signs and symbols

signs and symbols: artists & allies III

August 1 - September 15, 2020

Opening Online: Saturday, August 1, 6:00pm
Closing: Tuesday, September 15, 6:00pm

signs and symbols is delighted to present artists & allies, the third edition of our annual summer program — a dynamic exhibition of time-based media — video works, video documentation of performances, live streamed-performances and sound. Conceived as an experimental glimpse into our program and upcoming season, our annual summer exhibition is comprised of a selection of works by artists of the gallery, along with ally artists who contribute to our discourse. Since we cannot gather for a month-long marathon of daily live performances and screenings, this year's iteration is online only, with works that lend themselves to our new virtual reality.

signs and symbols has always been ‘a space of experimentation, collaboration and the development of new work.’ This is the first sentence penned years ago when conceptualizing its ethos. And now, as we find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic, while we continue to ponder the world and have our daily panic attacks — the importance of community has never been clearer. Our artists continue to make new work and support our program from their individual solitudes around the world. This year's ‘allies’ consists of artists who are close to my heart and our program, who have collaborated with our artists, and whose works inform and inspire our artists and our mission. The selection of works are both new and old — new works made by artists during lockdown along with historic works and projects we find ourselves revisiting now. They are inquisitive, unpredictable and timely responses and solutions using only creativity and what we have on hand.

Narrated by the legendary Brian O’Doherty, we enter a space in which none of the laws that govern our daily lives seem to matter anymore. The rhythmic dance of a boxer caresses you with his fists. A father and son weed a suburban lawn. Alter egos appear in drag. A bicycle wagon distributes ice cream and artist zines. We take a stroll through a magical woodland to the haunting melody of a waltz. The personal experience of motherhood is explored through movement, storytelling and song. Former characters make cameo appearances, while others are recontextualized from previous works into hypnotic new visual essays. We go from an explorative adventure meandering through the hidden undergrounds of Berlin, to a vacant theater in Bilbao, to the discrete movement of creatures dotted around a mudflat in Korea. We listen to a polyphony of ideas, avowals and utterances from the people of New York. We ponder the ambivalent and ambiguous relationship between authority and social reality. The absurdity of human relationships. The melodramas of existence and alternate realities. We contemplate the environment, and our changing relationships to technology. In our collective crises, gestures and self-awareness become the ritual for healing. Ghosts from the past are resurrected and enter the present in order to speak about future utopias.

Devised with the intent for dialogue, overlap and exchange, artists & allies is not a singular position, but presents a diverse assemble of style and substance from artists with unique sensibilities, and doubles as a snapshot and overview of our program and entry point to many of its strongest voices. Enjoy! xx

participating artists include:

adam broomberg | jen denike | michelle handelman | joan jonas | carol szymanski
tony orrico | rachel libeskind | jeewi lee | donna conlon | JAŠA | itziar barrio | kalup linzy
annabel daou | ornella fieres | miles greenberg | nicholas grafia + mikołaj sobczak | ULAY
mischa leinkauf | guy de lancey | melinda jean myers | shelley marlow | fawz kabra
gabriel cyr | isak berbic | brian o’doherty

performance and happening dates:

Monday, August 3 | Shelley Marlow | performance | 7pm | Instagram Live @signssymbols

Monday, August 10 | Jen DeNike with Nicholas Grafia & Mikołaj Sobczak | artist talk | 2pm | Instagram Live @signssymbols

Thursday, August 20 | Mischa Leinkauf | performance documentation | 6pm | online signsandsymbols.art

Friday, August 28 | Fawz Kabra, Isak Berbic & Nur Kabra Berbic | happening onsite | 4 - 6pm | 102 Forsyth Street in front of the gallery

Friday, September 11 | Annabel Daou | performance | 6:08pm | Instagram Live @signssymbols

Saturday, September 12 | Melinda Jean Myers | performance | 8pm | Instagram Live @signssymbols

ADAM BROOMBERG, GUY DE LANCEY & BRIAN O’DOHERTY
The White Cube, 2020

“Inside the white cube we don't speak in a normal voice, one does not laugh, one does not eat, drink, lie down, or sleep, one does not get ill, go mad, sing, dance, or make love... Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is devoted to the technology of aesthetics. Art exists in a kind of eternity. While eyes and minds are welcome, space occupying bodies are not. Emotions are turned into a consumer product” — Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube.

Adam Broomberg and Guy de Lancey collaborated with Brian O’Doherty to create a virtual gallery space in which his words, originally published in 1986, are chilling in their contemporary relevance.

Here, none of the laws that govern our daily lives apply: gravity, morality, bodily, functions, geographic space or chronological time. Like in his original text Brian invites us to consider the architecture of the white cube; and by extension the moral, political and economic codes embedded in the virtual worlds we now increasingly find ourselves living in.

JEN DENIKE
The Boxer, 2015

“The Boxer was inspired by two personal experiences; my initial reading of the battle royal boxing scene of Invisible Man, and meeting Muhammad Ali at the opening of The Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, 2006. Firstly, I was completely devastated by the internal anguish, sweat, confusion and utter brutality Ellison’s protagonist is forced to endure through the ritualistic spectacle of his volatile boxing ring. Secondly, I was struck by Ali’s sheer elegance and strength of presence, as he sat in his chair greeting his guests at his new center, yet couldn’t help but notice simultaneously his fragility from Parkinson’s and wonder if it was brought on by the natural erosion after a ferocious life in the ring; he chatted with graceful ease and posed for a photo with me. That photo hung in my studio for years as a source of inspiration, of someone who fearlessly transformed his hard-won iconic role as an athlete into a controversial political voice. In 2015, I started visiting boxing rings all over Los Angeles location scouting. I quickly realized each club had its own personality and was essentially a community center that went beyond the sport itself, historic photographs of boxers were mounted everywhere on the walls, surrounded by layers of signage spouting inspiring quotes, rallying the hopes and aspirations of primarily young black and Latino boxers who practiced there daily. The Boxer is shot in the black and white style of film noir, a boxing ballet of sorts, a visual portrait examining racial identity and the disjuncture between the narrative metaphor of boxing and its real history undergone by African Americans since the Civil War to now. My protagonist (Benson Williams III) is an amateur boxer who lives in LA, he generously helped me cast other young boxers. One of the boxer’s grills says 4:13, while shooting I asked him; is that an LA area code? No, he said, “it’s the number of a bible verse about strength.” In selecting this video for artists & allies I would like to dedicate it in memory of Ali who refused to be invisible, and everyone who has protested and risked their lives for over a century.”

MICHELLE HANDELMAN
Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression, 2020

“Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (2020) is a continuation of the project These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves which I started at the beginning of the pandemic. It recontextualizes characters from my previous works into hypnotic visual essays about the transfiguring of interiority during periods of isolation and fear.

"As lockdown continues, and fear of the pandemic gives way to the rage of the political uprising, it’s become crucial to read this moment from a perspective of racial inequality and capitalist fascist oppression. In the words of critical theorist Jill Casid, “May none of us rest as we live our dying. May we not forget but actually do the work of reckoning with the still uncounted, of the crimes of the endless war we are still in.”

"I’ve taken a clip from my project Hustlers & Empires, (2018) that features downtown New York legend and queer icon John Kelly singing a song he wrote for his character in Hustlers & Empires. Here, slowed to a halting breath amid a selection of found and original texts sourced during the pandemic, Solitude is an Artifact of the Struggle Against Oppression (2020) speaks to the discomfort of self-reckoning, and the complicated relationship between social and political inertia.”

JOAN JONAS
Waltz, 2003

Jonas's performance piece, an homage to 18th-century French outdoor theater, incorporates mythology as well as spontaneously occurring events into the narrative.

CAROL SZYMANSKI
I was a boy, 2020

“I was a boy is derived from cockshut dummy, an email-based work with text and images made while I was working as a banker. This entry was my fantasy of how a sexist corporate boss might feel if they wanted to become a girl. I paired the text with dreamlike imagery filmed at Sammy’s Beach, East Hampton.”

TONY ORRICO
My weeds are opportunity, 2020

My weeds are opportunity is a short video work divided into a series of performative tableaus between father and son, interspersed with acts of weeding a suburban lawn. White limbs, young and old, uprooted from the soil (invincible in its nature) and a loving embrace between the artist and his son after a real-life apology all act as representation to convey the trans-ancestral evolution of self-awakening and quest for harmony with others. This work considers the commonly symbolized weed not as foreign invader, nor fair-minded participant in a biodiverse wild, but as promise and devotion to the necessity of maintenance. Inspired by author and activist Michael Pollan's words, “We cannot live in the world without changing nature irrevocably; having done so, we're obliged to tend to the consequences, which is to say, to weed” (Weeds Are Us, NYTM. 1989). Orrico writes, "I have recently taken on a large debt to possess land — on purpose. When I go digging, I sense the dangerous conceit, but beneath my shame, I long to learn from all of the layers of why."

MISCHA LEINKAUF
Untitled (One night in my studio: the city of Berlin...), 2020

Is there "freedom" in urban spaces that are hidden from our everyday view? Leinkauf takes the audience on a personal video journey of his studio: the city of Berlin. Follow the artist to one of Berlin's hidden architectural treasures.

“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.” – Albert Camus

You cannot escape the absurd and every human being finds itself in an absurd situation that lies in the tension between the absurdity of the world on the one hand and the human longing for meaning or meaningful action on the other. There are three stages in dealing with absurdity: realization, adoption and revolt. Following Albert Camus and his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," only in the revolt against the absurd, you might realize yourself and find freedom.

RACHEL LIBESKIND
It Cost Me 2.11 Metric Tons of CO2 to Make This Video, 2018

“It Cost Me 2.11 Metric Tons of CO2 to Make This Video was made from footage shot in October 2018 in the Kāneʻohe Bay in Hawaii, where I was the artist in residence at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. My residency there was one part of a larger research project for Bruno Latour's Critical Zones exhibition at the ZKM museum in Karlsruhe, Germany. I participated in two years of making and researching with Latour and a working group of artists and thinkers, culminating in a large exhibition that opened in July of 2020 — and will be open to the public through the end of this year. The video is a meditation on what I saw and learned there — immersed in the waters, the science, the indigenous knowledge and the myths of exoticism."

JEEWI LEE
On earth, 2013

A still single shot. A mudflat landscape in Korea — which appears to be empty — is actually filled with gathering creatures. In this video, Jeewi Lee explores visual perception and appearances. What appears to be. The sound in the video is from NASA recordings of our planet from outer space.

“I made this video as a meditative piece, at a time in my life where I was questioning perception and truth - the question of existence — and how we only believe things to be true if they are visible and if not they do not exist.”

DONNA CONLON
From the Ashes, 2019

“The video opens with an abstract image, which is revealed to be a small bird, seemingly inanimate, held in a hand. The tiny hummingbird suddenly comes to life and flies free, like the Phoenix of Greek mythology, which was reborn from its ashes. Or the hummingbirds of Aztec societies, which were believed to be resurrected warriors.

“As we collectively confront a nexus of crises — environmental, social, epidemiological — it is foolish to deny the interconnections among people and organisms, the fragility of life and the delicacy of the balance among living things. The video questions our relationships with the natural world, a world we have mistakenly tried to harness and control. And portrays a hopeful image of the potential for a new beginning, and of the essence of nature, strong, tenacious and perseverant, recalling the wisdom of ancient myths.”

JAŠA
Lingering Cut_01, 2020

"During the initial stages of the COVID-19 lockdown in May 2020, and older idea resurfaced as the challenges of thinking, planning or even producing collaborative non-studio artworks or projects of any kind became almost unsurpassable. An idea of a collective action turned into a situation of solitude and detachment, a reality that only needed to be documented and not staged. The video was shot somewhere and then sent elsewhere. An older line came back chasing me: ‘A wish? A disaster.’ Somewhere within the voids and cacophony of overlaying thoughts and needs of one, a persisting solitude takes vengeance on the outside world. An egoistic projection (resonating a string of dominant political ideas) brings the crumbling reality of solitude to everyone else too.”

ITZIAR BARRIO
We Could Have Had It All, 2013

In this multi-layered digital video, Itziar Barrio takes a line borrowed from popular music as the departure point for an elaborate exploration of performance, language, politics and sexuality. Drawing its title from the chorus of British pop star Adele’s 2011 smash single, “Rolling In The Deep,” the work pays homage to the global appeal of Adele’s music while inquiring into the myth-like notion of total fulfillment.

The work is set inside the Teatro Arriaga, an historic theater in Barrio’s native Bilbao. A sequence of slow tracking shots and luscious stills, inspired by segments from Adele’s Live at the Royal Albert Hall concert video, capture an ornate interior, emptied of spectators yet intermittently haunted by the voices of two female poets asked by Barrio to collaborate on the project by responding to the lyrics in Adele’s hit song.

Maialen Lujanbio, whose voice can be heard as the video opens, is a Basque poet who practices an improvisational form of sung poetry known as bertsolarismo. Chavisa Woods, whose words follow in subtitle shortly thereafter, is an American writer living in New York. Reflecting on the social, economic and erotic dimensions of fulfillment and its frustrations, the two poets enter into a dialogue with one another and with their pop star counterpart. Portrayed with vivid sensuality, the vacant theater itself becomes another performative figure with which the poets interact. As the video’s soundtrack — based on a looping Adel sample — slowly builds, the intertwining of music and image, Basque and English, song, text and speech creates a viewing experience in which the conventions of public performance are redistributed like the sexual sensorium described in Woods’ poetry.

KALUP LINZY
Conversations Wit De Churen IX XI XII: Dayz of Our Ego, 2015

"Conversations Wit De Churen IX XI XII: Dayz of Our Ego is the ninth video installment of the ongoing Churen series, which began in 2002. The work brings together many characters who are featured in the Queen Rose Family Tree, an elaborate collage project which explores their lineage. After Katonya’s Queen Rose Art Commission is cancelled due to a family quarrel, Florida Queen works to save the project and bring the family back together."

ANNABEL DAOU, FAWZ KABRA & GABRIEL CYR
A LIVE DECLARATION, 2020

A LIVE DECLARATION is the outcome of the event, by the same name, curated by Fawz Kabra, recorded and remixed by Gabriel Cyr, and including the voices of the people of New York. This two hour event was organized in conjunction with Annabel Daou’s exhibition, WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS at signs and symbols (January 10 - February 9, 2020).

A Live Declaration was performed on February 2, 2020, from 4 to 6pm at signs and symbols. Visitors to the gallery were invited to lend their voice, reading excerpts from Daou’s work on paper WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN EVENTS, a scroll-like undulation that re-appropriates the opening line of the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. The phrases in the work include everyday expressions interspersed with lines borrowed, stolen or gifted by artists, poets, writers and activists. Cumulatively, they are an expression of urgency in the face of global quakes and minor disturbances. During the event, visitors read what moved them, their voice — hushed in a whisper or traveling out in the space — was recorded and then remixed with musical interventions by Cyr in real time.

ORNELLA FIERES
I create paths that lead to the clouds in which we go, 2020

In Ornella Fieres’s new video work, I create paths that lead to the clouds in which we go, an artificial intelligence shares its hopes, dreams and fears, giving an outlook on a future where the digital universe unites with the human, forming an entity that could mean the end or the salvation of the world.

Fieres notes, “to let the AI speak, I fed a neural network with texts that were written within the last decade on my artistic practice, which deals with the spiritual and uncanny aspects of the digital realm. The AI evolved, like in a self-fulfilling prophecy, from my theories to develop its own unreckoned, dystopian manifesto.”

MILES GREENBERG
HÆMOTHERAPY (I), 2019

Presented as an open-ended ritual, this piece was a long-durational, immersive, sculptural, architectural, culinary and olfactory performance proposition that unraveled over the course of seven consecutive hours. Viewers were invited to attend six of those seven hours. They were welcome to enter and exit at their leisure. Miles notes: “This was my first show in New York City and I was feeling very isolated at the time; I was going through some stupid heartbreak and simultaneously feeling very displaced. That wasn’t what the piece was supposed to about, but the whole purpose behind the ‘ –therapy' series is to hold space and to contain whatever happens to be in the air at the time of the performance by bringing it into my anatomy – Each environment is like sanctified space for emotional alchemy. Whatever I was going through ended up quite heavily informing how the piece went down. I shed a lot of layers in those seven hours, it really helped me get rid of a lot of bullshit; it felt like an exorcism. I think the audience members really got into that headspace, too. I still firmly believe that you'll never be in more pain onstage than you are in real life.”

NICHOLAS GRAFIA & MIKOŁAJ SOBCZAK
The Accursed Ones, 2018

The Accursed Ones was a performance based on rituals of exorcism and cleansing with an egg, as found both in Filipino and Slavic Cultures. The three personas shown in the performance embodied a zombie, a vampire and a witch; individuals mostly known from horror movies and gothic fiction or folklore. These figures can be seen as a metaphor for marginalized subjects and minorities, excluded from society and forced to live a life lead by disease, as shown for example during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. 'Resurrecting the dead' is a process closely connected to the politics of memory. This can be frequently observed in the government of countries that try to establish certain nationalist and imperialist ideologies, in order to systematically discredit established elites. The performance delivered various alternatives for these procedures. The action throughout the performance centered around ways of bringing marginalized subjects back into the center of collective memory.

ULAY & JAŠA
Water Mark / Cutting Through the Clouds of Myth, 2016

"The video work Water Mark / Cutting Through the Clouds of Myth, was produced in conjunction with ULAY and JAŠA’s performances/exhibition in New York that I curated in May 2016. The exhibition marked ULAY’s first performance and return to New York after 30 years (his last performance was in 1986). ULAY’s most recent artistic activities had focused on environmental issues, specifically on initiatives that raise awareness, enhance the understanding, appreciation and respect for our most precious resource: water. JAŠA transforms spaces into experiences, driving them toward their poetic and ecstatic potentials.

"Two personas with radically different approaches to performance and in drastically different moments in life are placed within a space for a specific duration of time. What is this space, this in-between space, this gap, this meeting point, this marked moment? This room is at once far too small and too vast for the both of them. This juxtaposition, this placement in time and space creates a necessity of opposites to co-exist. The necessity to co-exist on a common ground is the only common ground; co-existence is a bare fact rather than a statement.

"The project was an extremely special collaboration for all of us involved and has come to symbolize a very important time in our lives, as well as the genesis and origin story of signs and symbols. Having recently lost ULAY only days before the global pandemic, I find myself returning to this project often these days, and feeling forever grateful for the cherished memories.” – Mitra Khorasheh