HỒNG-ÂN TRƯƠNG

Copyright 2009

We Are Beside Ourselves
Installation including carbon single transfer prints on mirror, archival pigment print on Phototex, lithographs, and sound
2018-present

We Are Beside Ourselves mourns nothing, gives up nothing, makes no sense of history. Assuming the dispossession of our own histories, assuming the losses that define the textures of our positions, the discrete works in this show assert a space for desire and belonging in the face of a racist imaginary that relies on difference and subjection. The title of the show takes its inspiration from queer literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her book Touching Feeling, which conceptualizes beside as a non-binaristic, non-dualistic spacialization, allowing for a non-linear logic that opens up possibilities to imagine identity as a multiplicity of “desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, differentiating, mimicking...” We Are Beside Ourselves is the first installment of a larger project that attempts to respond to our current political crisis vis a vis the delirious promise and desire of radical politics.

Mining archives of what seems to be the familiar history of the 1960s and 1970s radical liberation movements, these photo-based works, including carbon transfer photographs on mirror and lithographic prints, begin to make legible a political genealogy that draws out the intertwined and parallel relationships between the individual and the collective, the personal and the political. The works in We Are Beside Ourselves forges a material history for Asian American resistance, a history that frames the visualization of political identities in photographic terms of the legible. It asks: What is unseen? What has been refused to be acknowledged? Ultimately, the installation of works suggests the powerful intimacies in political positions and attempts to “cultivate the epistemological and historical archive of solidarity.”

 
 
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