Recent and Upcoming Visitors and Speakers
2023 Distinguished Visiting SpeakerS
New Red Order
March 20 - March 24, 2023
New Red Order is a public secret society with rotating membership, collaborating with self-described “informants” to subversively yet earnestly interrogate desires for indigeneity, both individual and collective.. With core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit), the group deploys elements of time-based media, including video and sound, along with sculpture, installation, and performance in order to shift potential obstructions to Indigenous growth and to rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. Orienting their work through the paradoxical conditions of Indigenous experience, New Red Oder (NRO) explores the contradictions and missteps that embody, in their own words, “the desire for indigeneity in the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called Americas.”
The NRO’s work has been exhibited at the Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University, Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, HKW in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Toronto Biennial of Art 2019, EFA Project Space, Artists Space in New York, Walker Art Center, 57th New York Film Festival, Whitney Biennial of American Art 2019, Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Sharjah Biennial and more.
Links
https://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/new-red-order
https://kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk/en/exhibitions/new-red-order/
New Red Order Cover the Earth, detail, 2021. From the exhibition Feel at Home Here at Artists Space. Photo: Filip Wolak
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
Audience: Most of the following events are open to all except where indicated. Please see the details below.
Never Settle: The Program: Monday, March 20, 7:00PM in FAB 2-020
This event will consist of the screening of a 50-minute in-progress recruitment video featurette with a post screening discussion.
The promotional initiation video, Never Settle: The Program, introduces inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation. Imagery of settler-led planetary destruction is juxtaposed with sequences of underground group therapy sessions where settlers can lose, forget, and explore their identities In order to indigenize. Sharing their labor, lurking through museums, and institutions, future accomplices snap thousands of cellphone pictures of every artifact and artwork on hand. Deploying and containing confrontational representations around the stakes of accompliceship, the video examines the dynamics influencing the conditions in which the concerns of indigenous people are often treated as a topic du jour and then co-opted by non-indigenous people, alongside and imbricated with the earnest search for ways to make amends.
Never Settle: The Program (2018-ongoing) video still
Never Settle: The Program (2018-ongoing) video still
Never Settle: The Program (2018-ongoing) video still
Never Settle: The Program (2018-ongoing) video still
Anti-Ethnography Lecture/Screening: Tuesday, March 21, 3:30 to 5:00PM in FAB 2-020
Anti-Ethnography is a selection of video works which examines the violence inherent in the ethnographic impulse and unveils the absurd fetishism underpinning the discipline. For indigenous peoples the camera is a dangerous weapon, one that has been wielded against us since the device’s inception. Anthropology's obsession with preserving images of our “vanishing” cultures, through ethnographic films or archives filled with boxes of our ancestors' remains, has long been a tool used to colonize and oppress indigenous peoples. By relegating our identities to the past, and forcing us to authenticate ourselves through this past, our existence as contemporary individuals living in a colonized land is denied. It is in this sense that ethnography confines indigenous agency. The anthropologist's encapsulating gaze ignores the fact that for indigenous communities, tradition is not an immutable set of truths handed down by revelation, but a set of ever-evolving social practices whose continuity cannot be repaired by preservation, only elaborated through struggle, and finally achieved under conditions of genuine self-determination.
Informants Workshop / Seminar: Wednesday, March 22, 1:00 to 3:00PM in Henderson Hall (Rutherford South 1-17)*
This half-day open workshop will investigate how desires for indigeneity persist into our imagined future and how we can collectively inform on those desires to better understand and to re-channel them. The workshop will consist of short video excerpts, readings, reflection, and dialogue.
*This event is open to students
A Conversation with the New Red Order: On the multiplicity of desires for indigeneity, Thursday, March 23, 3:00-5:00PM in FAB 2-020
Culture Capture Series Screening (40 minutes) followed by a discussion on the theme of monumentality: Thursday, March 23, 7:00PM in FAB 2-020
In the video, Culture Capture 001, potential Initiates of the NRO continue through a museum hall before it closes for renovation. The camera moves through other institutions, in search of objects to capture, prior to removal. A photogrammetric 3d scan, of a Tlingit chief in regalia, captured from a display case, is brought into a no man’s land of virtual space, forced into animated transformation. Meanwhile, the figures aim to be inspired, to explore the desire to capture poses —to invert salvage ethnography — while enacting cultural properties of the other. In doing so they participate in the fantasy of removal as a creative act.
Half tongue-in-cheek absurdism and half deadly earnest, CULTURE CAPTURE: TERMINAL ADDITION continues New Red Order’s ongoing project of “culture capture,” recruiting viewers to participate in a program of practical strategies to counter the “salvage mindsets,” that set aside Indigenous culture and sovereignty by consigning it to the past. Delving into political tensions between advocacy for, and fears of, removal. The film represents strategies that include using new, accessible technologies, photogrammetric scans, and their manipulation, both of Indigenous material that museums and other institutions may hold, and public monuments that celebrate the ideals of a region’s settlers.
Culture Capture: Terminal Addition (New Red Order, 2019) video still
Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality extends NRO’s Culture Capture series toward examining desires for monumentality and its dissolution, pursuing fantasies of removal by morphing monuments into metastasizing flesh via ritualized photogrammetric capture and virtual manipulation, performing a sort of sympathetic magic. The piece literalizes the violence of settler-colonial propaganda and features high-profile monuments such as the equestrian Theodore Roosevelt statue that stands in front of AMNH in New York City and “End of the Trail”, both created by American sculptor James Earle Fraser. The video mines the archive of Frasier, going beyond simple iconoclasm to probe deeper, investigating desires for capturing indigeneity that motivated the artist, desires that continue to pervade the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called americas.
Culture Capture: Terminal Addition (New Red Order, 2019) video still
NRO Student Guest Critiques: Friday, March 24, 4PM - 6PM*
NRO acts as guest critic with art and design students, participating in studio visits, leading critiques, giving feedback on students' work.
*This event is open to students
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