In Discussion with Robin Henry: On Honey Dip and Creating Space


Portrait of Robin Henry by Natali Bravo. Photo courtesy of the artist.

By Étienne Lavallée

In the neighbourhood of the Old East Village, on the main Dundas Street drag, is an unassuming row of storefronts. During the day, Dough EV is a quirky doughnut shop, with rotating seasonal flavours, staffed by friendly queer employees. It’s a great use for what was formerly The Root Cellar. To the left of Dough EV’s entrance is a little green door encased in brickwork. At night, this little door opens to a dark stairwell, and if you mount that staircase, it’ll take you upstairs to Honey Dip. Honey Dip is no dive bar, but a spot for local artists, musicians, creatives, and weirdos to meet, mingle, and perhaps even collaborate. There’s something different happening at the Dip every night. It might be a DJ Night, a grindcore band, a crafting night, live noise rock, a record flip. The staff tries to keep it booked every night that the space is open, Wednesday through Sunday. Come often enough, you’ll get to know the regulars. 

On the dance floor, where our bodies intermingle, the distance that developed between us all during the pandemic narrows to a sliver. Strange bodies, unusual bodies, tattooed, pierced, patched and resewn, remade in their own queer image, mosh, dance, writhe and breathe together. The world becomes a little less lonely. Throbbing and laughing, dancing and touching, we’re unified. We become one again. This is our home, our world together.

Honey Dip owes a lot of its success to London’s queer community, especially queer femmes who attend Honey Dip’s many Sapphic nights. It is a queer-owned and queer-staffed establishment, and while it’s difficult for a bar to be a safe space, it is a compassionate and caring space. I had the privilege of sitting down with Honey Dip’s main founder, Robin Henry. Robin has been an active member of London’s art community through their work as The Real Antler Press, their multiple city murals, and past art exhibitions at TAP Centre and Jonathan Bancroft-Snell Gallery. We sat down together at Dough EV and chatted about it.

Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.

Can you run me through a history of how you acquired the space?

It used to be an organic restaurant, and the upstairs was a room for rent for bridal showers and office parties. The bar that was up there, the structure was already there, and there wasn’t really a stage. You could fit maybe one acoustic musician. Dough EV took over the restaurant, the upstairs sat empty. Some of my friends and I started booking shows in Dough EV in response to the general lack of musical spaces in the city.

This was after Call the Office had shut down, right?

Yeah, we had lost the Embassy, we had lost The Salt Lounge, we had lost many of the house venues — there just weren’t a lot of places. London[‘s music scene] was just revolving around the bowling alley at that time. We started booking shows and concerts, open mics, in the doughnut shop at the time. At the time I was booking with anyone that would let me use their space –at Brown & Dickson’s, Back to the Fuchsia, in the Squeaky Wheel Bike Co-op, and those are now going strong as Gears [Concert Series] — to convince anybody I could to post a weird little artsy event. We started doing it at Dough EV regularly around the end of February 2025. The two owners of Dough EV, Aaron and Tara, approached me and said the shows had been going really great, we’re doing them all the time, and we’d like to do something more serious with that. They asked me, would you be into going in on a venue with us? We received the lease in June, so we had until June to make it a viable space. So we flipped the space and renovated it. There were three months of renovation — the community rallied to renovate it with me. We didn’t hire reno help, it was just all DIY. We flipped the stage. Girls Rock Camp donated a stage they used for an exhibition they were involved in at Museum London; the premise of the exhibition imagined if the music scene was matriarchal instead of patriarchal. They built a music venue inside of Museum London for this exhibition, and then the stage sat in a storage locker for a few years. They contacted us when we opened and asked if we wanted it. We disassembled it and re-assembled it upstairs.

Within three months we had our opening, and I had an exhibition at the same time, which was crazy. That was at Jonathan’s [Bancroft-Snell Gallery], and I would be here from waking up until 11 PM building Honey Dip, and then I would have to get home and work on paintings for the exhibition until morning. The craziest work schedule I ever had, but very fulfilling. My entire life was consumed, dawn to dusk, by making an art space and making art. I had my exhibition, and within a week of the exhibition opening was our launch of Honey Dip. Also, simultaneously was the pinnacle of MAGICAL London. That was the crescendo of MAGICAL London. MAGICAL was a collective of show promoters and queer culture creators in the city. It evolved from its original conceptualization and morphed, founded in part by Regional HIV/AIDS Connection [funded by the London Community Foundation]. It was effectively a supergroup of queer organizers. It felt like, what if all these DIY organizers who were pouring money out of pocket to make these events happen, to make music performances, open mics, dance nights — what if we all had money to work with to host these events? The initial goal was to host 12 events, but when we got some funding, it turned into 3-4 events a month for a year, and then it crescendoed with a week-long marathon of events. It ended up being roughly 30 events and a book launch. It was a bunch of people who were used to doing it with no money, finding ourselves with money, so we were able to stretch it much farther than we expected.

What happened to MAGICAL London then?

It was incredibly demanding; none of us were getting paid to do it. It was such a consuming and ambitious project. It just ran its course. It was proof that with support these things could happen. Anybody in the arts knows that grant money doesn’t flow like water. Everyone involved in that work is still doing it in some capacity.  RHAC is still doing incredible work – Honey Dip came out of it, queer cultural forces came out of it, but we just don’t function as a collective anymore.

Everyone’s still part of the community, still organizing and gathering people.

Yeah, we just don’t have a shared budget we’re pulling from. In a way, that makes some of it easier: the fewer people you have to consult, the faster your work can go.

Willow Switch at Honey Dip. Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.


How would you describe the unique vibe and character of Honey Dip to someone who has never climbed the stairs to visit?

The vibe is – it’s if you let a bunch of people who organize house and DIY shows take over a cocktail bar. It’s like a package of peanuts that says “may contain nuts” – we are ground up, a DIY gathering space. In spite of having a home base, we’re still running it like it’s DIY because those anarchist values are interwoven with punk, underground, queer, and drag culture.

When Honey Dip first opened, it came out of a clear need for affordable art and music spaces in OEV. Looking back at the early days, what were the biggest hurdles in turning that concept into a fully functional local bar?

It’s my hope that this is still the early days. We’re a year in. I want this to be an institution in this city. Part of my desire in founding this place is creating a space for the outcasts, the queers, the musicians, the artists. I think one of the biggest challenges is that the culture of that type of nightlife is not baked into the fabric of London the way it may be in other major art cities. [We’re creating the kind of space where] you don’t need to know what’s going on, you just show up and see what’s cool. We’re teaching a new generation of London punks and queers what it is to have a gathering space and nightlife because we’ve all become accustomed to staying home and engaging with the world through screens and social media. We need to relearn how to engage with our people, in person.

With each other, to talk to each other outside of a screen.

The truth is capitalism benefits from us not gathering.

The alienation makes more money, right?

Yeah, and I view it as a very imperfect but very political thing, to create a gathering space for people who don’t have access to that regularly.  There’s plenty of bars locally that have not made it their grind to host local music events. Another challenge is that young people don’t engage with alcohol in the same way that we [millennials] do, and that’s our main revenue source, so that becomes a tricky thing. That’s why we offer alternatives and mocktails.

When I was growing up, drinking was a huge part of the punk subculture, and the way young people interact with alcohol is being approached with more moderation now, which changes how they interact with the space, right?

I think it always will be to some extent. But it’s different. I think they have a healthier relationship with alcohol. Our generation spent so much time sneaking around and hiding that we had weed because it was illegal, and now these kids can go to a dispensary, spend $5, and get an edible that will keep them high for the night. I think the biggest challenge is that alternative people, queers and punks, became accustomed to staying home. There’s nothing that’s for us, [that] lets [us] just hang out and do something on our terms.


You hosted an incredible number of events in your first year, well over 200, is that correct?  Looking back, what has been the most defining or surprising moment in the bar’s history so far?

It’ll be about 227 events by the anniversary. It’s hard to place. When you do this many events, it’s no longer any specific moment. One concert can feel monumental. When you place it in a sea of events, it becomes a drop. It’s more about the entire body of work.

Does it run together for you sometimes?

Yeah, they bleed together. For me the most life breathed into this neighbourhood, and to this scene, was our Halloween run where we had four concerts back-to-back, four events back-to-back, that ranged from a folk horror night to a surf rock night, to a DJ night, to Slash Need. To me, each one of those four events was so holistically different from the previous night. I was like, holy shit, London has as much of an eclectic range of creative engagement in this conservative city, in this beat-down little neighbourhood, as there is in any other art city in Canada. I really believe it. It has everything you need, but you do need to know where to look.

Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.

London is what you make of it, and it requires effort to find the good in it. But there’s a lot of it, is the thing. I think you and I are very much of the same mind that London has loads of potential, and it has so much good hidden within it. You’ve got to find it.
Yeah, these things don’t happen overnight. I think this vague idea of community is impossible to pin down, but you know it when you see it. There’s more to it than just talking about it.

Between live music and queer events to 16mm film screenings and creative workshops, Honey Dip is incredibly multi-faceted. What is the long-term vision for the types of programming you want to bring into the space?
Honey Dip feels like a blank slate; it takes a tremendous amount of effort to make this happen. It’s a lot of hard work on myself, the owners, the staff’s part. It is a lot of people coming to us with crazy, weird ideas. The vision is that we have more people coming to us with crazy weird ideas than we can handle, and it has to start existing in other places in the city in a major way as well.

I want our cup to be so full it floods the city around us, with queer culture and love, with dirty punks, and anarchism, and lowdown commies everywhere.


It has to overflow.
Yeah, I want our cup to be so full it floods the city around us, with queer culture and love, with dirty punks, and anarchism, and lowdown commies everywhere.


You’re seeking a very Ace of Cups situation.

It has to be! What’s the alternative? We wait for other people to do it? We wait for corporations to realize there’s potential for profit, so they target us, like they do with Pride, and then they withdraw when it stops being profitable? It has to come from the ground up. Seeds break through the concrete; no amount of concrete is going to stop that. I don’t care how cringe it is to be holistically sincere and optimistic. Being relentlessly optimistic and passionate has to be part of it, because if we want to believe in a better future, we have to believe in a better right now.

We have to put in the work on it.

It’s easier to believe in a better right now than ever, when you open up a space like this, and you see this many people gathering. It’s easy to believe in a better right now when the community has shown up as they have.

The timing on this has been kind of amazing. You managed to fill a cultural void at a post-quarantine period when we didn’t have a lot going on. Call the Office had closed, and you managed to fill something that was quite vacant. I think anyone here who’s part of the music, performance, and art scenes were really craving this.

The community was ready for it. See a need, fill a need – that very DIY punk ethos. When you can’t find a venue, you get a generator and have a show under a bridge. You can’t find a gallery that will exhibit your work, so you talk a coffee shop into hosting your exhibition opening. That fundamental leftist principle that you have to build the world around you.

Nobody’s going to save us but ourselves, right?
Right, no one’s going to do it for you. We’ve watched so many new bands form, new forms of cultural promotion like Sapphire 519, like Stompbox. These are all new in our community. We can’t skip over these other spaces that are also filling the need.

Sapphic Invasion at Honey Dip, organized by Sapphire 519. Photo by Justice Bekke, courtesy of Robin Henry.

Do you think that the close-knit nature of our London community helped Honey Dip succeed?

Everyone in Southern Ontario uses Toronto as a measuring stick to determine whether their culture is successful, relevant, up-to-date, but if we opened Honey Dip in Toronto, it’s a drop in the bucket. If we opened it in Toronto, it might not be meaningful or a force that can affect a whole city. In London, due to scale alone, a 65-person capacity room can have a massive impact on the music scene. It can be powerful enough that many of the queers and punks in my age group had to move away from London to seek cultural fulfillment. [They moved] to seek out queer community, artists with vision in alignment with their own, and now people can access that here. I would rather do this in London, Ontario than any of the major cities. I’d rather do this here than Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal – because it is deeply impactful here.

Because of our size, and because of London’s unique, gritty atmosphere, it’s more meaningful.

London is a corporate city in a lot of ways –a lot of corporate enterprises, factories, malls, corporate restaurants. These corporations have abandoned the downtown core, saturated the suburbs, but there’s an entire populace of working-class people who make the city run, a working class that keeps these restaurants staffed, that keeps our city working. And punk music always needs to be connected to the working class. When it’s not, it’s no longer authentic; it’s a product. Those are the people who gather here, those are who we’re here for. 

As the bar grows, how do you plan to balance keeping the space accessible and affordable for local DIY promoters while ensuring the venue itself remains sustainable?

The premise is that we always want it to be ground up – that is our hope as we build this culture in the city. I want a noise show with a full room, but I’ll book it either way. I just want to see the art happen, and I want to contribute to the legacy of noise music in the city.

We have such a rich history of noise music here, due to the Nihilist Spasm Band and the Regionalist Movement. It’s baked into London’s punk culture. But I want to be at a point where it becomes more sustainable and viable because it’s part of the fabric of the scene, not just the fringes. In a world that is always going to be more expensive than the working class makes, it’s important that we always lead with it being affordable. That’s why we have NOTAFLOF (No one Turned Away for Lack of Funds) as an evolution of PWYC (Pay What You Can). I would rather have you in the room than your ten dollars. I want to start offering larger events which will mean larger ticket prices, but hopefully with the support of a blooming scene and maybe some sweet government money – some grants – I can go a little farther. I always want to be able to offer local tier shows and DJ nights. If this place becomes only touring bands for thirty dollars, we’ve lost sight of what we’re about. The goal is to always include and prioritize the local scene and then have keystone events that might be a little pricier. There are so many ways to get into a show for free — if you work doors, if you go postering. I’ve even told people if they can bring three friends who can pay, then I’ll get you in free. I just want bodies in here celebrating our culture. If someone can’t get in, there are a ton of ways to get in that make the space better, and you get to go in for free, so you have ownership of the event.

You’re a part of it at that point, and you’ve given a little bit of yourself to the space.

Yeah! The scene is most powerful when it is run by the people who participate in it, not when it is a booking agency or LiveNation, or something like that, dictating and pricing what the culture should be.

Given London’s history of losing punk and DIY spaces such as The Embassy and Call the Office, what can our community do to strengthen and further entrench these spaces into our everyday lives? What can we as community members do to make it last?

Take ownership of it. Take ownership over the future of the space so it becomes sustainable. Call the Office was able to last 30-40 years, and it did music events as the York Hotel did before that. The Embassy was around for nearly 50 years because people were deeply passionate about the space, in addition to a deeply passionate group of people behind the scenes, steering the direction. It’s about getting involved. If you want to see a queer grindcore [band], book them. Be the reason. Or even better, start one. If you want to support your favourite band coming to town, poster around town so no one misses it and the room gets full. Be the reason a bunch of people gather.

I love how many community members have contributed to raising awareness of these events. Knowing it’s difficult to get people to leave their enclaves, I really appreciate the community members who have stepped forward to promote these events and gatherings. I love walking around the core and knowing what comes next. This way people know there are options other than staying in and endlessly scrolling their phone.

I’m a deep believer in the culture of postering – creating physical media and creating an archive of these posters. I’ve designed as many of the posters for these events as I can because I love poster art. I try not to compare cities, but I love walking through Montreal and seeing rows of event posters on every storefront and [every] telephone pole plastered with art made by a human being.  I love this physical media.


There’s something very special about ephemerality, isn’t there?

We talk about a show poster like it’s an ephemeral thing: you do a poster, the poster goes up, the event happens, and the art is dead. But the truth is it lives on, on the wall of a teenager’s room, it exists in the archive of a small DIY gallery, it exists in a zine. We talk about how the internet is forever, but the internet is not forever. The internet is new, and vast, and things get lost easily. Some of my favourite bands in the world, I cannot find their music for the life of me, and they were only around ten years ago. To me, that cassette, vinyl, poster, is forever. To circle back to the question, the best way to get involved is to take ownership over the archiving. People like Nat Bravo, Justice Bekke, like Ruby, show up and document the happenings. Every time that somebody documents and makes a zine, that’s evidence that queer culture exists, that a counterculture existed in that year, in our city. So show up, take pictures, start a blog, start a distro. There are so many ways to get involved. Start a band.  If you don’t play an instrument, draw a poster. If you don’t draw, take pictures. Organize a queer potluck. It’s all part of something larger.

It’s part of our culture that’s constantly growing and changing. It may not even seem like something right now, but there will come a time, years down the line, where we’ll want to be able to see that growth and be able to say ‘What a unique moment in London’s life.’ Taking ownership of that is part of making sure it lasts, right?

It’s one of the things I struggle with and have a fear around. My focus is that I am great at making it happen, but I’m not good at archiving. That is not my strong suit. It needs to be on other people to document these things and take these things from ephemeral to permanent.

What does community mean to you?

It used to mean just going to a punk show, a gathering of friends. Now it’s about showing up for those friends until you get to see them grow as people. It’s hosting enough shows to see them going from shaking with fear for their first time on stage to now fronting a band and being a total rock star up on that stage. It’s not just the show, it’s the human element. It’s the sitting on the sidewalk for the last two hours after the show has ended because you don’t want to stop talking with your friends, so you’re sitting and smoking and laughing. Those are the things that define it for me, how we show up for each other at the gathering space and beyond. Being queer is a radical thing in a world that doesn’t want you, that desires you to be so definable. I feel it’s inevitable that we’re all going to change the world a little bit. Perhaps not the whole world, but our little piece of it. That’s how I think of community.


Everything Comes Back Around: In Conversation with Niloufar Fallahfar

Niloufar Fallahfar’s thesis exhibition as part of the MFA Exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Photo by Alex Nichols courtesy of the artist. 

Interview by Adi Berardini

Niloufar Fallahfar approaches painting in an inventive way—rather than as a 2D painting on the wall, she asks the viewer to engage with the work as a 3D object. Like the Möbius strip is constantly moving, Fallahfar views history as constantly ebbing and flowing. She aims to create an immersive experience for viewers, inspired by sculpture, Iranian history, and Persian architecture of domes and transitional zones. Fallahfar is inspired by the hope that Iranian Shahnameh poetry can spark during dark times and periods of tyranny. Through sparking engagement, Fallahfar articulates a practice grounded in physical and conceptual movement.

Most recently, Fallahfar’s work is on display at the Michigan State University MFA exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, from March 14 to May 17, 2026. Referencing Iranian mirror work, in her exhibition, memory, like the image, is never linear or fully accessible at once and must be assembled through shifting viewpoints and sustained attention.

Niloufar Fallahfar. Under Deep Indigo Blue. Image by the artist.

Your work asks viewers to move around it and see it from different angles. How did you first conceptualize approaching painting in a more sculptural and expanded way?

It goes back to undergrad in Iran, where I was studying painting in university. And it was around 2010 and 2011 that I created my first three-dimensional painting. I made them out of different canvases; I just put them on top of each other. I came to the conclusion that a flat surface is not enough for me, given my curiosity and the questions I wanted to explore in the art world.

I realized that the way we experience life and everything around us is closer to moving through space rather than just looking at the single image, and you don’t access it from just a single fixed point. You return to it, you circle around it, and see different parts at different times.

I feel like that is like history. We move from the past to the present while we are heading towards the future. So, in this situation, time and place play a special role in my work, and I aim to construct a situation for the audience to enter a space and move and adjust their situation in front of an artwork, which I call sculptural painting, to actively participate in the work.

I feel that, as a painter, too. Sometimes, you want to move beyond the flat surface. And I think you’ve done that so well.  As you describe, you are interested in exploring how fragments can take spatial form. Can you explain how your work is influenced by Persian cultural memory and history, especially when cultural histories can be fragmented, yet resist attempts at erasure?

I feel like that Persian cultural memory is very layered, but also very fragile at the same time in certain ways.

I grew up in Iran, and I experienced how history is constantly controlled, and because of that, I think memory doesn’t exist as a stable or continuous narrative. I feel like it survives in fragments, stories, images, architecture, poetry, and many things that we have in our culture.

And what interests me is that even when these traces of memory are suppressed, they don’t disappear; they just reappear in different forms. So, in my work, I’m not trying to reconstruct a unified historical narrative. I’m more interested in how these fragments can exist, especially in the architectural forms that I was inspired by my home country, Persian architectural forms like threshold domes and transitional spaces that we have.

This becomes a container for the fragments that I’m talking about—They hold different temporal layers at once. So, I think these works reflect this condition where memory is incomplete, and narration is inadequate. I believe it’s kind of stuttered, but it’s still active and resisted. It cannot be fully erased. We can see through history that it is reappearing again.

In my work, I’m interested in how these mythological ways of understanding events intersect with the present, and how they remain legible and deeply synchronized within contemporary experience. 

Can you expand on your influence of Iranian myths and how they are living components of cultural memory that continue to shape political imagination, such as collective resistance in the face of tyranny?

Iranian mythology, especially in the Shahnameh poem that we have, functions as more than literature. It carries part of the pattern of thinking about power, justice, and resistance. For example, as you mentioned, this story of hope and freedom is not just about the past, it’s recurring.

The mirrored structure, through its repetition, multiplicity, and capacity for confrontation, also carries the experience of fragmentation and collapse through the breaking of light itself. Within that condition, there is also the possibility of overturning what exists and moving beyond it. That idea continues to shape how people imagine political change. In my work, I’m interested in how these mythological ways of understanding events intersect with the present, and how they remain legible and deeply synchronized within contemporary experience. Myths become more than characters; they become symbols that reappear across history, through which people resist oppression and reclaim their lives, their countries, and their freedom from tyranny. So, when I use these references, I’m not just illustrating the mythology in my work. I’m activating this as a living system of meaning. That kind of continues to inform how people understand oppression and resistance today, especially in my country, Iran, where we faced a lot. To know that they can resist and ultimately overcome the darkness.

And as an Iranian, we believe that light will once again triumph over darkness in history again and again. And this is the kind of hope that we have in our Shahnameh literature and all those mythologies that we have.


Niloufar Fallahfar. Infinite Action II. Image by the artist.

That’s so important to have too. The stories and the myths that kind of give you hope in those times as well. It seems inventive how you were inspired by the Möbius strip.

As I mentioned earlier, I believe that history continuously repeats itself in different forms. In Infinite Action Number II, as well as in an earlier work titled Infinite Action, which I created in Iran, I explore this cyclical condition of history. That earlier work was also connected to a social and political subject. Here, I return once again to the form of the Möbius strip to express the idea that history moves in loops, where patterns continuously reappear across time. In Persian poetry, Hafez writes, “Be joyful, for the tyrant will never find the path home.” I incorporated this verse into Infinite Action Number II because, for many Iranians, it carries a sense of hope across generations. Throughout history, people continue to believe that oppressive structures can eventually be overcome.

What interests me about the Möbius strip is its ability to overturn the relationship between inside and outside. Within one continuous surface, a transformation occurs where interior and exterior collapse into one another, producing a third space and condition. Simultaneously, repetition, transformation, and coexistence take place. This logic strongly resonates with my understanding of history, memory, and the recurring return of myth across time. The meaning embedded in the Möbius form connects deeply with my interpretation of how myth reemerges throughout history. That is why I wanted to return to this structure once again and create a new work through it. Considering all of these ideas, I chose to place the work on a mirrored surface. The mirror not only multiplies the sense of duality, historical looping, and transformation, but also introduces the question of selfhood and confrontation with oneself through historical and mythological reflection. As viewers search for the painted imagery across the surface of the Möbius strip, they inevitably encounter their own reflection in the mirror beneath it. In this way, the present moment becomes connected to the histories and mythologies referenced within the painting itself, much like that poem.

Across the Möbius strip, viewers encounter fragmented scenes and shifting moments of life. Birds appear alongside human figures and layered imagery. A repeated female figure with flowing hair emerges across parts of the surface. Numerous lines pass through her hair, as though she is attempting to shield herself from bombardment. This work reflects experiences that many of us in Iran have lived through. More than three years ago, Mahsa Amini was killed by the government in Iran for allegedly not wearing the “proper” hijab. Following her death, protests erupted across the country. People came into the streets demanding freedom, and the government responded with violence. People were blinded, imprisoned, tortured, and executed.

I believe that when oppression reaches a certain point, when people have been suppressed for so long and experience imposed systems controlling their lives, resistance inevitably emerges. People rise to reclaim their freedom and their right to exist on their own terms. 3 years later, in January 2026, people once again returned to the streets, this time confronting the regime with even greater force and collective resistance. What I want to express through the Möbius structure is that cycles of tyranny also contain the possibility of collapse. Just as in Persian mythology, Fereydun ultimately defeats Zahhak and liberates Iran from tyranny, these historical and mythological patterns continue to resonate in the present. As an Iranian artist, I am not interested in reproducing clichés of suffering. I am far more interested in speaking about the courage and collective strength of my people.

Niloufar Fallahfar. At the Threshold. Image by the artist.

You mention being inspired by the tradition of Persian mirror work, where fragmented reflective surfaces multiply space and destabilize the image. Parts of the work become visible only through reflection, requiring the viewer to move to reconstruct the image. Can you explain more about this influence and how you connect this experience to memory itself?

Persian mirror work is very important to me, but not as a decorative sense to the audience.

What interests me is how it breaks, multiplies space, and makes everything double, and the audience can see themselves in that. In that situation, you never see a single or stable image. You see fragments, reflections, and shifting perspectives. And that experience is very close to how I think memory works.

I feel like that memory is never fully accessible as a complete image. It appears in pieces, and you have to move mentally and physically to reconstruct it. And using the mirror in my work creates a similar condition. Parts of the image are only visible through reflection, and the viewer has to move and adjust their position and piece things together to understand it.

The act of things becomes an active process when I bring the mirror into my work as a kind of situation. You become aware that what you are seeing is partial, and that meaning is something you construct through movement and attention. So, the audience can see themselves, see the fragments, and they balance everything, and in a different moment and time and space works here together.

Niloufar Fallahfar’s thesis exhibition as part of the MFA Exhibition at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Photo by Alex Nichols courtesy of the artist. 

Do you have any other artists or inspirations you’d like to discuss?

There are several influences in my work, but I think they are more related to ways of thinking about space and experience rather than direct references. Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād has been very important to me, especially in the way space moves in his miniature paintings and how the viewer experiences different moments and perspectives at the same time instead of from one fixed viewpoint. I’m also interested in artists who challenge stable perspectives and create situations where the audience becomes part of the work physically. At the same time, Persian architecture, poetry, and cultural memory deeply influence on my work. I think what interests me most is how historical forms can still remain alive within contemporary experience. I don’t want to just mention one artist, but there are several of them that shape how I think about the space and how I can create or contract a situation for people to enter, and it’s influence between contemporary practice and historical forms.

Do you have any other upcoming events or news you’d like to share?

I have a group exhibition in the Soil Gallery in Seattle in July. Afterward, in August, I will join another education program.

For my exhibition at the Broad Museum, I was working on different bodies of work developed over time during my years that I was at Michigan State University (MSU), including a sculptural painting and kinetic pieces. I’m really interested in continuing this research and expanding the scale of my work, and further exploring the relationship between movement, architecture, and collective memory.

You can find more of Niloufar Fallahfar’s work on her website and Instagram.

Leaky Boundaries: In Conversation with Isabella Covert

Isabella Covert. Surgeon _ Gestator detail, Nylon, latex, medical tubing, IV pole, IV bag, forceps, breathing simulator, 30 x 54 x 75 inches (variable), 2025.

By Adi Berardini

Painter and sculptor Isabella Covert approaches the body as a shifting site of biological, political, and material negotiation. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison (BFA, 2023), she is currently an MFA Candidate and Graduate Fellowship recipient at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she continues to expand on her practice inspired by feminist theory and posthuman inquiry. Living and working in Savannah, Covert produces paintings and sculptural forms that blur the boundaries between flesh and fabrication, seduction and abjection.

Covert’s work examines “the relationship of reproducing bodies within current biopolitical frameworks,” exploring how gendered power structures contain and instrumentalize corporeality. Through entangled, unstable anatomies rendered in materials such as latex and hair, Covert constructs surrogate forms that swell and resist permanence. Inspired by the language of feminist horror films, Covert is interested in the biosynthetic approaches that intersect with the body. In her work, disgust becomes alluring, containment gives way to leakage, and the body emerges as a boundary-less site of speculative liberation, challenging the logics of collective futurity.

Adi Berardini: As you describe, the forms in your work “abstract the body and its capabilities.” How did you first become interested in the body and the abject, and exploring this in your art?

Isabella Covert: My work is very interested in the bodily ecosystems that allow space to overtly welcome and celebrate bodily excess, change, and overflow. They’re allowed to change and mutate within frameworks that are constantly changing for them, for the bodies themselves, and the people that inhabit them.  I think that in shifting towards structures that facilitate potential, there is more room for that.

This initially began for me personally with my experience of living with a progressive chronic illness, which worsens with age. So the relationship between bodily atrophy and that kind of DNA replication causing internal decay was the starting point in my work. Then it evolved into this curated lab of experiments, combined with radical political theory. And having that experience with the unknowingness of the body led to the relationship to the biopolitical structures that we exist in.

And you can see it’s very scientific, even the way you present the sculptures, too.

Yeah, they exist within a medical alternate landscape in a way. My work thinks about the fundamental impacts that a shift in perspective can have and how we can restructure institutions of medical care, but also collective mindsets to reimagine a utopian experience that regards reproduction and bodily capacities as something to facilitate rather than prevent.

Isabella Covert. Specimen Bags (preservation study) detail, Nylon, latex, specimen bags, metal hook, 52 x 7.5 inches, 2026.

Especially as women, we face issues such as medical misogyny and the dismissal of physical pain and pressures for our bodies to look a certain way with modern beauty standards. Are these veins of thought in the back of your mind as you create your work?

I think that the systems that you’re referring to are interconnected systems of thought relating to what I am discussing. I think that they’re all perpetuated by the same group of people, a small group of people with a mutual purpose and a broad spanning idea of perpetuating shame in that way.

So that’s where I’m interested in the abject and the self and the other. Within these works, I perform surgery in their innards, but also with the cosmetics of them. And so, in relation to beauty standards and cosmetic surgery, that kind of fits within the broader discussion of altering perspectives of care and how societal collective mindsets can alter and shift. Because with my work, I consider them never fully finished; they’re always aging or becoming something else. They’re fusing with one another, slicing open, stitching back together— birthing, doing, undoing, redoing. These processes reflect how we could consider bodies as a concept and the relationship to the self.

Isabella Covert. Simulated Incubation (embryonic fluid), Nylon, latex, glass specimen jar, metal connector, plastic cap, breathing simulator, 21 x 35 x 10 inches (variable), 2026.

You mention your interest in feminist reconfigurations of the body and posthuman relationships to power and reproduction. How do you materially address these concerns?

When it comes to the stitching and surgical aspect, I act as a surgeon in that way — both with synthesizing the research element of it, but also with the physicality of the materials and letting the materials evolve and age as they do. It is a process that just kind of naturally evolves in that way. I have bits and pieces and experiments (sometimes failed experiments) set to the side that I suture together. They become an amalgamation of flesh. It’s taking piles of things and then seeing what can fuse together.

I study a lot of feminist critiques that characterize the body as beyond the constructed margins that we have. I am interested in the dismantling of current patriarchal colonial pillars of power dynamics. At the core, there is the life-bearing expectation on reproducing bodies, and that’s also rooted in the state’s fear of bodily capabilities.

In post-human relationships and developments, technological developments and social relationship developments, there is the potential ability to utilize and distribute them without boundaries or biases in this utopian sense. That would entail a shift in mindset, especially about the dualism between the body and the machine. We’re at a point where there’s capitalistic misuse that we see today in those terms. It requires new modes of thinking to ensure that they don’t maintain those narratives and those eugenic perpetuations. And so much of what I research is of feminist reconfigurations, basically stating that the old tools we have used in the past won’t be useful in this sense, and they’re rendered obsolete in this era. It ties back to the saying, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” by Audre Lorde.

[I am interested in] thinking of a more pervasive system that reimagines current nuclear family orientations and dissolves those reproductive expectations that are tied to that. And also, when it comes to the familial structures, understanding kinship is not naturalistic. And instead, thinking about all gestational labor as already assisted and not “natural.”

I am thinking about potential post-human technologies and synthetic options, thinking about how we can pave a path for mutual aid structures, and just in general, less constrained family structures. In relationship to the general biopolitical structures that we exist in, the current notion is producing and reproducing as a self-replication method. And so, in this rethinking and reimagining, it shifts from self-replication to general regeneration that comes with mutual support and communal support.

In that radical rebuilding, we can understand care as wanting autonomy for others. It is a shift in mindset that I’m kind of picking at and prodding at with my work.

Isabella Covert. Incubation Spawn (ontology of abundance), Nylon, latex, hair, resin teeth, incubator, 18.25 x 33.86 x 14.13 inches, 2026.

You reference abjection, disgust, and humour as intertwined affects. How do you intentionally balance allure and repulsion in your work?

I think that in general, there is an othered nature of both reproducing bodies, but also any body that exfoliates and changes beyond constructed margins.

I think that in the current collective lens, those bodies are viewed as in “excess.” But when you consider it, aren’t we all really in excess all the time? We’re all, in a way, hosts to a myriad of bacteria, viruses, and things in our innards that we aren’t fully aware of, even when it comes to the scientific aspects. I find irony in that. And I think that’s where the humour lies. Like the leaky boundary between the thinness of skin and the insides. I kind of take that to a more nonsensical extreme version of bodily emancipation in that way. So, thinking about the self and the other and the morbid curiosity we all have, but in a colorful and playful way, that’s where the humour lies for me.

Isabella Covert. Navel Extension, Nylon, latex, hair, 12 x 9 x 64 inches, 2026.

Do you have any influences or other inspirations for your art practice?  

The area of inspiration that’s slightly more unconventional is the conversations within my work have a lot of overlap with feminist filmmaking.

Primarily French feminist films from the early to mid 2000s under the subgenre of New French Extremity. Those are something that I revisit in my research, because they see autonomy as exaggerated in a similar sense. Obviously, it’s gorier and darker in relation to what I do, but I have inspirations in prosthetic work and that hyperbolic nature of it.

The way that they depict autonomy is more monstrous and viewed through different outlets and different storytelling devices, such as cannibalism and other abject broader themes. These types of films altered the way that I view embodiment. And every time I watch them, I really do garner something new about my work and the way that their internal spaces are exhibited outward, how they tell emancipation through monstrosity in their art form, and the sequence of absurdity in their work. That’s something that I really gain inspiration from.

A lot of the discussions are symbiotic to what I’m discussing in my work. Many of the French feminist filmmakers that I study, whether they were making films in the 2000s or if they are currently making films inspired by it, are taking more neoconservative undertones from their male predecessors and, again, altering the perspective of how we engage with the world in a similar manner to what I am trying to unpack in my work.

Sometimes things that you first find unsettling can unpack a lot of important conversations. Like when it kind of holds you there and makes you process it or it lingers with you. That’s the world that I’m interested in.

Check out Isabella Covert’s MFA thesis show from April 14th to April 20th at Gallery 2424 in Savannah, GA.

Femme Demo: In Conversation with Sam Grabowska

Sam Grabowska. Surrogate, 2022, Conduit, human hair, plaster bandage, resin, exhaust pipe, polymeric sand, reclaimed lumber, moving air, warm light, 11’ x 13’ x 11’8.”

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.

Sam Grabowska is a multidisciplinary artist born in San Diego, California in 1982. They currently reside and work in Denver, Colorado. Their installations, which focus mostly on sculpture, grapple with the body’s transformation and endurance in our modern society. The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Denver Art Museum, the SOO Visual Art Centre, and Rejmyre Art Lab are just a few of the venues in the United States and Sweden where Grabowska has displayed their artwork. Their work has been reviewed by publications such as Southwest Contemporary and The Denver Post. They have a BFA in film, a BA in environmental design, an MH in interdisciplinary humanities, and a PhD in architecture with a cognate in cultural anthropology. Grabowska founded Manifolding Labs, a firm that specializes in trauma-responsive spatial design research and consultation.

JB: Hi Sam, Thanks for talking with me today. How are you doing? Did you have a residency recently?

SG: Yes, I did. I had a six-week residency here in Denver with four other artists. I had a giant studio space, which was very exciting. I asked my friends or colleagues to be models in the space. There were five people who came, and they went into a position that felt protective to them. Then I would heat PVC pipe and bend it around them in three-dimensional form to trace their body position, kind of like 4D drawing. It was really fun, and I couldn’t have done it without that space. (see video demo).

JB: Your work seems to be collaborative and participatory in different ways, such as bending the pipes to match the human forms. Other examples include when you collected hair from audience members in Resztka or solicited responses for AI-generated environments in Intake. What is your process for working with participants? How did you start working with participants?

SG: That’s interesting because when I first think about my work, I always consider it as this very introverted process of me holed up in my own studio, having such an intimate relationship with materials and forms. There are a couple of things, though, that led to bringing in other people.

 Going back to my childhood, I was raised by two parents who are incredibly particular people and have radically different needs and desires. I learned from a young age that there’s no such thing as a universal human experience. Even when I was studying architecture, this idea of designing for everyone, this one-size-fits-all thing always seemed completely absurd to me.

In my sculptural process, I’m always thinking about making sculptures that are somewhat interpretative or representational of bodies, even though those bodies are very abstracted. And there’s an intrinsic understanding that my personal needs and positionality, literally and figuratively in this world, are specific to me. After doing one or two sculptures where I am just going from my own needs and instincts, I inevitably have a moment of asking, “but what about other bodies?”

And also getting bored with my own habits, instincts, and ways. For example, my immediate way of getting into a body posture that feels safe to me is the fetal position. Even though it’s a defensive posture, I feel safe in it. But there’s only so much you can do with tracing a fetal position. I admit that I thought, well, if I have another model come in and I ask them to take a position they find protective, they’re also going to take a fetal position. It ended up, of course, not being the case. I think I’ve worked with about 15 different people so far with tracing body postures and never once has anyone else ever gone into the fetal position. I totally thought it was a universal human thing. I’ve even gotten people who stand upright and almost confrontational.

Sam Grabowska.Sanctum for 1985, 2023, Conduit, human hair, moving air, wall, 58″ x 44″ x19.”

JB: Fight or flight.

SG:  Exactly. Fight, flight, freeze, and please. Everyone goes through these different postures, and I trace their bodies with the pipe live in the space. It’s around two hours per single 10-foot pipe to trace, to heat and form each individual segment of the pipe around a person. It’s a really time-consuming process. 

And then we sit for two hours, and inevitably something about being in that posture brings up people’s stories of either their childhood experiences or difficult events happening in their life currently.  It becomes this thematically shared experience, which I never set out to do.  I never set out for these things to be collaborative pieces. I always come from it from a place of function.

Then, there’s Resztka, which is a Polish word for little remains, little leftovers basically. Resztka is a performance in which visitors were beckoned to donate snippets of their hair, which I sewed onto my shroud.  An AI-assisted generated video played back memories of my grandparents’ experiences in Poland before, during, and after WWII.

Many cultures have rituals around hair cutting, saving, weaving, or burning. To me, there’s something intimate about our hair.  Of course, on an almost forensic level, it carries our DNA. I’ve had resistance from certain participants who are worried about leaving a hair that has DNA in it, which I think is a very reasonable concern. They’re wondering, “What are you going to do with my hair? Is it going to be planted [at a crime scene] somewhere?” With those people’s experiences in their lives of being policed, there is an understandable concern about bodily autonomy and control. That’s really intimate and vulnerable.  I always respect that, and I never require anyone to do anything. With my next piece involving hair, I’m going to have them put their hair in a mini-incendiary device instead of donating it.

Sam Grabowska.Resztka, 2022, Cold War Era Polish Army coat, mesh fabric, conduit, shepherd’s bell, shepherd’s shears, sinew, human hair, AI-assisted video, grandparents’ stories, conduit, paint, visitors, Hejnał trumpet call, dimensions variable.

JB: Your practice involves working with people, but also institutions. How does your artwork relate to the space it inhabits?

SG: Because of my background in architecture and my own sensory hypersensitivity, I’ve always been interested in the built environment, and its failure to make me personally feel okay, especially American architecture. The built environment in the States has been at the forefront of my experience, especially made by developers who privilege economics over lived experience.

In my sculptural process, I don’t ever start with a very clear idea or concept. But I’ve always felt that architecture is an institutional failure. How does the body exist and survive in this environment? I also often think of humans as apes in self-captivity. We are self-captive in our built environment. That’s how it feels to me; it doesn’t feel like these nests or hives or the way that other animals create their shelter. It seems like it’s so controlled and hierarchical, not that other animals don’t have that per se in certain places, but it seems like it’s in our human animal hood.

Then, of course, things like walls, floors, ceilings, thresholds, doorways, and windows, those are all interesting architectural elements for me to explore. I think about how a body, a life, and a lived experience relate to those architectural elements.

In my interactive digital installation called Intake, there are different visual and audio components layered on top of another. It is centered on the domains of psychological care and psychogeography. Visitors fill out an ‘intake form’ on a tablet and this input generates a custom mixed-reality environment that projects onto a screen. Each visitor, when they input different combinations of these five elements, will have a unique output so that they can choose their own place to rest or feel safe or play in. You have five elements, but then you have different ways that they can combine, so you have far more than five choices because they multiply into many combinations. The visitors go behind the screen, casting their own shadow. A camera records this shadow play and rebroadcasts it on a monitor at the front of the gallery as an archive of all the people and their custom environments that came before.

Sam Grabowska.Intake, 2023, AI-assisted video, 3D models, computer program, text, soundscapes, visitors’ shadows, video camera, motion sensor, screen, tablet, approx. 12’ x 15’ x 15.’

JB: I also want to get back to the sculptures that go into these environments. You work a lot with these skin-like surfaces. I was thinking about how skin is a memory holder. It contains history, like scars. It can remind us of past traumas that happen to the body, or wrinkles and age. Skin can remind you of your whole life that’s gone by. What does skin mean to you? 


 SG: First of all, I think both hair and skin tend to show age and trauma. I’ve always been interested in that since I was eight years old, every time there’s a huge trauma in my life, I get another gray hair. I’ve always had gray hair throughout my entire life. Hair is a symbol of the life being sucked out of you, the color being taken out of the core of the hair, and turning silver or grey.

I think you’re absolutely right about skin. Many difficult experiences in my personal life have involved types of emotional abuse. And there’s also something about trying to seek proof of the damage that was done. When I have physical injuries, there are scars. There is a way to show other people that an event happened. Whereas with things that are more psychological in nature, I think for many of us it’s difficult,  especially if it happened at a young age and we were denied our reality. There weren’t any witnesses other than the perpetrators to what was happening to us. In my work, there is this need to get at that proof, or trace of existence.

Sam Grabowska. Hide of an Endangered Species, 2024, Plastic, sinew, moving air, 30” x 27.”

JB: How did you end up depicting skin in your work?

SG: I came to use this skin-like material in a roundabout way. I was a visiting teacher for a middle school/high school. I was working for a semester with them on a group art class project, and a lot of it was asking what they wanted to do, trying to combine their different material interests, experiences, and desires. As a group, we came up with this project that they wanted to make: a large dress that also dealt with the American dream. I was thinking about material for this dress and about how a lot of these students are underserved and children of immigrants, like I was.  What is the readily available material that I can show them? The bag hutch seems to be pretty universal for many people, but especially people who grew up in lower-income families and children of immigrants, where everything is saved and reused a million times. I thought, I bet it’s the same for this generation. Sure enough, they had tons of grocery bags. Our great friend YouTube showed me these craft projects where people are making fabric or weaving using plastic bags. You use these irons to heat plastic bags, and they can make fabric out of it. It was a lovely, interesting project. It ended up being a pretty large installation. During the making of the piece, there was a table full of young men who had a very binary relationship to their gender, and they were resistant to using an iron.

JB: Oh, it was too feminine to them?

SG: It’s a domestic feminine task to them. I was trying to explain to them that it’s literally a power tool. It is plugged in. It works at a higher power than you could ever do with your hands. I told them to play with it like a power tool. In trying to demonstrate to one another that they didn’t have an ounce of whatever they were viewing as feminine care or grace, they were slamming the iron down full heat onto the plastic bag and melting it. It took a couple of days for them to get comfortable with one another and with the process to start to not burn the hell out of it, which is also an interesting experiment in and of itself. I wasn’t making the experiment. They were cultivating the experiment with themselves.  In this burning, I was looking at it and I thought, oh this looks crazy. It looks like skin tears. It reminded me a lot of the culture of alien cosplay, or skin gashes from comic books, where there’s this really over-the-top mutated skin. I was thinking, “Is this a material I could control and make otherworldly? And have the material turn into something that would be uncanny?”

After that whole semester was done, I started playing with plastic bags in my studio with a lot of different heat-treating processes and trying to figure out what I needed to control and how to create this skin-like texture. Then it was about figuring out what form it wanted to be. So, it was a material-first discovery. It was very much seeing the material, being curious about it, working with it, and being attracted to it.  It was this highly synthetic thing that is toxic to skin and bodies. I need to wear full PPE during the process of heating the plastic. It is so foreign to our bodies and yet I can cut it into approximating an object that has a visceral connotation of being bodily.

JB: There are all these different pushes and pulls that you’re discussing, these contradictions that really interest me. I think there’s a lot of attraction and repulsion happening in your work.

SG: Yes, there’s attraction and repulsion. There’s a lot of what I call yuck and yum. I often do that. 

If you’re out camping without showering for awhile and you rub your finger behind your ear, there’s such an intense smell. It’s disgusting, and yet it’s so you that there’s a narcissistic attraction to the smell. You’re totally enamored at the same time because it’s so intimately you. Or when I brush my cat, she loves smelling her own fur and will try to eat it. I feel like there’s something weird, cannibalistic, or obsessive about that.

It’s a foreign substance. It’s the bacteria that’s making it smell a particular way. It’s very much out of the environment of your own body that produces it. It becomes intimate because it is particular to the way that your own psychology and body have processed that thing. It becomes distinctly yours even though you didn’t necessarily choose it. It has this seductive quality because it has been processed through you and is so related to you, however foreign at the same time. There’s something magical about that.  I’m not a parent, but when I think of the process of carrying a child and birthing a child, the child is very much of yourself, while also a separate thing. There is an obsessive adoration of that thing, of that person, of that entity. It is absolutely 100% of you and 100% foreign at the same time.


 JB: Another contradiction that your sculptures make me think about is resilience versus fragility. Your sculptures are fragile and torn, yet they also have survived so much. Those qualities can be both physical and psychic, trauma can take place on both the mind and the body. It reminds me of how trauma can build resilience but also be debilitating. Is that something you are also considering?

SG:  Absolutely. Recently, one of my dear friends, Katie, and I were discussing what if I had been born in Poland?

My parents are both from Poland. They came over here, and then the borders closed behind them because of Communist occupation. They couldn’t go back, so then I was born here [in the US], not in Poland. My dad had to find a job and had to get a visa under complete duress and political emergency. By the time the borders opened, my parents had already had to start this new life here in the States. I often think about what it would have been like had I been born in Poland. The year that I was born, it was martial law. There were curfews in place for everyone in the whole country. The city, Wroclaw, where my parents were from, was completely under lockdown, patrolled by an army in the streets. My grandparents and my parents had to adapt to it. You were saying, there’s resistance, and then there’s a lot of adaptation. It’s survival.  And also, the maladaptation. It’s a survival mechanism at first, and then it starts harming you.

Katie and I were having a dream session imagining who we would have been if our families and childhoods were different. Or do the obstacles make the person?  There are myths that who we are is innate and will come out regardless of whether or not we have adversity or not. It’s a chicken or egg question that a lot of people consider.

Sam Grabowska. Remote Sensing, 2024, Conduit, insulation, plastic, concrete, dimensions variable [as pictured, approximately 10’ x 13’ x 8.’


 JB: I really feel those influences in your sculptures. Would you agree?

SG: Yes, I very much hope so. I think it is something that I’m always thinking about.

But also, when I’m making work, I’m always worried about the work being too literal or being taken as one thing only. When I’m in the process of making something, if it feels too grotesque or too violent, then I’m going to immediately ease back off or add another component to balance or contradict. If an object is becoming extremely grotesque, then I’ll add an aspect that is alluring, beautiful, intimate, or shiny in it.

I also wonder about the term “trauma” in talking about my own work, too, how much it is used and how people use it. It is an element of my work, but I’m also worried about it being a primary vocabulary word.

JB: It’s a really loaded word. Whenever someone hears the word trauma, people tend to just directly talk about that, and they won’t discuss other things happening in the work.

SG: Yes. Thank you. It can be a useful shorthand, but many people use the word in very different ways. I think, in this current zeitgeist in particular, trauma seems to be a weird, loaded term. I still am using the word trauma. I’m trying to think of all negative experiences or abuse. I haven’t found a poetic way to necessarily recapture the gist of what I mean when I think of trauma in the body or emotional trauma.

JB: Speaking of unclassifiability, I noticed this dynamic between figuration and abstraction in your work. The materials remind me of the body, but the forms are very open-ended. It reminds me of the unclassifiability of the body in that they don’t have these specific identity markers. It reminds me of body fluidity. Is that something that you’re also thinking about?

SG: Yes. That goes back to fear of being too literal or too figurative. I do like the more subconscious projection of a body into the sculpture, where you might not see the body that I trace. I think there’s something subconscious and proprioceptive that happens in our bodies where you immediately intuit that you could fit inside it or understand it’s to your scale. In terms of the body and abstraction, I have an allergy to having it look like one body because my body cannot stand in for anyone’s body, and no one else’s body can stand in for mine.

 I used to work a lot in photography for a decade or so.  When I would take photographs of installations and they had humans in it, they always had to be nude to me, because as soon as there was clothing on it, there was time and subculture. There were so many things layered into clothing. I wanted the nude form as something that was human and out of culture.

At the same time, with these sculptures, I was also thinking about race, identity, and culture, and that’s important in my work. And yet it takes place behind the curtain. It’s behind 20 curtains. Because I don’t discuss it in my artist statement.  I don’t talk about it on title cards, and things like that, either. However, all of the models I choose come from historically marginalized identities or an intersection of many of those identities. When I’m tracing their body postures, the body postures they choose seem particular to the person and their gendered, racial, class, and cultural experiences. Nevertheless, I understand it’s so abstracted that I would never expect a viewer to see or feel their specific identities, nor do I necessarily want to tell the viewer to inform it. It’s odd. I don’t quite know where that starts to layer in yet, but I feel like the unique particularity and the identity of the people who I trace is very important.

JB: The abstractness of the sculptures relates to the fluidness of identity. Identity can’t be controlled or pinned down.  It really supports that.

SG: I love that. There is something weird about anonymity, where it can go either way.

It can be a universal erasure, making everything to the experience of the European man, everything is at that scale and experience. There’s a great deal of violence that comes out of the idea that the universal human is the six-foot-tall, white, Vitruvian man.

On the other hand, anonymity can be so incredibly freeing because so many of us want to be ourselves- our weird layers of infinite variables – and not be perceived or judged. We’re this weird accumulation of millions of atoms and an odd configuration due to our particular course in life.

There’s something again annoyingly twofold with anonymity. I do hope that there is something about the extreme abstraction of my work that hopefully opens the door to anyone. I hope that the intense intimacy in the process of making and forming it will subconsciously connect to that extreme reality of experiences.

JB: What would you like to do for your demo?

JB: Thank you for speaking with me today!

Check out more of Sam’s work on their website and Instagram. See their work currently on view in the group exhibition “The Search For Radiance in the Grotesque” at Zane Bennett Contemporary in Santa Fe, up until April 4th.

A Lesbian’s Heart Is an Ocean of Secrets: A Conversation with Kitty Rauth

Power (Buried Series III), 2024. Original lighting fixture found in Grey Towers Castle basement, wiring, ground glass.
15”x15”x36”

By Matt Morris

I’m an angel…seeking my people that have never been made, going down face foremost, drinking the waters, up to my heart, the terrible waters! What do you know of me?
–Djuna Barnes, Nightwood.

Sail away, sail away, sail away.
–Enya, Orinoco Flow.


Half a decade ago, Kitty Rauth (they/she) set sail from the comforts of their established art home in Philadelphia and washed ashore in Chicago, where they’ve unleashed a tempest of radical generosity, spirited discourse, and sensitively executed material inquiries into excess and loss at scales simultaneously personal and political. Upon completion of their MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they chartered their next adventure as an educator at the same institution, along with a heady mix of ambitious and frequent exhibitions of their own work, community organizing with the venerable alternative space Comfort Station in Chicago’s Logan Square, and facilitating various food and meal based happenings with their ongoing project Round Table as well as collaborations with foodie scenesters like TXA TXA CLUB.

Kitty is driven by an upbeat ‘sink or swim’ mentality across their endeavors, demonstrating an inclusive, supportive ethos that ‘rising tides lift all boats.’ They dream up futures with greater livability and pleasure for more than the status quo while integrating a circumspect problematizing of multiple pasts and histories. Last summer, when we exhibited together at LVL3 with Jacquelin Zazueta, I saw a shift in the core vocabulary of their approaches to objecthood, and the year and a half that followed has witnessed a flood of hybrid citations, technical curiosities, and well-researched expansions on discourses that their practice has centered.

Rauth’s most recent outing is Pleasure Cruise, a two-person exhibition with Ále Campos that was on display in September and October 2025 at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Centre. Together, they composed artifacts of queer life glistening from shadows and new shores. Campos offered annotations at the intersections of the sexual and social with installations of looped videos of their drag persona, Celeste, played variously from out of black plastic-curtained reconstruction of a back room gloryhole and yellow-washed urinal. Rauth complimented these vestiges with sensitive records of overwhelm, treading the waters of ecology and embodiment mapped across histories, fictions, and fantasy. Both artists have achieved lusty, heroic feats with the romantic inflections of devilish details and nuanced subtleties in a cultural moment when queerness is being abbreviated, flattened, and distorted at numerous political thresholds. I was honored to carry on some continuous conversations with Rauth about the work they prepared for Pleasure Cruise, as well as the deeper shifts in flow that have been giving shape to their studio research. What follows is compiled and condensed from those chats.


Kitty Rauth. Put Away, 2024. dimensions variable. found table, hinges, linen tablecloth, table setting for 5, ribbon.
photo credit: Lily Szymanski.

Matt Morris: While your practice spreads across myriad media and formats, ‘the object’ and its constitutive material states are often at the crux of your investigations: how are those approaches to matter, sculpture, thing-in-space useful for your articulation and analysis of desire and its capacities?

I think of your work often holding a residue of prior shifts in states of matter—melted wax candles, caramelized sugars, cast gelatins, shattered dinnerware, to note a few examples. What are the curiosities and conditions that preoccupy you at these thresholds of transformation?

In the case of your most recent works, several converging inquiries arrive at fluidity as crucial: do you interact with fluidity as a form? A mode?


Kitty Rauth: I want to tackle these first two questions together, because the concerns here are quite interwoven.

We live in the world, in uncertain times and fluctuating space, amongst real objects with real significance and human attachments. I’m concerned with objects’ and materials’ histories, and how they perform in the world. Performance in their usage, lack of usage, and inevitable state shift. I want my work to be a reminder that all things shift and change. Functionality and intention often fails, but through failure, we find change. It feels to me like a guidance, an adage, a prayer, much like Octavia Butler’s notion in Parable of the Sower that “God is change.”

All of this had recently led me to toy with the concept of fluidity. The power of undulating and/or crashing waves of a body of water, the endless overflow of a fountain, the tiniest tides in a glass of water. Truthfully, though, this water feels quite heavy. It both holds me afloat and weighs me down as I’m facing all that it holds.

Kitty Rauth. Fan Fiction, 2025. vinyl wall text. 60” x 60.”
Photo credit: Jonas Mueller-Alheim

MM: As I contemplated these liminal states, how they linger in your work, and especially interacting with your white-on-white wall vinyl piece Fan Fiction, I associated strongly to a passage of Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body that, if you and Femme Art Review will humor me, I’ll quote in snippets here, to see how you feel about it alongside your work:

No sunset m/y living one will illuminate the board where the name of your ship will be inscribed. I can tear from m/y forehead the violet bandeau that signals m/y liberty so dearly bought as for you all m/y dearest ones I ask you if you love m/e to let mm/e die one night far away in the sea…The flow becomes continuous, the foamy juice whitened in its eddies rises to the shoulders, the head emerging hair spread out, cheeks pale. Now the fingers tap continuously on the membranes. An agitation disturbs the flow of transparent juice fluid water. Abundant salty tears are shed into the flow, I drown, the water re-enters by m/y eye juice tears, in it I see blacks golds lights crystals scales…the thrust of our limbs floating on a great body of bluish lactic liquid, the water rises iodized translucent, it reaches the topmost branches of the last visible trees, it beats warmly against the legs of the swimming women, submerged up to m/y facial orifices I see that the liquid mass continues to increase with suspended mucus pearly elastic filaments, the golds the reds now have the same colour and consistence as the clouds, the rising wave debouches in the sky, farewell black continent of misery and suffering farewell ancient cities we are embarking for the shining radiant isles….
–Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body.

KR: Thank you, Matt. This feels like such a gift. This passage feels like it cracks open something that has been brewing in me with this show. The work meditates on the complications of pleasure, of what it provides, of what it distracts from, and of how it can implode on us. My personal relationship to pleasure lives in a very lesbian space— intimate, romantic, demanding, nuanced, occasionally all-encompassing, occasionally skittish. In what feels like a painful opposition to queer celebrations of pleasure, I am sometimes terrified of the way it can and has drowned us, and Wittig seems to have captured this complication so beautifully and poetically. I will be sitting on this for some time.

MM: There are a number of related critical facets in this fluidity that I want to tick off: annotate however you might associate and expand on them.

Wet.

KR: In the same breath, sensuous and miserable. Dripping, cold.


MM: Melt.

KR: Slow decay, disappearance, but also how you feel in love.

MM: Drown.

KR: Overwhelmed, all-encompassing, endless.


“I’ll never let go, Jack.”

MM: Overflow.

KR: Abundance, excess, indulgence.

Also,

A scene from Saltburn (2023) in which the Catton family is seated for a formal lunch in the wake of their son Felix’s unexpected death the night before. The curtains are drawn, bathing the dining room in a crimson light, and you watch as Felix’s sister Venetia despondently pours herself a glass of red wine, zoning out while the wine glass overflows onto the white tablecloth.

                        MM: Saltburn and Emerald Fennell’s films generally are interesting corollaries here, because they underscore the widening gap between the ways mainstream consciousness perceives sex as unmanageably perverse, bodily realities like menstruation as savage and taboo, and expressions of grief like the scene you’re mentioning as not only confounding but unmentionable, ineffable even. We enjoy the privileges of a fairly robust queer community in Chicago as a context for our goings on, but I wonder—given the cultural climate of our times—what it feels like to show work like you and Ále have done this fall? How do you perceive being perceived while demonstrating desire, queering pop culture, experimenting with legibility and visibilities as you have?

KR: Desire and our perception of sex, and how we use, interpret, or weaponize pop culture, have always been temperature checks for the political and cultural climate. You are right, we are very lucky to live and work in a community where the sexuality and queerness of the work in this show, to my knowledge, hasn’t sounded any alarm bells (not to say it wouldn’t in other iterations or with larger audiences or farther reaches, as we’ve seen in the recent censorship of Sally Mann’s work).

In this realm, my work allows some flexibility in the perceiving—yes, it’s work that engages pleasure, queer interpretations of beloved pop culture, nods to climate change, etc., but as you mention, I am playing with legibility in a way that demands attention. And I have found throughout the run of this show that, honestly, not that many people are paying attention! Those who are “in” see the work deeply and share their own experiences, anecdotes, and concerns. Those who aren’t push me back towards the former group, so that we can weather it all together.

MM: For as long as I’ve known you and your work, I’ve consistently felt an intense reckoning with loss, mortality, and death as coextensive to particularly queer modes of pleasure, care, and embodiment as you describe them, in material and in form. Can you narrate how you understand those mordant dimensions, how and why they came into your approaches to making?


KR: The first time death entered my making was through its innate connection to fatness and disability. Going into grad school, I was exploring the roots of fatphobia and found myself deeply involved in Terror Management Theory, the idea that we are always, consciously or subconsciously, trying to escape death through rules, structure, and legacy. But I grew up in a household where death was an accepted part of our story, and with a grandmother who was a death doula. For my whole adult life, I’ve been in community with legions of queer people whose shared history is so entangled with death that we have had to develop a very different and sometimes explosive relationship to pleasure and existence. The promise of death makes us choose differently, and I think my work is often living in the space of that promise.

Kitty Rauth. Belly of the Beast, a World to Unearth, 2024. Manufactured onlay, spray paint, latex paint
24”x36.”

MM: Your newest work may be the most understated I’ve seen you produce (compared to more baroque presentations in Chicago and Philadelphia) while also referring to really intense modes of affect. Were you aware of the development of this relative economy of gesture as a means of expressing some of the biggest feelings in the work to date?


KR: I have used these big flourishing motifs in my past work to point toward excess, but also because I really love those over-the-top architectural gestures that hold history and tell the complicated stories of wealth, class, abundance, et al.

Over the last year or two, I have felt a schism in myself. I don’t necessarily feel like I need “all that”- I have significantly pared down my life, my style, my social circle, and have in turn had the “Who even am I anymore?” existential bug out. But in all of these spaces, including my studio practice, it has allowed me to get to the root of the matter and focus on the one or two gestures that feel reflective of some internal reckonings. To be clear though, none of it was ever a conscious choice, but rather I think a reflection of what I’ve been developing in my 30s.

Kitty Rauth. As the water rises, 2025. Table, linen damask tablecloth, linen napkin, handblown champagne flute, fountain pump, champagne
38” x 16” x 16.” Photo credit: Jonas Mueller-Alheim

MM: With glassware of various kinds, both holding and demonstrating breach/fragmentation, containment and interiority, but also escape and leakage are operative in these works. The fountain component of As the water rises in particular calls attention to both the holding as well as the breach and overflow. Can you speak about vessels and holding, what is inside/contained?

KR: The vessels in this body of work are both drinking glasses, meant to hold liquid for consumption. As the water rises contains a champagne glass on a small, dressed table. The glass continuously overflows, pointing towards indulgence or decadence; an endless over-pouring, it is uncontrolled and unceasing. As if almost through magic or a ghostly force, it is endlessly filled. Through quieter means, the water glass in Unsinkable commands space simply through its contents. Filled with glacier water, there is ownership and a cavalier one at that. It beckons a curious, forbidden sip.

Kitty Rauth. WSL1yd. 4x scale historical recreation of White Star Line flag in linen, canvas, rope, pulley, cleat
128” x 53”, dimensions vary &
Kitty Rauth. Maiden Voyage, 2025
single-channel video 2min 30 sec loop. Cinematography and editing by Ruby Que
Photo credit: Jonas Mueller-Alheim.

MM: In the video Maiden Voyage, 2025, you ‘christen’ your own body by breaking bottles against it as is conventional for maiden voyages of sea vessels—your form becomes ship, form, and an additional vessel within this body of work, but one suggestively disoriented from biological determinisms and carrying offspring, instead embarking toward what? Doom and shipwreck? Cruising? Longing?


KR: There is an amount of not knowing involved in the nautical tradition of breaking a champagne bottle on the hull of a ship on its maiden voyage. Not knowing what’s to come, not knowing how it will go. If a ship is a body, a vessel, it holds memory and that memory takes time to accrue and embed itself. The captain may have expectations, but the vessel can’t yet understand.

For me, the gesture of breaking bottle after bottle holds a simultaneous hope and hopelessness. A prayer, almost, that things will be alright, as torturous as it feels. There is no roadmap for where we’re supposed to go from here, for how to reorient ourselves to whatever new horror is next. We’re just sailing forth towards the unknown.

                        MM: A tenet of queer life, if not existence generally, is doubt, right?

Transgressive, suppressed sexualities call attention to the total lack of a map or manual for navigating becoming ourselves. You’ve spent years noticing shifts in material states and reflecting on those in your work; it sounds like you’re approaching life transitions and change in similar ways.

Kitty Rauth. Untitled (Wilted Series #4), 2023
Manipulated found glass, houseflies
12” x 6” x 5.”

KR: It’s true. I seem to be constantly thinking about queer mapping, navigation, and orientation, and a huge looming cruise ship felt like an apt object for projection.

MM: For WSL1yd you recreated one of the flags flown above the ocean liner RMS Titanic on its first and only (incomplete) voyage. In the ways I also cite from available histories in my work, I’m very influenced by the radical interventions being made by folks like the political scientist and historical interpreter Cheyney McKnight, who revisit recorded histories and artifact as a starting place for counter-narratives that contest monolithic (and patriarchal, white supremacist, heterosexist) power structures around how we orient to past and future. In your own interpretations of the flag piece, how did fantasy and fabulation, alterity and re-interpretation come into play?


KR: This piece started as a joke with myself to create a huge red flag, a colloquial kind of warning flown on the ship itself. The White Star Line’s logo, this red flag with a white star flowing in the wind, was imprinted all over the ship, and I dug into the Titanic Museum’s archives to look for real-life representations of it. I found archival photos of an intact version made in the 1940s, which I imagine would have also flown on the Titanic. I was shocked at the size, as the original flag was only 1 yard long, a fact written onto the strip of canvas attaching it to rope. A 3’ flag for an 883’ ship was just ridiculously small to me, and the owning company’s flag display seems to me like the swinging dick of the ship, no?

While we’re on the subject of counter-narratives, though, I found this incredible piece of Black American oral folk tradition that tells the story of the sole Black man aboard the Titanic, Shine. Although Jim Crow laws barred any Black staff, crew, or passengers from boarding the Titanic, the story of Shine documents a Black crew member trying to warn the captain of the sinking ship. After being ignored, Shine escapes the sinking ship and heroically swims to land to enjoy a Seagram’s Seven at the bar while his white counterparts drown. Langston Hughes reinterpreted this into a written poem called “Shine and the Titanic”, and I was really excited to read how the ripples of this historical event have been held onto over time through storytelling amongst Black communities.

MM: The way/s you’ve used WSL1yd as a kind of architectural partition and curtain feels both very queer coded—following on curtain-like interventions by Liz Collins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Millie Wilson, Allyson Mitchell, Macon Reed, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Tom Burr, to name just a few—and also dis/orienting in the shifts in scale of the object and from the context of a ship to a gallery interior. Curtains, folds, flaps, partitions, and thresholds have some overt erotic legibilities: what did this work and its installation mean for you?


KR: I think this installation was directly in conversation with “rabbithole,” a video installed inside a glory hole by Ále Campos that sort of introduces the show. In both pieces, there is an ask for the audience to look past or move around the partition to participate in something that feels forbidden. The flag acts as a curtain to cover and mask the video of myself breaking cast sugar champagne bottles over my back while naked in a seemingly endless body of water. It felt important that the viewer is moving into a different space where they can more privately experience the work from. Rather than anonymity, it’s asking for closeness, for intimacy, for grace.

MM: It seems to me that you’ve widened the scope of your research to consider the ecological and industrial dimensions of culture, along with your sensitivities to history and myth-making, class struggle, and biopolitics, which are ongoing. One way I see you contending with all these intersectionalities is in complicating the (lost?) love object into hybrid, multiple positions. For instance, methodologies for queer love and care advance into a varied array of questions concerning environmental tourism, pleasure cruises, and not only the historical incident of the Titanic sinking in 1912, but also the interlocutor of James Cameron’s 1997 film adaptation of that event. What all were you managing together as this work came into focus?


KR: I’ve always been obsessed with the RMS Titanic and it’s sinking since I was young. Titanic (1997) was one of the first “adult” movies I can remember watching– I was 6 when it came out in theaters, and I remember my parents getting a babysitter so they could see it in theaters. I was upset that I wasn’t allowed to join, but as soon as it came out on VHS, I replayed the double-tape on my parents’ TV over and over again. While putting together the show, Ále and I spoke about the movie holding the shared space in our lives as a flashpoint for both of our sexual and romantic awakenings.

I watch this a few times a year at least and track other artists working within this history (Claudia Bitran, Dynasty Handbag, among others), although the Titanic often seems to be the butt of the joke. When I would talk to people about making work about the Titanic, they always laugh as if we all understood that Titanic art cannot be serious or at the very least, must engage camp as an overarching sensibility. At points, I even framed it this way myself because these reactions convinced me the only access point was through humor. But the work came out of me in the best way I know how.

MM: How do you think about the love, pleasure, and longing that figure into, say, sexual orientation, and how they exist in fandoms, particularly in adolescent and developmental phases of maturity?


KR: The joke that got me starting to think about gender-flipping in the short form fanfiction I wrote in conjunction with this show goes back to 2016, when I used the Femme-Butch Scale meme format (referenced below) to track my proposal that Young Leo is actually better viewed as a lesbian. I was 24, just off the peak of my deep investment in the One Direction fandom where I was reading sensual and emotional Larry Stylinson (Harry Styles x Louis Tomlinson) fanfictions written largely by 20-something lesbians. I don’t think this was a coincidence, especially since young twinks often read as gay women (lol) and was undoubtedly the way I found myself in the trenches of Online Directioners. And for me, this felt like a safe place to explore different emotional tones of queer romance while stuck in the very straight culture of my undergrad, without putting my heart on the line before I was ready.

Femme-Butch Scale: Young Leo (intervention on meme template by Kitty Rauth, 2017)

MM: I think fandoms have been a stalking horse for the parasocial turn, self-consciously so, with self-organized fan conventions starting in the 1930s and becoming more widespread in the 60s and 70s. How would you describe the experience of identifying with characters and properties in, say, Titanic?

KR: I think sometimes there is a moment when a celebrity almost becomes synonymous with the character they play, and that’s when I say, “Okay, fair game.” For me, this is “Young Leo” (who feels like a separate entity from Leonardo DiCaprio the Actor, if you follow) and Jack Dawson. With the Young Leo Femme-Butch Scale as a jumping off point, my rewatches became more and more about reading into a sapphic dynamic between Jack and Rose—the immediate attachment, the secret and forbidden love, the way Jack shows Rose a different potential for her life. And Jack’s hair!!! Simultaneously, in my own life, I was soaking in new political realities, learning ways of recognizing and interacting with the world that were so different from how I had grown up in polite east coast expectations. In a dramatic flourish of self-fantasy, I always insert myself as Rose DeWitt Bukater with Jack Dawson as my love interest. Since, I have tried to convince many trans mascs in my life to adopt his hairstyle, to varying degrees of success.

MM: How does fangrrrling and identifying in these ways relate to self-determination and the fashioning of a self?

KR: My favorite game with my BFF is assigning all of our friends’ personalities to different characters, like a never-ending Buzzfeed quiz. I am always projecting myself into pop culture. It’s hard not to imagine how I would act or react in a situation. But most of all, it is an opportunity to recognize and come to terms with aspects of myself to allow for future meditation. This way of engaging with media can be helpful in understanding oneself, figuring out what feels good and fits well, or what to shed to grow into a new version.

Kitty Rauth. Set Piece for an Institution, 2024
wood, drywall, screen-printed cotton, liquid starch, manufactured molding, sandbags, fabric
8’ x 9.5’ x 3.’

MM: I think you know this, but for our readers’ sake, I’ll again confess to you that I’ve never seen Titanic. Do you think it’s important to have done in order to be able to appreciate or understand the world you’ve been developing with it as a reference? If so, I propose pausing our exchange for me to screen it.

KR: The biggest understanding of the film one must have to really appreciate the fanfiction I wrote involves the question of whether or not the narrator is hallucinating her lover. It felt like an opportunity to question what she needs and what this short but intense relationship gave her. In the movie, Jack wins his ticket in a poker game just before the boat sets sail, so there is no record of his existence. When telling her story 85 years later, Rose is not immediately believed that he was real or that it happened. Yes, this love affair was important, but what lasted was her freedom, the way Jack showed Rose that she had agency over her own life, that things could look different, and that it was worth the sacrifice.

Regardless, I would love to host a movie night with snacks and pastries this winter so that you can truly understand. ♥️

MM: It’s a date!

Forgive me, this might be a messy thought still: I’m thinking about the resources that support queer and other dissenting, alternative approaches to living—Virginia Woolf’s 500 guineas and a room of one’s own, meaning the means and space to be who and what you want to be able to make what you need to make. I’ve been reading Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians and have been struck by how she underscores the ways notable queer women at the end of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries inherited wealth from their fathers and invested it into queer community, art, and writing from their peers, and in facilitating ways of being that went against dominant norms. Meanwhile, in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she analyzes and fabulates toward near total elisions of queer femme and trans masc people of color in modern history, with the rate of invisibility proportionate to a lack of economic means. Class, poverty, systemic racism, and criminalization mark the possibilities of supportive queer communities and the historical record of them quite differently, dependent on circumstances. Hartman’s indispensable work shows that the capacities to love and fuck and thrive persist despite the most challenging of conditions, but given the upstairs/downstairs class divides in Titanic and adjacent narratives, the tensions and subordinations within the LGBTQIA+, and the ongoing erasures of women desiring women, or even women desiring at all, I wondered if this zone of thinking figures into your inquiries.

KR: I love hearing this report back from Diana Souhami because the answer to all my inquiries is always that the lesbians are holding it down! During the run of Pleasure Cruise, I had some peers point out the stark differences of priorities within the queer community, and how proximity to privilege and power changes one’s relationship to others and to the ways in which we seek pleasure. I’m interested in the connections you’re drawing to an upstairs/downstairs dynamic in the Titanic that feels translatable to the striations of queer personhood. Those striations, or maybe more clearly letters within the LGBTQIA* alphabet, tend to react differently to power and seemingly relate via their social status within our larger society more than their economic one. Much more to think about here.

__________________________________________________


Readers can encounter more of Kitty Rauth’s work and goings on at kittyrauth.com and on Instagram @_sugarm0mmy_.

Burning in Loops: DIRD’s Animated Apocalypse and Alternative Futures

DIRD, Mountain of Reincarnation film still. Photo courtesy of the artists.

By Adi Berardini

In the world of DIRD, narrative glitches behave like corrupted files—flickering, freezing, and repeating themselves. Stories unfold, collapse, and reappear across shifting landscapes, building what they call a cyclical apocalypse: a world where endings are never final, and the possibility of an alternative future flickers in and out of view.

Formed by Rui Shi and Zijing Zhao, DIRD works at the intersection of stop-motion animation, sculpture, and moving image. Their practice is rooted in the logic of animation—an understanding that movement and transformation are not just techniques, but philosophical conditions. “All cinema is animation,”[1] Alan Cholodenko once remarked. DIRD extends this proposition into a world where myths, ruins, and spectral bodies refuse to remain still.

Hand-sculpted forms appear alongside digital models; web-based interactives are layered with hand-painted textures. A single puppet might be sculpted from paper, its fragile limbs flickering in stop-motion, only to be re-imagined as a digital avatar wandering a frozen, browser-based mountain. In this sense, animation is a mechanism for conjuring life and provides a way of activating matter, generating illusion, and testing non-linear time.

DIRD, Mountain of Flames film still. 2020-ongoing. Photo courtesy of the artists.

DIRD’s ongoing project Mountain of Flames (2020–ongoing) embodies this philosophy. It builds a burning world shaped by Eastern funerary culture and the legend of Princess Miaoshan, a figure who defies patriarchal authority, dies by fire, and reincarnates as the bodhisattva Guanyin. In DIRD’s retelling, Miaoshan’s body is constructed from fragile paper. She collapses and reassembles in endless loops, as if trapped inside the broken machinery of myth itself.

This myth is dismantled and recomposed, becoming a structure for queer worldbuilding and cyclical regeneration. The project has expanded across multiple works: Mountain of Reincarnation (2020), a browser-based 3D landscape in which viewers must wait through endless loading loops; and Miaoshan (2023), screened at Goldsmiths CCA, where gestures falter and images stutter, producing an unstable visual terrain. In these works, apocalypse is not a singular collapse, but a sustained condition—the cooled ember of fire, the residue of a failing system, the afterglow of political exhaustion.

DIRD, Mountain of Flames film still. 2020-ongoing. Photo courtesy of the artists.

If the apocalypse in DIRD’s cosmology is ongoing, their new work asks: what keeps producing it? Increasingly, they turn to the worlds of videogames, not as fans of gaming culture, but as critical observers of its embedded structures. For DIRD, videogames often encode patriarchal and violent logic: war as the default narrative, technological advancement as a weaponized drive, progress defined through domination.

In these works, apocalypse is not a singular collapse, but a sustained condition—the cooled ember of fire, the residue of a failing system, the afterglow of political exhaustion.

Their next project, provisionally titled Every Videogame Depicts the End of the World, examines how digital spaces rehearse violence again and again, simulating crisis as both entertainment and control. Battles are repeated, maps are drawn, and borders between self and other are endlessly re-inscribed. In these systems, the apocalypse is a design principle.

DIRD does not seek to replicate gaming aesthetics in a literal sense. Instead, they extract the logics of loading screens, glitches, and respawns, and bend them into queer, feminist, and monstrous imaginaries. If games produce war, DIRD asks how art can produce peace, not through naïve utopia, but through speculative failure, haunted spaces, and monsters that refuse to play by the rules.

Central to this vision is the figure of the monster. In DIRD’s works, monsters are not villains but alternative hybrid bodies. They inhabit the cracks of collapsing worlds, carrying with them new ethics of survival. For the duo, monstrosity is a form of magic: a way of suspending the violence of dominant systems and opening portals into parallel dimensions.

In their upcoming installation, these monsters are imagined as guardians of a counter-world, holding open a protective “enclosure” where war and technological violence lose their grip. Within this fictional spell, destruction is not the end but a threshold. Fiction itself becomes a weapon, or perhaps more accurately, a healing device and an imaginative structure that interrupts violence by inventing other ways of being.

Rather than escapism, it’s a critical use of fantasy, what they call “ruinous worldbuilding.” By constructing spaces that flicker between collapse and possibility, DIRD positions fiction as a necessary tool for confronting the real, where crises of climate, patriarchy, and technology demand alternative visions to resist despair.

Artist photo: Rui Shi (right) and Zijing Zhao (left). Photo courtesy of the artists.

DIRD’s works insist that apocalypse is something we are already inside and not an event waiting in the future. From burned paper bodies to frozen browser mountains, their worlds mirror the sense of living amidst political, ecological, and technological systemic breakdowns. Yet their vision is not nihilistic. In the ruins, they conjure cycles of rebirth, queer spaces of reorientation, and monstrous figures that refuse violence.

In Every Videogame Depicts the End of the World, this vision turns explicitly toward peace as an ongoing, fragile practice and a willingness to imagine otherwise. If patriarchal war games train us in repetition, DIRD proposes different loops: flickering, failing, regenerating. They create spaces where endings multiply, and where another kind of arrival might just begin.

To see more of their work, visit Instagram: @ruishi.ruins / @orchidmoths.

[1] Alan Cholodenko and Australian Film Commission, The Illusion of Life (University of Sydney, Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1991).

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.

Ayanna Dozier on the Sacred Labour of a Whore

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

By Gladys Lou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview by Adi Berardini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, that’s ominous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three. How will you begin?

Four. How will you live now?

Five. What is the shape of your body?

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

Seven. What do you remember about the earth?

Eight. What are the consequences of silence?

Nine. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

Ten. Describe a morning you woke without fear.

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

Twelve. What would you say if you could?2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Weeds Always Come Back: An Interview with Laleh Motlagh

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

By Samuel Schwindt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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