Femme Demo: Studio Visit with Jenny Fine

Jenny Fine, As in a Mirror, Dimly at Ortega y Gasset Projects, 2025.

Interview by Julia Betts

Femme Demo is a series of conversations highlighting the insights and expertise of women and LGBTQ2S+ artists. These artists share their creative experiences through discussion and then follow up with a hands-on demonstration of a process related to their work.

Recently, for the first interview of Femme Demo, I spoke with artist Jenny Fine through a virtual studio visit. We discussed her recent solo exhibition As in a Mirror, Dimly at Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) in Brooklyn, New York and its place in the larger context of her work. 

Jenny Fine is a visual artist based in Alabama. Grounded in photography, Fine’s artistic practice investigates her personal and cultural identity. She has shown her work nationally and internationally at venues such as Geh8 in Dresden, Germany (2012), the Sculpture Center in Cleveland, Ohio (2015), the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York (2015), the Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University in Georgia (2022), and 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina (2023). She earned her BFA from the University of Alabama in 2006 and completed her MFA at The Ohio State University in 2010.

Left: Jenny Fine, Psychomanteum, 2025, spun cotton, paint, steel, fabric, tarpaulin, light, fan, mirror.  Bottom right: Jenny Fine, Milagro, Shores of Sheol, 2025, spun cotton, paint, gel medium, paper, foam, folding chair.

Julia Betts: Hi, thanks for speaking with me today! I’m curious to learn more about your show at Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG).

It seems like family is a really big influence in your practice. Can you talk about the role of family in your work? I was also wondering if your family members were included in the photos and sculptures in the show at OyG. 

Jenny Fine: My family really started in the beginning as unknowing collaborators, but continued to work together over time. My grandmother Fine, who later becomes Flat Granny, a character in my ongoing body of work, was a school teacher. In undergrad, when I was studying photography at the University of Alabama, I would come home some weekends or on holidays and we would spend the whole day into the afternoon, early evening staging photographs. And she was all in. As a college professor, she was very passionate about it. She also understood the patience it took with learning. While I was trying to figure out the exposure triangle and compose the photograph, she was always telling me stories. The pace of my photography practice is set to the pace of her storytelling. In that way, they’re inextricably tied. She would tell me about stories from her childhood, her past, but also stories that she had heard from her family members that had been passed down to her.

That became a through line in my work, using the photograph and the collaboration between my family as an opportunity to see them in a new way. As we get older, we understand family dynamics more than when we were younger. Photographing them is a way of looking at them straight on, passing down stories. 

Grandmother Fine and then my sister Beth, who also passed away, are both central. My dad and my mom as well. I have another sister. All the people in my family really are central figures in the ongoing narrative of my work.  I see them as collaborators, with both of my grandmothers and my sister as posthumous collaborators in my work. 

There’s a post-mortem photograph of my sister within the evil eye sculpture [at Ortega y Gasset Projects]. Even as a kid, I would be able to go straight up to the casket and look out and touch my relatives. But she was always in the back. She had this fear. I know that she doesn’t want people looking at her. She was cremated. There wasn’t an open casket. The image of her is hidden inside the eye that becomes this ocean. And there are these bobbers, which are these characters that come from the narrative of swimming witches. Anyway, the narrative is long and winding. I think it’ll be a narrative I continue to work with. So, as they go on, I’ve been using my art to bridge the divide between here and where they are. 

Jenny Fine, Evil Eye, 2025, spun cotton, paper, paint, light.

JB: I noticed that with your series Flat Granny and Me and then the series at OyG, that it’s both about these female members of your family? Are you interested in female narratives specifically? Or is it anyone in your family? 

JF: I’m specifically interested in female narratives. I am the primary caretaker of my 93-year-old granny. She was one of five girls. Then my grandmother had two girls, and then my mom had three girls, including me. And so, there’s a strong female lineage in my family, and therefore a lot of stories from the female perspective. There are stories from the male perspective that have been shared with me, and I’m interested in enacting those, but I think the primary role models in my life have been the women in my family. So, I’m definitely interested in their perspective and their narrative. 

Jenny Fine, Flat Granny as a costume, no. 4, 2012, archival pigment print.

JB: It also seems like photography plays a prominent role in your practice. I was noticing that you’re kind of inserting liveness into these static images. Can you talk about your interest in spiritualism in relation to photography and how that came about for this exhibition at OyG? 

JF: Yes. I think that there is a resurgence of spiritualism in the decline of religion across the United States. Churches are closing all over the place, and in its place, I think spiritualism is on the rise. I was always interested in photography as a form because it mirrors the world around us. And therefore, because it looks like the world around us, there’s this element of truth or fact. With spiritualist photography, they were debunked, and it was often considered fake. It was a hoax. But even after people realized, they would still attend these studio parlors where you could have these spirit photographs taken. I was interested in that idea because I grew up going to church with a strong Christian background. 

Jenny Fine, Ectoplasm, 2025, archival pigment print.

But the death of my sister really rocked me in a way that other deaths have not. We were Irish twins. We were 18 months apart. We grew up together. She was my companion from birth on. Well, birth until her 42nd birthday. This idea of yearning for connection, always going back to the photograph because I’m interested in photography, photo history, and the magic associated with it. The photograph as stand in. The evolution of the sentiment around an image that is captured and reproduces and mirrors the world around us, that gives us evidence that people were here before. All that is really fascinating to me. And for that reason, I choose photography more  than painting or something else. I’m starting to do sculpture because I want my hand and my time to be very evident. But that’s the incentive, for pushing the photograph beyond the 2D image into more sculptural or becoming more of an object that can be held and can become an amulet. 

Jenny Fine, Seance, 2025, spun cotton, clothing, fabric, frame, jewelry, decorative light with flickering flame.

JB: I noticed that your work at OyG was more geared towards creating discrete sculptures than some of your past works. Do you think this is a new direction for your work? 

JF: It is. I’m trying to really make a concerted effort towards making works that can be consumed, collected. I guess that is the better way to say it, to be collected. Creating immersive installations, which is what I’ve been doing for the past decade, takes a lot of time, effort, organizing people, and administrative tasks. I had the opportunity to have the show at OyG and because of constraints, with travel and budget and all the things, I decided to try to take the essence of some of these ideas, using the components of the immersive installation. I use materials that I have at hand that are everyday materials like glue, cotton, cloth, and plastic single-use bags. Any discarded object is repurposed as material and ends up becoming part of the work. I wanted to scale back to sort of grab at the essence through photo sculpture. I also [added] video and animation to some of the works themselves to bring in some of the components of time. It’s a new step for me and one that I want to continue to explore. It’s very satisfying to make the work and for it to be done and hang it on the wall. With the immersive installation, delivering the work and beginning to install and respond to the unique architecture… of course, I’m prepared for it, but it’s always a labor, and so I asked myself, what do I want? What kind of labor do I want to do? And at this point, I wanted to really just be in the studio in conversation with material rather than a lot of people. I needed to do something more solitary. 

Jenny Fine working on Psychomanteum, Studio shot by Charity Rachelle.

JB: Definitely. I really loved your materials at OyG. I noticed the blue tarp, especially. I was wondering if you have an interest in materials that other people typically classify as “low material” and non-traditional art materials. You mentioned discarded objects. 

JF: Right, right. Well, it’s a nod towards class. One of the reasons that my sister died is because Medicaid in the state of Alabama has not been expanded. I know now across the nation, it’s all on the chopping block. She could get emergency care, but she wasn’t able to get a primary care physician because no one would take Medicaid. It’s a loop all to say.

I’ve been asked before, why don’t you like chisel marble instead of using a tarp that you found in the garbage can or one that you could get at Home Depot or Lowe’s? And really, it’s about access, class, and what I have at hand. It’s about making do and living within the boundaries and using the material to speak from a specific place.

Thinking about a tarp, it’s often found, and it’s used for protection. If you have hay, you put tarps over it to keep it from getting wet. It’s used over cars or busted windows when hurricanes or tornadoes come through. 

Also, I used all of the elements from the immersive installation to help continue to build out the sculptures, the photo sculptures that were in OyG. A lot of the wear and tear that is on the tarps is actually because of the performers using it over the last four years that it’s been toured. So really thinking about the evidence of time and the performance, like the residue of that or what remains of that or the product of it. In that way, the immersive installations are a generative thing. 

JB:  The other thing you mentioned about your work at OyG that was different was the sound and motion component. Have you explored this before and what interests you about it now? I was thinking it related to your performance work. 

JF: With the photograph, it was always me capturing the picture as a performance was unfolding in the field on my dad’s farm or in an old house that we came upon. The photograph became a stage as this performance was unfolding. I was capturing single frames. Of course, I could take several in a row. 

But I then started thinking about adding time back to the photograph. I started by making simple stop-motion films in graduate school. And then, I started moving around puppets or dolls. And then, after Flat Granny became a thing, wanting it to not be such a static flat image, but wanting her to be able to pose and make new movements, so that the performer could break the illusion. You could see that it’s a photograph that’s being worn by a performer, so that the collision of time is evident. 

Jenny Fine, Wheel of Life, 2025, spun cotton, paint, gel medium, eyelashes, photograph, spinning motor.

The immersive installations really were just enacting a little section of a narrative. The audience would come into the immersive installation not really knowing what had come before or what came after. There were these  redundant movements like waving back and forth or of someone riding a parade float. I also used sound throughout the installation at different locations, by Taylor Shaw, so that when you moved into the installation, the recorded sound would layer with the live sound of the performers, but everyone would have a unique experience based on where they were within the installation and what soundtrack was on.

Jenny Fine, Synchronized Swimmers, 2022/2025, archival pigment print, immersive installation performance still.

JB: You also mentioned that the pieces at OyG use repurposed materials from your previous installation Synchronized Swimmers, right? Can you talk about that installation? 

JF: Prior to that, I created a parade float of my grandmother, and it was a memory that I had never seen but only walked around through her imagination.  I imagined the things that she was telling me, and I recreated this photographic installation based on how I imagined it. It was really around the time when everybody’s asking, “Who gets to tell the story? Is it your story to tell?” So I started thinking about my personal experience and those stories surrounding that. My grandmother’s pool– I’m a triple water sign, if that makes any difference.

JB: [gasps] I’m a triple water sign too. [laughs]

JF: Oh, wow. That’s amazing. What are your– what is it? 

JB: I’m a Pisces sun, Pisces moon, Cancer rising. 

JF: Oh my God. We are exact. I am Cancer, Cancer, Pisces. 

JB: Oh my God. 

JF: You might be my yin. 

JB: Wow. This is crazy. 

JF: That is crazy. We have to talk about this more, but all to say, my birthday is June 24th.  My grandmother had an in-ground pool installed in her backyard. She was a teacher at the local community college, and she put in a pool when she retired. And while we were learning to swim, she was learning to swim. And just a lot of childhood memories surrounding her pool and storytelling. When the rain came, she’d get us all out and we’d have snacks under the umbrella, perfect to sit under in a lightning storm. But she would tell us stories. In particular, ones that stuck out in my mind were this idea of swimming witches, trial by water. But just really her telling those narratives, filling our brains with all this imagery. And then the rain would stop, and she’d throw a watermelon in the pool, and we’d all jump in after with all this in our minds after swimming all day long. I would even imagine swimming in my dreams. Her pool’s deep end would become like the ocean floor. I started thinking about women, water, and regional stories, as well as stories told through literature, drawing inspiration from Odysseus and the sirens. 

I was interested in creating an immersive installation where viewers could walk inside and it was going to be a “dinner theater.” As I toured it and worked with different institutions and different budgets and constraints, food became the least important part of it. It wasn’t quite like the dinner theater, with appetizers and such that I had imagined, but the essence was all there. And I got a chance to show that a couple of times, I think four times. Two weeks before I went to show it a fourth time at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, my sister died unexpectedly.  I was really shook and I focused that exhibition on this drowning witches scene. They’re these dancers in blue in the tarp bobbing up and down. And there’s this finger with a lifesaver tied around it. And there’s a light that then projects the shadow onto the back wall, and one of the performers flicks that finger. It sort of bobs this lifesaver shadow near the girls. I was thinking about Medicaid and our health insurance. As we moved into As in a Mirror, Dimly, about other kinds of insurance, things that we pray for and hope for, and things that we find hope in, or luck, protection, et cetera.

JB: I was also wondering about, in general, where you think this body of work is taking you and what your plans for your work in the future are. 

JF: The work that I’ve just made, I think I have a few more images, a few more things in me to sort of wrap those up. But I would like to use As in a Mirror, Dimly as a sketch or also as props in sets for the camera in my studio. I don’t want to get too far away from photography, from photographing people, from compressing and expanding time within the frame of a photograph.  I don’t know that all those parts have to be accessible to the public. 

I’m going to hunker down in the studio and create a new body of work, and I have some ideas. I’m always trying to create this idea of a musical, and it falls way short of that, which is fine because I’m not trying to build this impossible thing. I’m really trying to get at the essence of it. The idea is that I will introduce Beth, go into the afterlife, and pull Beth into my work. I’m going to figure out how to do all that and what that looks like. But it will include a lot of symbols from my work that I’ve made in the past.

JB: That sounds exciting. So the last thing- what would you like to demo for us?

JB: Thank you so much for speaking with me today!

Check out more of Jenny’s work at her upcoming show There, There at Old Bailey Gallery in August 2025 and on her website and Instagram.  Listen to her discuss her work on Alabama Public Television in her recent television feature.

Forming Information: IT IS MEANT TO BE READ by Aileen Bahmanipour

Aileen Bahmanipour. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ. Installation shot. Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of Dennis Ha. 2023.

March 31 to June 3, 2023

BAF Gallery, Vancouver, BC

By Kiran Dhaliwal

Aileen Bahmanipour’s uncanny installation and works with paper question the regulation of and access to information through its destruction. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ features revisited and new works by the Iranian-Canadian visual artist from her winter residency at the Burrard Arts Foundation. Bahmanipour’s practice is informed by her lived experience with censorship in Iran. Her work also centers the exploration of contemporary forms of Iconoclasm which she defines as “not to reject or negate the image but to redefine it.” 

The gallery is transformed into a quasi-bureaucratic space with diagrammatic imagery, paper hanging on the walls, and a filing cabinet in the center. Instead of answers and information, Bahmanipour’s manipulation of each piece reveals tensions and misgivings in the supposed transparency of constitutional law and archival systems. In turn, this prompts viewers to remedy their curiosities beyond the gallery space and, like the title suggests, encourages active interpretation.

When clarity is lacking, this creates a level of opacity obfuscating the connection between a body and language.

When it comes to information meant to be accessible and understood by the public, things like government documents and constitutions often feel like they’re written in a different language. When clarity is lacking, this creates a level of opacity obfuscating the connection between a body and language. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ (2022) is a manifestation of this connection where Bahmanipour reimagines language through the exploration of her own body in the process of engaging with an English translation of The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This vaguely worded document contains articles regulating and restricting the circulation of information to the Iranian people. For those trying to navigate what’s legal or not (especially when the consequences are severe), the ambiguity plays in favour of the state as the public reaction to such dubiety can present itself as self-censorship. These conditions create cautious, fearful citizens who do not want to test the law, afraid that acting outside of the status quo may land them in prison or worse.

IT IS MEANT TO BE READ by Aileen Bahmanipour installation shot, Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of the artist.

This series occupies three of the four walls and takes on two approaches. In the first approach, handmade letter-size sheets of paper are embedded on both sides with single lines cut from the document. The lights of the gallery glow through the sheets that extend outwards making both sides visible to the viewer. Bahmanipour’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the Iranian Constitution is her method of finding new ways to connect to the language and attempt to understand it. The single lines are folded into a knot and then arranged onto the paper like concrete poetry, creating a new method of connection and meaning to the language. 

IT IS MEANT TO BE READ by Aileen Bahmanipour installation shot, Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The other two walls are mounted with fifty-five pages of handmade paper that, while still wet, Bahmanipour placed over her keyboard as she typed the constitution. The organic, delicate quality of the paper creates a sense of softness, making the depressions and punctures left by her typing fingertips on the lower half of the sheet somewhat violent. The sheets are affixed side by side to the wall with a single nail against a painted strip of pale umber that runs along the two walls. Described as “cryptic” in the exhibition write-up, this series is arguably the clearest embodiment of Bahmanipour’s efforts to understand and reimagine the text and language. The perforations made in the paper can be seen as indices of her body as she converts dysfunctional language into material form. 

Iconoclasm doesn’t just refer to the destruction of religious icons, images, and monuments, but symbols of a political or ideological cause as well. Bahmanipour’s interest and exploration of contemporary forms of Iconoclasm is displayed in this work. She also gives the ground of the image—which historically has been suppressed and regarded as merely a surface that holds the image—a new language, making it more visible and a part of the image. She uses the iconoclastic gesture of an image-breaker or, as she describes in her statement, “the person who doesn’t have a language of her own but by deconstructing the already established language tries to create new meanings to make sense of reality and create meaning from apparently disparate elements.”

Aileen Bahmanipour. IT IS MEANT TO BE READ. Installation shot. Burrard Arts Foundation. Photo courtesy of Dennis Ha. 2023.

The sculptural installation, Filing Cabinet (2017-2023) is a transparent, self-destructive archive system. Again, Bahmanipour interrogates the supposed transparency of archival systems by removing the sides of the filing cabinet to make the insides visible. Viewers are encouraged to open and look through the drawers. Three of which contain clear folders with printed and layered diagrammatic imagery. As if the cabinet was dreaming about the folders that sit inside of it, a dream bubble in the form of a large painted roll of acetate reaches up and wraps itself around the duct above. 

On the floor between the two is plastic tubing that is connected to a dosing engine in the bottom cabinet drawer. The engine administers a permanent, acidic ink that travels through the tubes and pools onto the painted pile of acetate and given its nature, will ruin the intricate illustrations. When an archival system is meant to preserve and accumulate information, Bahmanipour gives us an anti-archival, self-destructive system that eats away at itself. No matter how clear the folders and acetate are or how many panels are taken off the filing cabinet, what stands between me and this installation is a curious space worth questioning.

At a time when we are constantly bombarded by information and falling into algorithmic feedback loops on social media, IT IS MEANT TO BE READ left me feeling slightly disoriented and walking away wanting to know more. Bahmanipour’s manipulation of the selected source materials raises questions about the systems and flow of information meant for the public. By deconstructing and reconstructing the image, her work interrogates archaic, systematic constructions of representation and presumed objectivity with an alternate visual form. Despite the opacity of their façade, viewers are invited to interact with the materials that promise transparency and are meant to explain how systems function. Instead of searching for answers in documents that falsely promise this transparency, the exhibition encourages using our confusion or restriction of information as a catalyst to create alternative methods of understanding.

This review is featured in our third print issue themed on Censorship found here.

Complexifying this notion of truth: in conversation with Anna Karima Wane

Anna Karima Wane. Installation view of a rememory that belongs to somebody else at Museum of Impossible Forms (Helsinki, FI). Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

By Juliane Foronda

I vividly remember when I first met Anna Karima. It was in Dakar, around a table full of food, under the shade of a mango tree. Now looking back over two years later, and reconnecting in one of the most unexpected places, I can’t imagine a more fitting first encounter. 

a rememory that belongs to somebody else was recently on view from May 4 – 12 at the Museum of Impossible Forms. This solo exhibition by Helsinki-based Senegalese artist Anna Karima Wane was filled with gestures, questions, (hi)stories, rehearsals, and radical acts of hospitality that echo far beyond the formal parameters of the work. In the space, I first noticed the CRT television screens scattered across the floor playing a four-channel video titled, How to Eat a Mango, with a large rug and a seating pouf in front of the screens, inviting guests to take their time and get comfortable.

Along the wall were photographs of archival material that documented her research trip in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, coupled with hand-written journal entries ripped straight from her notebook, with their hands being present both literally in the photographs, as well as through the vulnerability of teared pages. On one wall were two longer texts that share the stories of two women in her family, Aye Touré, and her grandmother. These stories fill the space with a mix of authority and tenderness.

Finally, there was her dining table that was transported from her home in East Helsinki. On the table rests a few more journal entries, trivets with images of colonial Jamaica from her grandmother’s home, and laser engraved napkins with digitally altered images of colonial Kindia. There were also chairs around the table that gently offered themselves to host the guests, giving everyone a place to sit, consider, and rest.

Anna Karima immediately offered me a cup of mint, jasmine, and orange blossom tea upon arriving at this conversation, and told me that this is the tea that her mother makes for her back in Senegal. My hands naturally wrapped around the mug to take advantage of the warmth.

Anna Karima Wane. Installation view of a rememory that belongs to somebody else at Museum of Impossible Forms (Helsinki, FI). Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

Juliane Foronda: We’re sitting here now in the middle of your exhibition at the Museum of Impossible Forms in Helsinki. How did this work come to be?

Anna Karima Wane: The first thing was The Story of Aye Touré, which I wrote in 2020 when I was first starting to look into this story. I was very inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts and thinking about the importance that is given to the archives and how we find our place within this record that has tried to erase our histories. Then going to France and going through the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in 2022, and having that experience was a little bit surreal in many ways. I remember writing in my notes that I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was taking these images of files and documents, but also wanted to show myself within it and think about my own position in this. I wanted to also bring back this idea of the gaze into it and talk about why we are doing this. This is a document. It has been kept, sure. But then, why am I looking for it? And how does me being here change the relationship to whatever this notion of truth is? The archive erases a lot of lived experiences and a lot of lived realities. I had to keep reminding myself that this is not everything. It’s interesting and you can keep going back to it, but you cannot give it too much weight.

JF: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the gaze, and maybe stretching that into ideas of performance. In the show, the video work is perhaps the most obvious performance or performative piece. But then I also see your hands being very present in the archive photographs showing that it’s your perspective, your gaze. It’s not just any generic gaze from online archive documentation, but a person’s hand is holding the documents. It’s a Black person’s hands holding them, a family member’s hands holding these things. It’s quite powerful to document yourself in these photos.

AKW: I think that at some point I was hesitant about including these images in the show, and I think I still have a lot of work to do with them and about the conversation that I want to have with my grandmother about these things that I found. I really wanted to think about this exhibition as a book in a way while thinking about how I tell these stories. Writing is also an important part for me throughout this whole experience and for my practice in general. I really wanted to write about these experiences and write about the process of going through the archive.

This idea of the exhibition as a book was a constant thought, but the first thing I considered when thinking about how the show would look was that I want it to be like a living room. And even more so, capturing the idea of my grandmother’s living room, even knowing that there’s no way I can recreate that, but I was thinking about how I can make myself comfortable within the space so that I can better host people within it. That was an important question for me because I feel like I have some concerns with exhibition-making, so I just had to think through how I would be able to create that space for myself. Up until the last minute, I was thinking if I should bring in the table, because it’s my actual dining table from my apartment, and I was just thinking about what kind of table I want to have in the space. For me, it was very important that it was the kind of table that you feel like you can gather around as opposed to a desk or work table. Once I wrote the journal entry about the tables, it was clear that I had to bring it in.

JF: You opened your exhibition text with a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I just want to expand a bit on the term “rememory” and slightly step away from Morrison’s telling of it and talk a bit about your perception or knowing of the term.

AKW: The term rememory kept coming back up, and it was something that I was really thinking about because Beloved is one of my favorite books. I thought back to the beginning of this project in 2020, when I was stuck inside like everyone else, and I was thinking a lot about motherhood and about parenthood in many ways. I read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and then Are You My Mother? in close succession, and was thinking a lot about the “good enough mother” idea from Winnicott. I was reflecting a lot about that, and these ideas of anger at the mother. I started describing it almost as an anger at the mother for not being able to protect herself.

That was also something that I found in the story of Aye Touré. Just hearing it from my grandmother and the way that she was almost erased from her own story and trying to feel these “zone d’ombres,” and thinking about how to tell this story. Beloved is also in that context of thinking about this character of the mother and the choices that she has to make to protect herself and to protect her children. This idea of rememory really stuck with me for a long time – that it is a memory, but also thinking about the action. Even in the quote that I use, she talks about the moments when you walk through a memory that belongs to somebody else, and this active participation in the act of remembering and memorialising. That’s something that resonated with me.

Anna Karima Wane. Trivet from the artist’s grandmother’s home. Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

JF: You touched a bit on the role of the archive in this work. The two of us share a deep affinity for archives and have spoken many times about all the curious things you can find in these spaces, but also the heavy bias that comes with an archive. How was your experience working in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer?

AKW: The first things I looked up before I even found these documents was “Guinea 1895 to 1910” and having this wide range of this time period that Aye Touré was there to try to get an idea of what that would have been like. I was reading all these documents and I remember writing in my notes about how the fact that this is so boring is a failure of the archive to capture real life. It was just these dry letters back and forth, they felt so sterile and divorced from reality because in these letters, it’s not like they’re organizing a picnic or something, they’re actually committing acts of violence against people and yet they managed to be completely detached from that. That was the first thing that kind of struck me throughout reading these documents. As I kept going, I just kept thinking, what if I miss something just because I got bored? I wasn’t so much interested in the documents themselves as I’m interested in what is not there, and what is in between the lines, and the things that are there are omitted a lot of the time.

JF: One thing I’ve always found quite interesting with archives is that sometimes the need to preserve kind of stops things in the archive from living or continuing to live. Maybe that’s their paradox.

AKW: I definitely agree with that. I think a lot about when you and I went to the Hotel and Restaurant Museum archives last year and I just remember that photograph of the woman making sausage. In the description, it says something like “hostess making sausage”, and in parentheses are the ingredients. That has really stayed with me because it’s not just telling you that this person is making sausage, but it’s in a way giving life to this archive by giving the recipe to follow. It made me think a lot about how you give life to the archive. I think the handwritten notes were also my way of giving life to these things.

JF: It’s also important to think of the responsibility of the archivist and those who work in collections to give them life. These conscious or unconscious decisions to omit or include certain things, or to decide what’s considered important, factual, or necessary information to include or exclude is a lot of power and responsibility.

AKW: That’s something that I think about a lot for sure. One of the first people who came to see the work spoke to me about the gap – about the fact that you’re telling a story, but you’re not telling the whole story. You’re kind of leaving these gaps and being able to kind of sit in between the gaps and not having to say “everything” because you can’t do that. I think that’s one complication of my relationship with archives, which is the fact that it’s often seen or considered as the truth, but for me, it’s more about complexifying this notion of truth. Like, what does that mean? I go back to this idea of walking through a memory that belongs to somebody else, and not taking for granted everything that is written down, but also finding these connections and relying a little bit more on things that you cannot explain.

Anna Karima Wane. Handwritten note. Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

JF: That makes me think about the unfair assumption that written language is more powerful or more important than other forms of language or communication. I’m also curious about your use of language in the show because I find your use of language very intentional here. It’s present in various ways throughout the show whether that’s in hearing your voice talk about mangoes, seeing your handwriting, or reading the texts that you wrote. How did you navigate using language in the show? 

AKW: It was a bit instinctual and not very planned out, but from the beginning I had the idea that I was going to make a book. I think in words a lot of the time, it’s just one of my preferred forms of expression in a way. It helps me process and create connections between the things I’m thinking about. I feel very attached to writing as a practice. 

JF: There’s also the multilingual reality of your work. The entire show is in English other than the text on the archival documents, which is in French. Then thinking of maybe even communicating what you’re researching to your family, that would likely be in Wolof. And we’re in Finland, where Finnish is the primary language. For me, it’s quite curious to think of language in relation to translation. And not just translation between different languages but thinking about how we translate what we see into words, or how we translate an experience into a conversation, or something like that.

AKW: I’ve been thinking about how I’ll share this work with my family, and how the translation would have to be in that direction, strangely enough. I would have to consciously move things towards French or Wolof. There was one text that didn’t make it in, which was about Malinké, my grandmother’s language, and thinking about generational shifts, how things are being transmitted, and how we’re kind of losing a little bit as we go along. It’s also interesting that there’s so much text here, but people are still asking me what the archives are saying. I don’t know… you don’t need to know everything that is being said.

JF: It’s also interesting to think of how language and translation can be an assertion of power because you’re framing things in a certain way. The translator is the one in control of how things will be presented and how perspectives can be shifted. For example, we’ve had this conversation before about when it’s convenient to use “foreign” versus “international” when talking about people, specifically in an arts or academic context. Maybe this example is quite relevant not just to the show here, but to your lived experience in Finland so far.

AKW: Exactly. Showing this work here made me have to think through these questions in Finland, which is a white environment. So, thinking about how this work is related to my family and very personal things, it’s strange in many ways for me right now, because I do feel like I’m in a way sharing myself with people who don’t have a lot of context.

This past year I’ve been thinking a lot about my time in the USA making my bachelor thesis, which was about representation and different ways of representing and talking about Black women, and how much of that was a response to the environment and how much of that was coming out of a need to justify my presence or my existence in this space. So, when working on this, I had to think to myself, what do you want to do? and not just, how can I make everyone understand where I’m coming from? That’s been a really big question for me to try and navigate.

I’ve been reading and rereading this article called Traces, Signs, and Symptoms of the Untranslatable by María Iñigo Clavo and they talk about artists from the Global South or from marginalized communities feeling like they need to translate that context in their work. The text was more specifically talking about Native American practices and how people are kind of shifting certain things to a Western context in a way that will make the Western audience feel like they understand, what really needs to happen for them to understand is a complete shift in their mindset.

JF: Or understand that they don’t know yet and that maybe it’s a learning opportunity for them.

AKW: Yeah exactly, it’s completely different. That’s a question that I have a lot of the time and trying to also find a certain balance. I understand that I’m here. I’m in Finland. I’m at this white institution, and this is the institution that’s going to give me a degree. But then, how do I still make things happen on my own terms without feeling like I have to completely contort myself to fit in? Because I was thinking, too, what does it mean to show this work in Finland? Do people get it?

There are so many memories in the house, so many different people who have passed through it. It’s a very charged place for me in many ways.

JF: Exactly. This show talks about Blackness, Black Ancestry, and womanhood, but it also talks about hospitality and hosting traditions in general, which are widely different in Senegal than in Nordic countries, like Finland. The way you’ve translated all of that in a way that’s understandable by the local audience, but also unwaveringly true to yourself is impressive.

It’s also interesting you say that a priority of yours during the exhibition is making connections because to me, this show is all about relationships. You said in the exhibition text that the work roots itself in the relationship you have to the women in your family, but also their relationship to the men they love and raised. Aside from that, I can also see the work itself as evidence to your relationship to place and your relationship to culture.

I think about my grandmother’s house a lot. I grew up there also, so it has been my home for many years. I think a lot about how much life there is in that house and how I’ve lived there from the beginning of it when we moved there in 2000. I feel very attached to that place specifically, and to how there are the spaces in that home that have their own choreography that have been developed over many, many years. It’s like a language that has developed over time and a comfort that has developed over time. When I go back home, I always like spending so much time in that house as well. There are so many memories in the house, so many different people who have passed through it. It’s a very charged place for me in many ways. It’s also very connected of course, to Senegalese culture in many ways in these ideas of hospitality or teranga, as we would say. I won’t say it’s unconscious, but it’s just part of the fabric of the place and of the culture I come from. Obviously, I’m always going to offer food, it’s not even a question.

JF: Exactly. I’ve experienced living and working in Nordic places for a while, so I’m familiar with the reality of what’s hospitable to some is overbearing to others, or what’s hospitality to some is vacant to others. There’s a lot of learning that there’s not one version of hospitality. There’s not one way to host.  Even if you’re practicing hospitality, that doesn’t mean that the people receiving it are necessarily feeling hosted. It’s curious how drastically hospitality can differ. What is hospitality to you, especially now being here in Finland?

I think a lot about my studio at school, where I’m sharing the biggest corner space with two of my friends and there was a lot of discussion about what that space could be. Early on, I had this talk with my studio mates, Joel and Romance, about us being able to kind of carve the space that’s open to everyone. If you have it, why not share it?

I think it really relates a lot to the text I wrote for the show about my grandmother always hosting people because as soon as I left home, I became that person. I didn’t even know. When I went to boarding school in South Africa, suddenly my room was where everyone was hanging out. In college in the US, where I lived was just like always open for people to come in and that continued to happen when I moved off campus and my mom came to visit, and she asked me: why do people always come here when they have a problem? Now there’s more intentionality behind it for sure. Now I’m trying to find my boundaries, but I think there’s a big part of me that knows that if someone needs something, I’m just going to be there.

Anna Karima Wane. Installation view of How to eat a Mango (2023). Photo by Rong-Ci Zhang. Photos courtesy of the artist.

JF: Sometimes some people don’t realise that something exists until they experience it. Like Senegalese level of hospitality, for example. These things that are just common practice to you are suddenly extraordinary to some, and probably confusing to a lot of people as well. So, if we’re talking about what hospitality is to you, I think it’s simply you. It’s how we were raised. It’s how you live and navigate the world. It’s knowing that your ancestors are firmly watching you to make sure you offer people something.

AKW: I guess sometimes these things are just ingrained. It’s not something that is always conscious in these cases.

JF: In thinking of that and talking about school and your studio, I think it’s also important in the context of this show to talk about how this is your MFA show. Final MFA work is typically shown in a group show on campus at Uni Arts Helsinki, and you are the only person out of over fifty students to make the conscious decision to pull away from exhibiting not just in the group show, but outside of the institution completely. You instead are exhibiting your work at the Museum of Impossible Forms. Can you tell me a bit about that decision to step away from exhibiting with your class and what led you here?

AKW: Yeah, in my acknowledgements I thanked the bus driver that left me in London.  That was shitty, but it was a moment where I was just stuck in that bus station with my phone dying or dead most of the night and I just went through these cycles of thinking like, what is art? What am I doing with my life? What’s the point of all this? And then in the next five minutes, I was writing all these ideas for new work. I was also thinking about what it means for me to show my work in this white institution, and how I want my work to be seen. At that point, I already had questions, but I hadn’t even had my biggest problems with the school yet, to be honest. It was just starting. 

Finland is very specific. This is not the first time I moved countries, yet I feel completely lost because their system has so many rules, and there’s no support or guidance for international students. I also don’t feel heard in many ways. Especially on issues like racism, there’s a lot of ignorance. I remember this class that I took my first semester, which was about documentary in contemporary art and the teacher talked about the history of documentary. After a few days of class, I realised that I was going to have to be the one to bring up colonialism because the teacher had still not brought it up at all. I studied documentary in college so I couldn’t understand how you can speak about the history of documentary and not talk about that, and not talk about how documentary in many ways was started to capture the other. I eventually spoke up and said that I feel like the history of documentary is very much rooted in the oppression of marginalized people, and then the teacher just goes, “okay,” and that was it. It made me think a lot about why it is often the labour of the person of color to bring up racism, racial injustice, or racial ignorance.

JF: Yeah, we know that institutions are rarely safe spaces for those in the global margins, but I’m curious about what your Finnish peers are doing when they hear about your experiences. Are they standing with you? Are they the ones speaking up and calling this stuff out?

Yeah, I do feel like I found some people who do. I mean, Finland is really white and ignorant overall, but I’ve never met allies like I’ve met here. Of course, the people who are in charge still are not listening or don’t care and that’s unfortunate. 

JF: I do want to speak a bit more about not only the active choice to not have this show affiliated with the institution, but more so the choice to step out on your own.

AKW: The first thing I wrote during that sleepless night at the London bus station was, “You want to put them on shaky ground.” What I meant by that line was the impression I got from my school was that: you are invited, but this is not yours, this is not for you. So, we come in with the feeling of being an unwanted guest in a way. I knew that I couldn’t exhibit at the school because it’s so much about consumption, and I did not want my work to be there. And I don’t want to be tokenized. This work is extremely important to me and is extremely personal, and I don’t want it to be consumed in that way. I’m also concerned with the intentionality of people who will come. Not everyone is going to come here and that’s okay.

The Museum of Impossible Forms (MIF) is one of the spaces that hosts exhibitions without charging artists, which is rare in Helsinki. Their mission statement is very much involved in practices that deal with archives, and that deal with BIPOC, and are centered around people whose voices are not always heard in the mainstream Helsinki art scene. For me, it was kind of obvious at a certain point. I had a studio visit with Chris Wessels, one of the co-founders of MIF who I had connected with at one of their events. We had a lot of conversations around the work so I reached out to him about if MIF would host my MFA exhibition. Maybe it was also the right time because they had just moved here a month and a half ago and this is the first exhibition in this new space. It’s been a good space for this work and allowed for it to stretch out, which I wouldn’t have had at school for sure.

JF: Yeah, it’s easy to say as we’re currently sitting in the exhibition itself, but this is a complete show. It’s not a one-off project to fulfill something in class. This is work that in many ways, you started well before your MFA, before you knew that you would be showing in Finland. It’s a solo exhibition in its own right and it being your MFA work is (at least to me) very secondary to it.

AKW: I feel I was lucky, and I am incredibly grateful. Not just to MIF for hosting, but to the many people who have supported me through this process. Many of my friends are also working on their own thesis and still found time to help and support me in various ways. It all leads back to community… I had a whole part in my thesis about “What is community?”. 

JF: Well, what is community?

AKW: What is community? I don’t have the answer. 

JF: You have a whole section in your thesis.

AKW: I do have a whole section. It was mostly questions, let me tell you. I feel like working on this project and making this exhibition, I’ve been held up and supported by many people, and by a community of people. I think I didn’t expect it either. I’ve been running around talking about community building and doing all this stuff to try and make it happen. I quickly realized that the school and the institution were not interested, but that it was resonating with other people. I just feel like in making this show, I’ve also felt like the energy that I was putting out, I was kind of experiencing firsthand.

To check out more of Anna Karima Wane’s work visit her website or Instagram.

Part Two: Ash Barbu and Natalie Bruvels in Conversation

Maximalism and the Postmaternal

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

In this two-part dialogue, spanning contemporary feminist theory to modernist art criticism, independent curator Ash Barbu and interdisciplinary artist Natalie Bruvels reflect on the relationship between maternal caregiving and collaborative authorship. Specifically, they discuss the recent exhibition Walk in the Park (2023) created by Cat Attack Collective, an artist duo consisting of Bruvels and her 11-year-old son, Tomson. Walk in the Park transforms the white cube Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery into an expansive environment that blurs the line between the surreal and the everyday. Building from the prior exhibition Abound (2022), presented at the Ottawa Art Gallery, the installation incorporates co-created paintings and sculptures of recycled, accessible materials that intersect and overspill. In the exchanges that follow, through considerations of accumulation, refiguration, and immersion, Barbu and Bruvels propose readings of ethics and aesthetics that foreground the inherited context of the work of art.

Ash Barbu: Perhaps we can turn to the various symbols that appear and reappear throughout Walk in the Park. It is an unusual environment that strays from anything we commonly associated with “the natural.” First, my mind travels to the paintings of Roblox gameplay.

Natalie Bruvels: Something I continue to grapple with is the all-at-once feeling being a mother. Recently, I started using Roblox imagery in my work. I used to paint solely from screenshots—these scenes seemed too cool and distant. Eventually, I found pleasure in adding traces, stencils, and layers from the so-called real world. The process simply felt more tactile. Some might assume that I’m addressing the effects of video game culture in the work. In a way, I’m engaging in this discourse, however it isn’t a negative commentary. Roblox was how I could see our family during COVID. These works are family portraits. It is as if the camera, the screenshot, acts as an additional family member. These scenes are tender-hearted, although Roblox doesn’t necessarily look that way.

AB: On representing nature, we should also describe the walls, covered with layers of colourful plastic tablecloths.

NB: Some viewers have a strong reaction to the use of plastic based on environmental ethics. Working with my kid, I find it a useful, workable medium. From a practical standpoint, it is reusable. And I don’t need to clean up after. I can put the sheets in a bag and store them away. Over time, they develop their own character. The more I return to them, the more I might shred them. Sometimes they look like tentacles and sometimes they look like the sky—you never quite know. Too often, we turn to artists with an angst that is rooted in our collective inability to solve environmental problems. In fact, throughout the installation, I’m strategically eliciting judgments. Because you cannot be a mother and walk through this world without judgements.

“You need to be able to provide, you need to be able to think on the fly and problem-solve, you need to be a warm presence they can turn to when they are sick…”

Finally, I’m interested in the reasons why we feel compelled to use these materials in the first place. We might see them at a birthday party, for example. The function of these colourful spaces is simply to say: “I love you.” They have power to communicate the message: “I care you’re here—let’s find a way through this together.” From these different considerations, the plastic allows me to think through the complex processes of mothering. You need to be able to provide, you need to be able to think on the fly and problem-solve, you need to be a warm presence they can turn to when they are sick—all these things are true simultaneously.

Still, I find that I have this fantastic chip on my shoulder. It wasn’t until I attended Andrea O’Reilly’s seminar that I gave myself permission to think about motherhood in a feminist way. Forming that connection, you don’t feel so alone. You don’t feel like a deficient mother. This is what writers like Adrienne Rich were concerned with in the 1970s, namely the everyday experience of mothering coupled with the classist, patriarchal, racist institution of motherhood.

AB: As a poet, Rich also interrogated how this institution is inherited and thus recreated from one generation to the next. I’m thinking of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), where she writes about invisible domestic labour and cyclical gendered violence. For Rich, it is violence that belongs to a culture of silence. Your work contends with the contemporary cultural resonance of this silence. Having this conversation, then, we seem most interested in the words unsaid by the Madonna of the “Madonna and Child.” Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna (c. 1504-05), for example, offers the viewer legibility. A certain visual transmissibility is at stake. Alternatively, with Walk in the Park,the landscape is rendered abstract. That landscape is unsettled as we move into opacity. A park is supposed to be a shared space. We read books, we watch birds, we visit friends—all in the company of perfect strangers. I think this feeling of community is fictional, though.

Cat Attack Collective, Walk in the Park, 2023, Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery. Image: David Barbour.

NB: Let’s say that our experience of the park is not all the same. A mother is providing care and working to keep it all together on her own.

AB: To the passer-by, the depth of her experience, the context of her arrival, is easily overlooked. A park setting is fundamentally a public setting that is structured according to some contract of social acceptability. Yet Walk in the Park makes visible what has been rendered invisible. That is, we see the physical and emotional labour of maternal caregiving. This is not a walk in the forest. It is a walk in a park, which is itself a constructed environment. In this rethinking of that constructed environment, there is an expansion and contraction between private and public worlds. Here, an aesthetic reinvention occurs. The park is no longer a seamless, smooth surface of leisure activity. It is a texture—an inherited context. The work is doing more with less. And that feminist sense of maximalism offers us the chance to rethink the canon of Western art history. Many would argue that minimalism represents the height of modernism, where the painted surface and sculptural form become indistinguishable through the absolute reduction of the image. Highlighting the maximalism of Cat Attack Collective, we are not simply asking: What is painting? What is sculpture? What is art? But instead: Who is an artist? What is a studio? What is the relationship between maternal caregiving and artistic production?

NB: It makes people upset when you show them this side of art.

AB: According to that inherited myth of modernist art, the studio is a private space where the genius closes his door to the world and goes to work on a masterpiece. I think about Brancusi’s recently recreated studio at the Centre Pompidou and the ways in which this privileged space becomes fetishized. A copy of a copy of a room filled with nearly priceless phallic objects—there is perhaps no greater metaphor for the historical durability of these relations.

Cat Attack Collective, Rough Around the Edges, 2020, University of Ottawa MFA Final Critique. Image: Cara Tierney.

NB: Our work is maximalist with a Dollar Store budget. The artist Jenny McMaster called it “messimalism.” I think about the notion of spilling over from a feminist theoretical perspective. The emphasis on plastic originated from practical considerations leading up to an MFA critique. I was grouping my paintings together into one expansive blob. Tomson’s work was on the other side of the room in a smaller formation. The two bodies were approaching each other, almost touching. But the surface underneath looked like a studio wall—it became distracting. I needed color quickly. And it needed to be inexpensive.

AB: The plastic tablecloths are readymade. They also behave as a connective tissue, a second skin for the gallery walls. In this sense, Walk in the Park rejects the visual logic of the white cube gallery. What the white cube shares with the park setting is the myth of neutrality—the fiction of a common ground. In the installation, the ground of meaning emerges from a place of visual and material excess that is, paradoxically, tied to a series of constraints. It is, as you suggest, a context that spills over. It is a textured surface of meaning that begins, first and foremost, with the question of feminist worldmaking.

NB: Returning to the question of legibility, I don’t think children are viewing the installation as an aesthetic reinvention of the park or an interrogation of modernist neutrality. In the busyness of creating the work, you don’t have time to sit and enjoy it until much, much later. For me, that much, much later, came the day before the show closed. I could feel the space. It made me emotional because I saw it as beautiful. I was proud of what we were able to do. I was having a heartfelt introspective moment when several children came in running, laughing, and screaming. And that is how they view this space. So, legibility varies.


AB: Walk in the Park offers a feminist critique of maternal erasure that is born from sensorial pleasure. For any viewer of any age, that visual excess is the pull inward. But what is made visible only scratches the surface of an inherited context, in art and life.

Read part one of Barbu and Bruvels’s discussion here.

Ash Barbu is a writer, curator, and researcher who holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto. A recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, they have produced numerous group exhibitions foregrounding the limits of reparative visibility, including Words Unsaid: Autobiography and Knowing at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Visual Arts (2023). Their recent writings have appeared in publications such as OnCurating, Peripheral Review, and Esse art + opinions. Barbu lectures on queer theory and trans studies locally, nationally, and internationally.

Cat Attack Collective consists of Natalie Bruvels and her son, Tomson. They are a multidisciplinary collective working primarily in painting and large-scale installations. Established in 2020, Cat Attack Collective has exhibited at the University of Ottawa, Art Mûr, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and along the Greenboro Pathway as part of Microcosm, the City of Ottawa Public Art Program’s COVID-19 pilot initiative.

Natalie Bruvels holds a Master of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory, both from the University of Ottawa. She is currently enrolled in the Feminist and Gender Studies PhD program at the University of Ottawa. Bruvels is researching maternal subjectivity in art and visual culture, while advocating for caregiving supports in a university setting. Bruvels has presented the work of Cat Attack Collective at various academic conferences, including the Museum of Motherhood in St. Petersburg, Florida. She has subsequently published writing in The Journal of Mother Studies.

Tomson is in grade six and is happy to be back at school in person to spend more time with his friends. He loves dodgeball and has a special affinity for zip-ties as an artistic material. He is the youngest artist to have his work exhibited at the Ottawa Art Gallery.  

Memory Mirror by Lares Feliciano: A Reflection on Recollection

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

Lares Feliciano

Denver Art Museum

July 4, 2021 – June 18, 2023

By Alida Kress

Lares Feliciano transforms the Denver Art Museum’s Precourt Family Discovery Hall into a timeless, vibrant sanctuary of nostalgia with her multimedia installation, Memory Mirror.  Her stylized work moves viewers to confront their relationships with memory and explore the history of the marginalized communities who have shaped Denver’s history. Feliciano’s extensive use of the gallery space encourages viewers to interact with the installation’s various elements. As such, she creates a piece that invites viewers to see her work and become part of it themselves.

As I approach the gallery, I am beckoned in by the sounds of jazz softly underlying an audial collage of recorded memories. Enormous flowers bloom on vintage wallpaper adorning the walls in a 1970s supergraphics style, and from behind the colorful blossoms, grey-toned faces peer down at me. 

Shadow boxes containing sentimental items donated by the Denver public hang on the wall and, across the room, two vintage chairs invite me to sit. An old TV, globe, rotary phone, and other vintage items accompany the chairs in their place on a large rug. Although these items were foreign to me, something about their arrangement felt comfortable, almost familiar. 

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

Graphics stylistically akin to hand-drawn, children’s book illustrations are projected on a large oval frame. The cheerful animations provide visual accompaniment to the memories being recounted overhead. I felt compelled to look at each item in the shadow boxes, sit in the chairs, spin the globe, and even dial my number on the rotary phone. All elements of the installation work in conjunction to instill a sense of hazy nostalgia in me which I yearned to follow to some philosophical conclusion. 

Lares Feliciano is a Denver-based artist from California who works in multimedia design to create interactive art installations. The local artist has another installation at Meow Wolf Denver, an artist collective that collaborates with local artists to create maximalist, interactive art installations at permanent locations across the U.S.[1] At the installation in Denver, Feliciano applies her unique artistic style to breathe life into the Portals of Theseus collection.[2] The whimsical nature of her work with Meow Wolf remains evident within this installation as well. 

 Memory Mirror opened in July of 2021 and will continue through June 18th of 2023. Prior to the installation’s debut, Feliciano set up an in-person event and a phone number at which the public could leave a voicemail recalling a significant memory of theirs. Participants were also invited to donate images and items of sentimental value to be displayed in the gallery. The photographs incorporated into the wallpapers are partially these images donated by participants, but most were taken from the Denver Library’s official archives and depict a wide range of Denver’s diverse cultural history. 

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

In my conversation with Feliciano, she shared that her inspiration for the piece came largely from her dad who passed away from early-onset Alzheimer’s when she was 16. Recalling her own relationship with memory and her dad, she notes that memory is an intangible thing, the loss of which, however, is incredibly tangible. Thus, in Memory Mirror, she attempts to capture tangible markers of memory that not only reflect the associated moment in the donor’s life, but also their relationship with the memory as they recall it. She stated that the installation is not trying to make sense of memory or give it any type of order, but simply to give it a place. 

In asking Feliciano about what she hoped viewers might gain from experiencing the installation, she said, “Hopefully their own nostalgia is triggered and they are forced to remember… anything.” For me, the piece was a way to interact with and process trauma. The nature of the space encouraged me to recall difficult memories and sit with them in ways I hadn’t before. The space was soft and calm, and it felt as though the words tumbling from my mouth had a safe place to exist outside of my own mind.  

In an interview with Westword, Feliciano shared, “My work often evokes a dreamlike nostalgia where decades overlap and all of time exists at once.”[3] This sentiment is incredibly apparent in the installation. While much of the installation is a call to self-reflection, just as significant is how it spotlights the history of Denver’s marginalized communities. The images Feliciano edited into the flowers on the wallpapers feature mainly people of color. These photos feature nostalgic photographs of varying levels of formality. Feliciano showcases a history of people of color in Denver by including everything from images of CU Denver’s minority student organizations in the 1950s to an image of Denver’s Bruce Randolf at his street naming ceremony. Feliciano described this part of the installation as a method to “give them their flowers,” sharing that she “had no idea what sort of celebrations have existed for any of these people, but they’re here if nothing else.”

Lares Feliciano. Memory Mirror, 2021-2023. Images of Memory Mirror courtesy of Lares Feliciano and the Denver Art Museum.

In the wake of the pandemic, Feliciano wanted to acknowledge how hard it is to exist, but also how powerful it is to be able to remember something good. We discussed the potential of all of time existing at once, and how recognizing that is an incredible way to deal with grief and trauma. For anyone who has read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Memory Mirror is a step towards seeing every moment of life all at once, like one would behold a stretch of the Rocky Mountains.[4]

 Feliciano’s work urges her viewers to lean into the resemblance Memory Mirror holds to a relative’s living room. It encourages viewers to sit in that nostalgia either to process their relationship with memory or to learn a little more about Denver’s collective memory and the histories of marginalized communities so often written out of colonial history books.

Memory Mirror facilitates a multifaceted experience in which the viewer is invited to explore not only their own memories, but the memory of the city they are in. Feliciano has created a piece that cradles the viewer’s internal child and allows them the space and safety to sit, feel, and remember. 

[1] “Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences,” Meow Wolf: Immersive Art Experiences, accessed April 2023, https://meowwolf.com/.

[2]“Meow Wolf Denver Introduced Portals of Theseus,” Taking The Kids, January 7, 2023, https://takingthekids.com/meow-wolf-denver-introduced-portals-of-theseus/.

[3] Kyle Harris, “Lares Feliciano Wants Your Memories for a Denver Art Museum Installation,” Westword (Westword, March 17, 2021), https://www.westword.com/arts/lares-feliciano-collects-memories-for-memory-mirror-at-the-denver-art-museum-11921404.

[4] Jr Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five: The Children’s Crusade (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 86.

The Bed: In Discussion with Maayan Sophia Weisstub


Maayan Sophia Weisstub. The Bed. The Museum of the Home. Images Courtesy of the artist.

Interview by Adi Berardini

CW: Discussion of domestic abuse

Displayed at the Museum of the Home as part of the Festival of Sleep from June to September 2022, The Bed by Maayan Sophia Weisstub is a powerful installation that takes the visuals of bruises and injury and pairs them with the comfort of a bed. Although the bed is often associated with solace and security, for domestic abuse survivors, a bed can hold complex and negative associations. As Weisstub explains, The Bed explores the physical, mental, and emotional toll of domestic abuse, addressing how even after the bruises fade, the emotional scars still linger. The installation sparks difficult but essential conversations about domestic abuse to ultimately create awareness and healing. 

Currently based in London, UK, Maayan Sophia Weisstub is an interdisciplinary artist working with a range of media from drawing, animation, collage, and sculpture and installation. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Weisstub has shown at the Saatchi Gallery, Christie’s, and Pavlov’s Dog Gallery. Her work has also been featured in White Hot Magazine, Kaltblut, and Design Taxi, among others. The following conversation discusses The Bed and her broader practice. 

Maayan Sophia Weisstub. The Bed. The Museum of the Home. Images Courtesy of the artist.

Can you speak more about your installation The Bed at the Museum of the Home which aims to raise awareness and reflect upon domestic violence against primarily women and children?

Raising awareness is regarding everyone. It’s commonly towards women and children but also towards men, I don’t want to take that part away. It’s a topic that always concerned me, like many other social topics. I also did a project with a graphic design office in Munich last year to raise awareness about violence against women. It’s not the first project where I’m dealing with this topic. I wanted to do a bit more because a lot of my work is naturally [based on] the things I deal with. It’s important for me also to touch on other topics and make a little change or protest. It’s not always easy for me to go outside and protest so I can raise awareness in a way that I can or know how to. This is my way to contribute to it as a start [to a conversation about] this topic. 

I didn’t want this to be about me or my experience, but it touches me in personal areas. I wanted it to be in the entire spectrum of domestic abuse. I think it touches most people in some places. Whether it’s been sexual abuse or verbal abuse that I think many people have experienced in some sense from parents or siblings, or a partner a lot of times. Sometimes we don’t necessarily think of it as scarring or domestic abuse, but they are all on the spectrum. And then, of course, the more severe ones—I don’t know if more severe, cause it all depends on the effect—but the physical violence and abuse that we hear about in the news.

We don’t hear about it [often], but during COVID, we heard about it more because cases were rising since more people were at home. I think [people] felt frustrated with their conditions, and many were out of work and didn’t make the money they needed, or they took their aggression on their partners or children. I think it’s something that should be [discussed] more because I feel like there’s not enough attention [paid to] it. Then I decided I wanted to do a piece about it, and I had this idea, like a metaphor.

Maayan Sophia Weisstub. The Bed. The Museum of the Home. Images Courtesy of the artist.

The Bed evocatively bridges the personal and the public and juxtaposes the softness and respite of a bed with the pain of physical violence. Can you elaborate on your approach to using these opposites and how The Bed addresses trauma and survival?

I see the bed as a shelter where you can rest at the end of the day or even cry when you need to be with yourself. Also, intimate relationships and physical contact happen in bed. So, the bed is a very personal, private, or intimate symbol. On the one hand, it’s supposed to be the safe place where you could be vulnerable. Then, on the other hand, it’s also like it can be a door to nightmares or for dark things that may happen in situations in bedrooms, behind closed doors as well. 

There’s bruised skin [depicted] in different stages of healing. I researched bruises and looked at photos of domestic views of survivors. I wanted it to [reflect] different stages, but still, there are some scars there. Some heal, some don’t, and some stay forever. 

The bed is a very personal, private, or intimate symbol.

Then I approached and was in contact with Refuge, a charity that helps children and women who are survivors of domestic abuse. They sent me some materials and I researched from people around me and my own experiences. [I was in] contact with them regarding the text I wrote that accompanies the artwork, to ensure that it’s not offensive. I wrote victims at the beginning, and later they told me that it’s correct to say survivors, not victims in this case of domestic abuse. That was the only thing, but it’s a big thing to change. I think it’s important.

Then I reached out to a Museum of the Home, it was very fortunate that they did the sleeping exhibition [Festival of Sleep]. It fit well with their program. I reached out to other places, but this was the place I wanted the most because I feel like they’re very involved with the community and social topics. I was very intrigued by The Museum of the Home. It’s a beautiful building that was built in the 1700s. The head of the Ironmonger Society built it for retired ironmongers and widows of ironmongers. And later it was bought and turned into a Museum of the Home in the fifties where it showed different sets of interiors in Britain to teach people about the history.

They do a lot of community workshops and stuff with different communities, such as Turkish, Jewish, Indian, or African, they have a very diverse community coming to the museum. I felt that it would be the best place to show The Bed. Of course, I want it to be shown in galleries and museums as well, but it’s also important for me to show it to audiences that aren’t necessarily the same audiences who would go to the Tate. It’s also free so there are a lot of different audiences that would come and see it. It’s not necessarily [just] artsy people. Once they said that it fits, I [thought that] this is the best match.

I co-hosted a workshop about The Bed on September 28th with a friend who is a designer. It was a therapeutic workshop quilting scars, so attendees added their scars to this communal blanket. It was informative and provided a safe space to do craft work together. I think it added to the experience of The Bed shown there.

Maayan Sophia Weisstub. The Bed. The Museum of the Home. Images Courtesy of the artist.

It might be hard to gauge, but what has the response been like, do people often share their stories with you?

I went there with friends, [a couple of] art curators and a journalist to show them the work. I mainly got responses from people I went with because museum visitors didn’t know that I made it. I like that because then I can see their response from the side.

There was one woman who went there, I saw her staying there and taking a photo, and then she told me and my friend that it was “very powerful.” That was very nice to hear. Also, I saw a couple come in, and one woman said to the other, “The bed is very small,” and then she walked out. The work is not easy to digest. I know from my friends that they had different responses.  

Some people said it’s meaningful and powerful. With these kinds of abuses, you tend to feel a sort of loyalty to the person who has done that to you, whether it’s a family member or a partner. You don’t want to make them look bad. I don’t feel people necessarily have to share their experience if they don’t want to. If they brought it up, I would ask and talk, but I wouldn’t force anyone into an inconvenient or uncomfortable spot. I hope one day we will be able to talk more openly about the pain that we go through and not be ashamed of it, or scared to share, or worried about making someone else look bad if they’ve done something wrong.

With friends, it takes time to gain trust and feel safe enough to share traumas. It takes a certain degree of knowing each other to share these vulnerable experiences. 

Maayan Sophia Weisstub. Mnēmē, A Breathing Object. 2021.

Your work commonly connects inanimate objects to emotional feeling (such as a table and chair, with the kinetic sculpture Mnēmē, A Breathing Object), giving it human qualities. Can you speak more about this connection and your inspiration of how people connect to objects?

Mnēmē is a word that describes the effect of the past on the present. That work was my graduation project from the Royal College of Art, where I graduated last summer. This piece was dedicated to my father who passed away almost eight years ago. It was about how we project sensations, memories and experiences onto inanimate objects and bring them to life doing that.

A lot of it was also inspired by reading In Search of Lost Time by [Marcel Proust], there’s a part that [clearly] describes this experience. I always feel like I get attached to objects quite easily. If someone brings me [something], I can’t throw it away easily. I keep it and associate it with memories of that person. It breathes life into the object, becoming a sort of monument forever. In the book, there’s a part where the main character eats a Madeleine. Suddenly, he goes into a stream of memories from his childhood triggered by the smell, touch, and taste of that cookie. I think that you can get that when you find an old shirt, for example, that belonged to someone you cared for, suddenly it brings a lot back to you.

The objects in that installation are all objects that I [used to] create an imagined scene of my father’s room when he was younger. It’s all furniture from the fifties, including the book. 

Everything is finely [selected] and symbolizes something. The article the book is opened on is an article about life and death, different theories by different philosophers about how to conceive death in regards to time. We may not know what happens next, but I believe it doesn’t just end when someone passes away. 

How do you choose your medium with the work that you do? 

I usually think of an idea and then I think of what would be the best medium to share it with the world and communicate it. A lot of times, I see my drawings and collages as sketches for future installations, sculptures, or films. I do them at home on paper or Photoshop, just because these are my immediate resources. I would like to produce more large-scale installations and video works. I like things that immerse you in an experience.

You can view Maayan Sophia Weisstub’s work on her website and Instagram. Check out her upcoming installation at Room25 in Tel Aviv in May 2023.

History is Full of Fiction

“History is Full of Fiction:” In conversation with Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Timo Kaabi-Linke

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Das Kapital – Epilogue: The Fable of the End of an Era, 2020. Installation with found monument, video and sound; variable dimensions, 12’07” © Photo: TiKL 2020 courtesy of the artist and Darat Al Funun the Khaled Shoman Foundation.

By Jess Chen

Writing about the collapse of the bourgeoisie, Walter Benjamin remarked that material residue preserves a kind of dream-world, an image of the future. “Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams about the one to follow, but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.”[1] Nadia Kaabi-Linke is a collector and archaeologist of such residue, the traces of what has been and what could be. She excavates the everyday by retrieving detritus; coffee grounds, scrap metal, paint chips, and even dust become source material for her work. That which has been overlooked, or deemed waste, constitute the means through which Kaabi-Linke dismantles the clean narrative arc. Capitalism, war, colonialism, domestic abuse—these are her subjects, storylines defined by their destruction, tragic irony, and ultimately, regret. Kaabi-Linke composes extended metaphors of longing and deferred hope from these ruins.

Kaabi-Linke’s own trajectory began in Tunisia, where she studied painting at the University of Fine Arts, Tunis, before moving to Paris to complete a Ph.D. in Art Theory at the Sorbonne. Kaabi-Linke now lives and works in Berlin with her partner and collaborator Timo, a sociologist. They also spend time in Kyiv, Ukraine, her mother’s hometown. It comes as no surprise that Kaabi-Linke is a keen observer of how history and geography color personal experience. She probes the miasma of fear and greed that marks history in her latest work, Das Kapital—Epilogue: The Fable of the End of An Era, a scathing critique of our economic system.

Das Kapital, on view at Darat al Funun, is a video installation with several found objects: a metal gate propped upright by a pile of tawny, unpolished stones and a weathered electric cable. The objects come from Amman, Jordan, where Nadia and Timo noticed a plot of land between two townhouses, empty except for the gate, stones, and cable. After conducting interviews with nearby residents, which became part of the installation, they learned that there used to be a house on the land. Its owner had a dream in which her father said there was treasure buried underneath the house. She went to work accordingly, evicting the tenants and destroying the building, but she found nothing.

Das Kapital is a potent metaphor for the corrosive desires of capitalism. The work is more relevant than ever today when the COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted hundreds of thousands of people into financial precarity, even as large corporations continue to profit. In my interview with Nadia and Timo, we discuss the implications of Das Kapital, their approach to revealing history’s fictions, and how we might imagine a post-capitalist society.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Das Kapital – Epilogue: The Fable of the End of an Era, 2020. Installation with found monument, video and sound; variable dimensions, 12’07” © Photo: TiKL 2020 photo courtesy of the artist and Darat Al Funun the Khaled Shoman Foundation.

Jess Chen (JC): I was captivated by the way in which mythology or fiction figures in the work: first in the backstory, in which the landlord follows a dream, and in your subtitle, Fable of the End of an Era. But these fictions have had concrete consequences on real people, places, and things, and these consequences can turn into historical fact. How do you interpret this relationship between fiction and history?

Nadia Kaabi-Linke (NKL): Actually, I always thought there is little place for fiction in the way we [her and Timo] deal with history. But history is full of fiction, that being said, because there is always narrative. There is no historical fact. Historians work with theories and histories of books, which give us narratives. Depending upon which regime you live in, which time you live in, I learned to understand that fiction is really part of history.

But our approach as artists tries to avoid that. We work with prints, we work with direct contact with people and take pieces and bits of life. [We] compose objects and create a grammar of things. In the case of “Das Kapital,” we say it is an urban legend. You can say a dream is fiction, but it’s a concrete dream she has had.

It depends on the culture where you live also. For some people, dreams are communications with the spirits or the universe. This [Das Kapital] is an example of a lady who took the dream as reality, so she believed it completely.

Timo Kaabi-Linke (TKL): Your question is very sociological, as I understand it. In sociology, you have two histories: the history that is operated within and followed by a rationalist regime, which is relating facts and archives and documents, and doing a reflection of your own interpretation of these documents. Through source analysis, you try to get objectivity in your research.

On the other hand, as you try to be objective, you must consider yourself as a subject in this history—as something that was created and made by this process. You need to question all your methods, so this objectivity resides in the fact that you need to look at history that has an effect on people and social life. I’m not talking about the history created from the archives, I’m talking about the lived history and the oral histories, like urban legends. We must say that the subjective part of history, which is composed of many, many individual stories is much more effective than anything you can prove on paper.

JC: There are always those gaps in the archive you can never fully fill.

TKL: When we come to Das Kapital, the fact that they changed the law to rebuild and reconstruct the city was less important to the woman than the dream she had, and she relied on this dream more than the printed law sent by the government.

NKL: When you listen to the video, to all the interviews we made, there is always the same story with deviations. I see it as a kind of aural sculpture because it’s as if through the voice of the people you are turning around the situation and it becomes three-dimensional. Some of them say it is a woman, but several say it’s not a woman. They are an extremely rich family, and this is one of the houses they have in Amman. Most of them live in foreign countries, and some say the dream came to a sister [who didn’t live in Amman], and she consulted with all of her family members and decided that they would do this [find the treasure]. Because they are a rich family, they blocked the street from one end to the other. The army was involved to protect the whole process.

TKL: The government involved itself in order to avoid public upheaval, because they feared that people would all claim the fortune.

NKL: It makes total sense why the army and government would be so much involved. This neighborhood was not very rich, but it was in the most historical part of Amman. The treasures are not their [the landlord’s] ancestors.’ [It’s] something maybe 800 years old, or more, so they don’t have the right to it. If there was something, it doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to Jordan.

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Das Kapital – Epilogue: The Fable of the End of an Era, 2020. Installation with found monument, video and sound; variable dimensions, 12’07” © Photo: TiKL 2020 courtesy of the artist and Darat Al Funun the Khaled Shoman Foundation.

JC: Going back to taking these bits and pieces of reality for your work, how do you avoid reproducing those fictions or myths?

TKL: We work a lot with reproductions, but when you reproduce, when Nadia takes prints from walls, she’s in direct contact. Not reproduction but a transfer of a texture. The print cannot exist without the original and is not identical to the original, because it is a pattern, while the original is an object. This is a critical approach to the idea of reproduction.

When you put the different stories with slight deviations together, you realize how this is constructed, and you see that there is a common myth that everyone makes something out of.

In this work, we reproduced the gate and took original elements from the site to rearrange them in the exhibition space. This was not a transfer—it was a transposition. We wanted to cut it out of the original environment and put it in the clinical environment of the exhibition venue, a kind of petri dish. When you put it in a different place, where it doesn’t belong, then it becomes visible.

We did the same thing with the recordings. When you put the different stories with slight deviations together, you realize how this is constructed, and you see that there is a common myth that everyone makes something out of. When you align these stories, you become aware that this is all construction.

NKL: I would say that we don’t try to avoid reproduction—we work with it. We work with prints and imprints, and in this case, we didn’t want to touch the gate. We made a re-enactment and reproduced the whole thing. When you asked your question, it made me think of Urinal by Duchamp, although it’s not my favorite work. You take an object and reproduce it as it is. No one looked at it before. But when you take it out of its context and you put it within the white cube, you look at it with new eyes.

JC: I was going to ask about the Duchamp, actually. The found object.

NKL: Yeah, Duchamp is not the best example because there are very strong theories…it’s very possible the first readymade was produced by a woman. Another patriarchal myth.

TKL: Still, once you do something with pre-existing elements, you don’t try to ignore or invisibilize or overlook the fact that you work with reproductions. Put it on the table. Think about it and ask the questions: How can I make this reproducibility visible? How can I work with it in a way that the reproduction is so strong that nobody would dare to think, “Wow, this is original.” That kind of originality in art is a big myth of modern art.

JC: I’m interested specifically in the reproduction of narrative. You mentioned those recordings in the video installation of different people retelling the urban legend. How do you avoid one master narrative coming out? Is that a concern of yours?

NKL: There is one story, so the only variations are slight. Some say it’s only the woman, some others say it’s her and especially her brothers and sisters who took over and she [the woman] doesn’t even live in Amman. There was a big question about the gate. Who built it? Is it the gate from the house? Some say yes, some say no. There was a homeless man who came and collected it. Some said he cared for it, some said he was crazy or had a mental illness.

But the line is clearly the dream, the gold, the treasure, destruction, and losing everything.

The core idea, why we called it Capital and Epilogue, is because the gate should separate the outer and inner space and protect the inner space. But it’s not holding itself. It’s being held by stones, by an electric cable, and by a branch, so everything is super precarious. We saw in this gate the metaphor for the post-capitalist era.

I have a feeling that the coronavirus has pushed us toward something. And nevertheless, all the governments in the world, instead of questioning everything and asking how to save us, hold onto a system that is built on blood and destroying the planet. Total nonsense—the gate is nonsense [too]. It’s not holding itself, it’s the cable and some stones holding it. That’s why the narrative, the story is important. It’s like a skeleton.

TKL: I was thinking about the guy who lives in this area. He created some kind of a poetic plot because he’s actually at the other end of the social scale. He’s homeless, he has nothing, but he got a place where he could be at night, where he could leave his things during the day. This is huge for someone who has nothing. So there was a treasure in the ground.

The funny thing is that he decorated this place in the typical capitalist fashion. “This is mine—here’s a fence—don’t go further—this is now my place.” He appropriated it. He should be the guy explaining to us why capitalism isn’t working.

JC: That reminds me of salvage capitalism. Being on the edges of capitalism and making a place for yourself.

TKL: Yes. As Nadia said, the beginning of capitalism was always bloody, in all societies, and it was not so long ago. Especially if you look at the United States, you can go a few generations back and find the guy who draws the fence.

In Europe, it’s a bit more complicated. We have the feudal system that intervenes, but it’s the same logic, all about property. The point is capitalism is something like a dead-born child. It could never live, it could never really work. This is how it can deal with problems and crises. People are saying this is late capitalism and the end of the capitalism. I think that crisis is all capitalism needs.

JC: Thinking about Das Kapital, the first thing that came to my mind was that quote attributed to Fredric Jameson, that “it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

TKL: In my sense, this has become so outdated. This is something you would think of with Francis Fukuyama, the end of history.

JC: And yet so many people still have this mindset.

NKL: Some take it as a system like weather, or conditions like water or air. No, it’s not that. It’s not vital.

JC: I have one last question. We’re talking about the destruction of capitalism and how coronavirus is pushing capitalism even faster so that systems are at the brink. If we get to the point where we decide we have to build a new system, what are you imagining and what kind of structuring principle(s) are you imagining for the future?

TKL: It’s quite difficult to fathom the possibilities of the future so I won’t do that. But what I could do and what triggers my interest is what already exists. It’s incredible how reflective people have become about money. Modern Money Theory (MMT) creates public awareness that money doesn’t exist. It’s not a substantive medium. When you take money from a bank, it’s not that there’s less money when you take it. No, they give the debt that the bank has for you to someone else to deal with it. Everything that we exchange is not money. It is not like gold that is sold and someone else is now the new owner. It’s a program of behavior. These discourses would bring so much awareness to this. If people start thinking this way, society would totally change the idea of property and come to a culture of sharing and caring.

NKL: This is for me also. Sharing and caring, that’s for me a dream, and I think we can reach it. People think it is in the nature of humans to be greedy, to accumulate. It is as much in human nature, when someone smiles at you, to feel a second of incredible happiness, and we need that. That’s why all the films and songs are always about love, because this what we need and that’s what anchors us. I don’t want to be romantic here. Love for me is something very concrete, very real, tangible, that I experience every day. Even when I’m angry, there is a part of love in it also.

It is as Timo said, sharing and caring. It is the opposite of capitalism.

—-

 Das Kapital is a timely exploration of the consequences of capitalism. The work’s strength, however, lies in how it beckons to the future using the ruin as artistic strategy. Ruins are evidence of both fragility and destruction, of human life and of marginalized histories. My conversation with Nadia and Timo shows how they can also serve as a starting point for imagining a more equitable system. Nadia’s work is on view at Aicon Gallery, New York, from March 3—April 17.

[1] Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), 13.