ground that we start with. We often photographed in people’s homes. So often we’re in an environment that isn’t artificial. It’s more about the relationship that we build during that moment.

I used to be overly cautious, and then I realized that the people who want to be photographed feel a lot less protective of themselves than I thought. It’s a self-selecting situation. There are a couple of friends of mine who I’ve photographed over the years, but it’s always been portraits because the feeling in their bodies is that they don’t want to be naked. I don’t have that sort of relationship with them, but I have a series of psychological portraits of them. But for other people, it comes more naturally to be at ease in your body, and some people seek it out, they want to be photographed.

As much as the image is mine, I always feel like their image is also theirs. So, if we made it together, the way it is enacted in the world always has to be on those same terms of mutuality.

EFJ: Is that partly what drew you to books as a medium or format—the ability to control the way that the image is enacted in the world?

CR: I struggle with putting my imagery on the internet because it’s such a fast thing, and also portraits are sort of commodified online. We had that moment as the image was being created, and I have this kind of feeling about this image, and then I’m just going to put it up and have it dissipate in a moment? And I don’t know if anyone’s going to take the time to look at this image of this person. With a book, it’s this intimate viewing experience.

Returning an image to an object, it becomes possible to think about the person a little bit more, because you’re holding something physical.

Carly Ries. Centerfold (2nd Edition) cover. 2023.

EFJ: Do you feel like there are ways in which your experiences growing up inform your current work or the way you relate to your subjects?

CR: I grew up in Baltimore, and my mom was always taking pictures. I was always making things, and when I was 14, she showed me how to use her 35 mm. Shortly after that, she got sick with breast cancer, which she recovered from, but it was several years of treatment.

Before she got sick, I was photographing her, because she was a readily available subject. She is not naturally someone who wants to have her picture taken, but she was allowing me to do it as I was starting out and needed a subject. And then when she got sick and started to have reconstructive surgery, we started to play with the tropes of art history together. The process was very collaborative, and she felt really good about at least making something from her experience. And it was really helpful to me. She showed them to her doctor, who thought they were great. He was like, if you want, I can find other women who’d be interested in this.  That was a project of mine that I did for many years.

That’s how I got started. It was the beginning of trying to think about gender and body modification. But I didn’t want to be a documentary photographer or jump from a group of people to a group of people. So, I ventured out into my own realm.

My own top surgery was partially related to having a breast cancer gene. I had known from a very young age that I would have to do something. Doctors never presented that I could just go flat. It was always about reconstruction, and it really depressed me for many years. I stalled out about what I was going to do. But then I realized that there’s totally another way to be, and it connected so much with my queerness.

The surgery allowed me to experience my gender as a more ambiguous thing, and to let my interior self match my exterior self for the first time ever. If it wasn’t for the cancer gene, I don’t know if I would’ve had the guts to do it. I think about it, but it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. So, in that vein, I’ve been photographing myself, since just before my surgery to now. But I now use my body as a tool to explore bodies in general and their relationship to space and environment and creatures and fluidity. In a way it reverts to the early work I did.

EFJ: The word “slippery” comes to mind with your work.

CR: I love that it’s so hard to put language to gender, and in that way, I find that it’s slippery. And while it’s frustrating in some ways not to feel like you are in one way or another, it’s much more freeing to feel like you’re one foot in, one foot out. In that way, I think of my gender as slippery, and I really enjoy that. Not slippery as in you’re going to slip and fall—slippery in the sense of you might be able to hold it for a little while but it’s going to slip out.

Carly Ries. Centerfold. 2023.

EFJ: Does that relate to your use of film, materially or conceptually?

CR: Film is a physical material. It’s a little unruly, in the sense that sometimes things don’t register on it the way you had hoped. But you can sometimes get lucky—I always shoot when there’s not enough light, because you just never know,  very interesting things can happen, and then they can exist more in the subconscious space. I like that film is not a perfect dance partner, because it enables chance to happen, and the material itself to have its own agency.

I like that film is slippery. I like things that don’t necessarily behave all the time. And that’s also why photographing people who aren’t used to being photographed all the time is interesting. Like you get the image that you think you can get. But also, there are micro-expressions on people’s faces, and you might get the one that’s right after the one that you want to get. It’s about how you relate to people.

I like that film is slippery. I like things that don’t necessarily behave all the time.

EFJ: Going back to the origins of the Garden show, the workshop with Justine Kurland and Philo Cohen, how do you work towards carving out the art world you wish to see?

CR: I value having studio visits that are not about something necessarily happening, but just a chance to enter into what someone’s doing. I like the reciprocity of going to someone else’s space and seeing how they think.

In Baltimore and Chicago where I went to school, it’s cheaper and there are apartment galleries. I grew up having these ad-hoc spaces, which are great, but difficult to have in New York.

Books are a huge way that I feel like I can show up for people, so I go to book signings every week, and there’s such an exchange that happens. And the photo book community is really supportive. Publishing is a large beast. But on the smaller level, people who are into it are really interested in sharing and being collaborative. And that art world can be a positive place that’s very generative. And it’s not all individual’s work—it’s people mining archives, it’s people seeing someone else’s work and wanting to make a book for them. And I would love to do that myself. I’m talking with a couple of friends of mine about collaborating on a book, although it’ll probably take years for it to actually happen.

You can find more of Ries’ work on their website.