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Freestyle exhibition. April 28 – June 24, 2001. Curated by Thelma Golden with the support of curatorial assistant Christine Y. Kim.
The Scholl lecture series, featuring the premier cultural creatives of our time, kicks off 2025 with one of the most influential people in the contemporary art world—Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Streamed live on January 31, 2025.
Which stories do fields, gardens, forests, and deserts tell? How are they articulated in—and between—the extensive and intensive senses of articulation? In what ways are they distributed between muthos and logos? There is no one all-embracing answer to these questions because the answers are indexed to various plant communities, distinct vegetal milieus, or modes of inhabiting the middle. Plant communities are tangles of stories about interactions among plants; the collaborations and collisions of plants with bacteria, fungi, and animals; agriculture and permaculture; diets and habitats; and, less and less so, the wilderness.
The deserts that grow worldwide as a result of deforestation are the environments that best correspond to the arid abstraction of globality, inherited from the rarefication and dematerialization
of reason. It did not have to come to this: spirit could have been receptive to matter, feeling at home in the forest, while culture could have meant care for and cultivation of life.
… assuming that the plant’s self is not separated from the place of its growth, whatever it tells about that place is already a phyto-biographic narrative and, vice versa, the story of a plant about itself is a slowly developing narrative about its surroundings.
… keepsakes of my memories, the mnemonic centers of gravity that evoke the events and even the atmosphere of my life at the time
Michael Marder, A Philosophy of Stories Plants
Toni Morrison :
Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.
exchanged that danger for the relative safety of brutal work
home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory.
The implication being that this is all there is.
love in its desperate state … poorly veiled by his business ventures.
Valerian took very good care of the greenhouse for it was a nice place to talk to his ghosts in peace while he transplanted, fed, air-layered, rooted, watered, dried and thinned his plants.
imagined the blackness she was sinking into.
It was the name that called forth the true him.
Veronica Vasicka Boiler Room x Dekmantel Festival 2016.
In the faint flush upon the telltale cheek,
And in the pallor that succeeds it
[…]
in the tender
And unnamed light that floods the world with splendour;
[…]
Still as the dawn, and with the dawn’s swift force––
attendre, esperar, wait.
“The work to be done, he told them, is a refusal of savagery.” (RK)
The blackness I am after does not know where Africa is located but can point it out on a map.
It is an interesting project this authenticating African thingy: that is, in order to create a wholeness, a thing unto itself, a purity–one must cross an ocean …
This is a long way to either absurdity,typicality, desperation, or truth, yet even if it is truth,it may not be logical.
Some notes on the Ocean …, Pope.L, 2005
Pope.L Has Never Been More Urgent, Frieze 207, 2019.
Triple Canopy published the lecture, On a Painting by Hamishi Farah by Tobi Haslett. This lecture was given at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) on February 1, 2025, as part of the Transmediale festival. Hamishi Farah was commissioned to make a painting that was to be shown publicly during the festival. Transmedia festival declined to hung the painting.
A couple of excerpts from the text:
It should be said at the outset that those in charge of Transmediale were not told they were getting a painting of Chialo; they thought they’d be exhibiting something else. So they’re well within their rights to refuse to install it, and the mere fact that I’m still allowed to speak with the piece propped up next to me is proof of both their generosity and tact.
But I suspect that the real reason this painting cannot be exhibited properly is the same reason Farah thought to paint it in the first place, and the reason its true subject had to be concealed from the curators of this festival: that Joe Chialo represents the cutting edge of culture-industry repression in this country, which is not exactly known these days for its openness, permissiveness, good faith, or good taste.
To be more specific: Over a year ago Chialo, in his official capacity as minister, proposed a so-called antidiscrimination clause to be included in all contracts—yes, all contracts—for recipients of public arts funding. Included in that clause was an intriguing and topical detail: Anyone receiving public funds would have to commit to abiding by the notorious International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which effectively conflates criticism of Israel with hate speech.
[…]
The subject that gazes out from Farah’s canvas was the face of the most ambitious, even audacious attempt to censor and punish support, within the arts, for Palestinian freedom. I’m sure I don’t need to point out that all of this was taking place against the backdrop of the genocidal assault on Gaza. Indeed, this attempt to inscribe fealty to Israel into the day-to-day operation of the much-celebrated, publicly-subsidized Berlin art world amounted to an attempt to fully—dare I say finally—silence any and all cultural opposition to the starvation, bombardment, and invasion that marked only the latest blood-soaked episode in the colonization of Palestine. The face in this painting was, for a moment, the face of the pro-Israel vanguard within the German state. That’s saying something. And one might infer, based on Farah’s previous work, that it matters more than a little that this smiling, public face is a black face. Its presence in the German state apparatus might be cited as proof of the transcendence, at last, of racism—even as Arabs and antigenocide demonstrators get their skulls smashed in the street.
It’s all a bit bizarre. You might even call it fucking ridiculous. Indeed, ridicule appears to be a big part of what’s at stake in this particular painting. Or, if not quite ridicule, then irony, anguished paradox, an appreciation (however rueful) of the exquisiteness that attends this very contemporary contradiction.
The whole thing is excellent!
