Gala Porras-Kim, 228 Offerings for the Rain at the Harvard Peabody Museum (detail), 2021. Colored pencil and Flashe on paper. 72 x 72 inches. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.
On March 25, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis will welcome three new artists to its halls. Through images, video, soundscapes, and sculpture, these new exhibitions–Correspondences towards the living object, HIT MOVIE: Vol. 1, and a solo exhibition–explore such varied themes as the ethics of showing human remains and rapid urbanization. Ahead of the trio of openings, we caught up with CAM chief curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi to discuss the artists, their work, and the magic of a new season.
You’re currently installing three very different exhibitions. How’s it going so far?
It's going great. This is kind of the busy, exciting time when the shows all come together. We work on these exhibitions for, let’s just say, a long time in advance. So when we get to this point, it's really about seeing it all happen, seeing it come to fruition. Walls are going up, walls are being painted. Things are being installed, you know? And like you said, we have three very different kinds of exhibitions, which means that installation period is all also really fun and dynamic, because we're working with a lot of different materials and mediums that we have to either prepare or install. This season has a lot of different mediums, and so there's a lot of different things that we're preparing for.
Can you tell me a little bit about the process of bringing these three particular artists in?
So, as the chief curator, my job is to design the program. Our assistant curator works really closely with me, and we work hand-in-hand really on everything. These are three artists that are, I think, all really at interesting points in their career and in their practice. Something that we are really focused on at CAM is working with artists at that point in their practice and in their career where having an exhibition at CAM is an opportunity to explore something new, try something different, make something new, or bring their work to new audiences.
Alia Farid will be showing her film At the Time of the Ebb (2019) in an exhibition she’s titled a solo exhibition.
Alia Farid is an artist that I've known for many years now. She's presenting one work, and it's a work that was commissioned by the Sharjah [Art Foundation] in 2019. That is a work I saw there, and I was just so moved by that work that we approached her to say, “Hey, you know, you haven't shown this work in the United States at all. Would you like to debut the U.S. screening of this project here in St. Louis?” It’s a really powerful and beautifully made film. And I think what you'll see with the CAM program overall is that we are bringing different artists from really different viewpoints who are experiencing the world from their own places. They live in different places, and they have different experiences, but there's always something that ties us all together in thinking about social issues, contemporary issues. So I think all of the things that are discussed in the shows are things that people in St. Louis can relate to, or find an access point to. With Alia Farid’s work, one of the things that she does with this piece is look at this long-standing, traditional festival that happens on this island in the Persian Gulf. One of the themes that emerges from that is how we explore the effects of urbanization in communities. She's looking at that in this place where people might be like, “That's so far away. That is a very different place. How does that relate to me?” But I think this idea of thinking about the way urbanization affects our communities and how we navigate the effects of rapid urbanization, especially in rural societies, is something that people here can relate to or find a way to relate to. I think that something that each of these artists does is kind of bring in a topic or a theme that they're engaged with through their practice and their point of view. Alia lives between Puerto Rico and Kuwait, but this is still a theme and a subject that can be very relevant to audiences here in St. Louis… I'm really looking for how the exhibitions, the programs, the artists that we bring–how can we further expand those connecting points for people and create these opportunities to make connections for people that go beyond the city, or the Midwest, or the country, or even further?
Alia Farid, At the Time of the Ebb (still), 2019. Single-channel video loop, stereo sound, 15:43 minutes.Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist.
And then, as opposed to Farid’s single work, you'll have Martine Gutierrez’s HIT MOVIE: Vol. 1, which is viewed a few different ways.
Martine is this incredible artist who is really interested in speaking about archetypes of femininity. She does this throughout her practice. We invited her to CAM and asked if she would be interested in making a new work, what we call a site-responsive or site-specific [work] in response to one of the spaces in our building. So, as a result, she's created this insanely awesome film that will be on loop in one of our areas, and, alongside it, she made a poster that goes along with the film and a teaser trailer that will be played on the outside of our building at night on what we call our Street Views series, which is the projection on the outside of our building.
In the past, she's looked at things like models and the whole culture around being a model. In this case, she's looking at actors. She's really interested, for this project, in thinking about Hollywood and particularly the 1990s action blockbuster film genre. She's exploring ideas of the diehard bombshell who’s wielding chaos and dominance. She's dressed in this optimistic, hyper-feminine way. And she plays off of those tropes to create the film. One of the things that's so incredible about Martine is that, in her photography and in her films, she is the actor. She does the costumes, she does the makeup, she does the filming and the editing. She literally does it all from A to Z. She has help, but she is the core part.
What drew you to Gutierrez’s work specifically for the Street Views series, which passersby can encounter without ever entering CAM?
When we invited Martine to do a project, it was really for our space that we call the Project Wall, which serves as the main backdrop and area for all of our public programs, but it's in and of itself a gallery as well. And when we talked about it, I asked her, “What about this outside projection space? Are you at all interested in that?” Because it's a very challenging space. It's huge. And it's also very horizontal in shape, which means that when you edit or when you format, you really have look at something that can be very horizontal. And so she immediately was like, “Oh my God, absolutely. I totally want to do something for this. Maybe I could cut a trailer of the film from the inside to put out here.” And of course it makes sense now, because she has just recently made public artwork. Particularly in New York, she just did a project for the New York Public Art Fund where she did bus shelters. She made a series of photographs called the ANTI-ICON series. So you're already playing with this idea of what it means to put her work in this public space. What does it mean when it's not inside the building and it's not being interpreted for you? You're only seeing what you see, and you have to make whatever assumptions or come to whatever conclusions on your own. She also has made a billboard project before, which is at that scale that the outside of our building is. So she's worked on that scale before, but she hasn't done it in video. She's only done it with still photography. That's the newer thing for her, with the project at CAM. But she's already thinking in these ways and she's using popular culture modes, right? Like a magazine or a movie. These are things that circulate in our culture without the layers of interpretation that you might find when you come to a museum. These are just things that are in our culture that we already know how to access and consume. She's making work that is kind of critical of that, and then she's putting it back in those systems, which is what I think is really interesting.
It’s a very cool opportunity for the neighborhood and for the folks who are going to drive by and see it so many more times than, probably, they are going to visit the exhibition.
Yeah, for sure. In our neighborhood we have pedestrian traffic, as well as vehicular traffic and a school across the street. They're always kind of looking around at what's going on, and then whenever Grand Center [events] happen, people park all along our neighborhood. So there's definitely an interesting audience for it, and it lights up the corner and it makes the neighborhood feel more lively. It's a project we've been doing for almost 10 years now. But the thing that's a little different about Martine's presentation is that we have been trying to do more linking what is on the outside with what's on the inside. It doesn't always work out that way, because not everyone is able to take on a space like that, but it felt very natural for Martine.
Gala Porras-Kim, A terminal escape fromthe place that binds us, 2020. Papermarbling on paper; human bones fromShinchang-Dong, Gwangju, 1 BC; letterDimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.Commissioned by the 13th GwangjuBiennale in collaboration with the GwangjuNational Museum.
And then you have the third exhibition, Gala Porras-Kim’s Correspondences towards the living object, which makes the cultural institution itself a subject, which I think is super fascinating.
Yes, so the larger show for the season is Gala Porras-Kim’s show. The exhibition is going to consist of drawings and sculptures, and there's even a very subtle sound piece. The reason I wanted to invite Gala is that I have seen a lot of her work in different group exhibitions, and I felt like Gala needed the opportunity to bring a number of bodies of work that she has made into one space so that we can choose an arc of looking at what her practice does. When an artist shows a work in a group show, you only get a glimpse of what they're doing. But when you can bring several projects together, you start to be able to fill in a much bigger understanding of things that this artist is investigating. Gala is really interested in thinking about objects and how they live and move in the world, and a lot of that is around archeological objects and artifacts. At CAM we're a contemporary museum, and we don't have a collection. So we are talking about the critique of the institution, but a slightly different institution from ours, right? We do not have artifacts. We don't collect. So we're not participating in that activity as a museum. But I think what's interesting is that she's a contemporary artist who is using that as her medium or as her content to talk about these larger issues around who tells what stories, how, and when and why. And it has to do with larger political and power struggles, with colonialism and all of these larger issues. But it's through the lens of talking about these objects.
The show consists of five projects, and sometimes they have one object and sometimes there are three objects within the realm of the project. Two of the projects are looking at this idea of human remains and what happens to human remains, particularly this question of, “When does it become okay for an institution to bring human remains into their collection?” Who gets to decide after how many hundreds or thousands of years that now this is no longer a human body, but an object for us to bring into a museum to look at?... Those are two projects that she made in the last year and have never been shown in the United States.
The ethics of things being taken, human or object, is a massive question, and one people have been asking for a while now. Who gets to make those calls is quite a thing to unpack.
This is the kind of thing that she's questioning. So like when you look, there's a piece that we borrowed from a private collection in Miami. And it was a piece that was made about a collection that's in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's collection. They got this huge collection from this man in the '70s, and his name is Proctor Stafford. And when they got it, he sort of said, “You have to, whenever you show this collection, list my name.” The collection became known as the Proctor Stafford collection. And so Gala went in and was like, “This has nothing to do with him. We should name this collection and these objects after the people they came from and where they came from, what they actually represent.” So through this process, her letter for that piece was asking them to rename the collection for the region that the objects came from… Her letters don't always result in the things she's asking for, but that's not the point. The point is that she's pushing against these systems and she's making these systems re-question and rethink their methods and their ways of working. Sometimes it results in a change.
Porras-Kim and Gutierrez will both be on hand at the opening, and all three artists will have artist talks throughout the season, correct?
Yes, so Gala will do an artist talk on Saturday, the 26th, and Martine is coming back in April to do an artist talk. Alia is going to do a virtual artist talk because she is a bit far away and unable to get here, but she'll be doing a virtual artist talk. And we film everything and put it on the website, too. So it will all be there.
We haven't uploaded these yet, but we also work with the artists to make these little audio tour recordings. We give them a set of questions and then they answer the questions. It's very low-fi, but it's really nice to hear from the artist. I'm mentioning it because I would encourage [visitors] to listen to Martine’s audio tour, because she basically called a friend and had a conversation, and that's the audio tour recording. And it's hilarious. She's like, “Nobody listens to the audio tour, so let's just give 'em all the dirt.” She didn't really answer the question, she basically chatted with a friend on the phone and put in music and movie sound effects. It's hilarious. It's worth a listen. It's probably two minutes long.
Martine Gutierrez, HIT MOVIE: Vol. 1, 2022. Video, 5 minutes. © Martine Gutierrez. Courtesy the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
What a fun idea, to just make her audio tour another part of the performance.
Exactly. And that's totally Martine. She's always performing. That's sort of her persona in a way.
They’re so different, but as a collective, what do you most want people to know about these exhibitions?
I would just say that these are three artists who are thinking in really interesting and engaging ways, working in really different mediums, but talking about issues that I think are in the forefront for all of us and our culture and society today. There's a kind of “worldview-ness,” too, that it brings. This idea that these perspectives might come from a lot of different places, but there's a relatability and an accessibility to the ideas that are presented in this season. Hopefully there's something for everyone because, you know, they're each very different presentations. Not everyone's going to like everything, but maybe there will be something, because there's such a variety of ideas and mediums and points of view.
It sounds like they’ll provide some balance to one another, that there will be a nice change of pace among the three as you go from exhibition to exhibition.
I hope so. We don't really know until it's all there. I usually get to experience it and really know once it's all up and running and going, and we're not quite there yet. There's always really great surprises, too, things that we didn't anticipate. And we're like, “Oh my God, look at this connection. This thing we didn't think about.” And, not to be cheesy, but that's the magic about art. You can look at it. You can read it. You can think about it. You can write about it. But once it's in the space and you're physically experiencing it, so many more things can be brought to the forefront. That's the part that excites me. Even though I do this every day, there's still this magical moment, when work comes in and it's on the wall, or the projection of the film is in the space, and you're like: “Oh my God. Yes. This is what I thought it was going to be, and a hundred times more.”
