American Gurl | Hauser & Wirth, WxW

LaJuné McMillian in collaboration with Marguerite Hemmings
Antidote
2020
Video
Duration: 21: 38 min
© LaJuné McMillian
Courtesy the artist

Written by Luxi H.

There are words like this in our language: tons of beautiful, sensual and funny words that outnumber the purely grammatically-functioning preposition and auxiliaries. These words tell an origin story from metaphors and are closely glued to imagery. We love these words; our accent is attuned by these words, and our cultural and political histories written into these words: Mama, women, land, Americana, girl.

Savanah Leaf
Run
2023
Single-channel video, transferred from 35mm film, color, sound
Duration: 9:06 min
© Savanah Leaf
Courtesy the artist

But sometimes, when the imageries, throughout decades of cultural changes and struggles, become blurred, overlapping, contentious, and warring, the imageries also become such an overload that they are no longer immediately evocable, and hide in an abstract hollowness from being retrieved. We look into the eyes of the woman and ask: what is Mama; we look down at the 3 x3 mosaic tile and ask: what is land; and we look into the mirror, onto the stage, up to the screen, and deep to the archive and ask: what is American Gurl?

Carrie Mae Weems
Afro-Chic
2009-10
Video projection
Duration: 5:00 min
© Carrie Mae Weems
Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

In American Gurl, Hauser & Wirth and Womxn in Windows, a platform dedicated to presenting women of color via video art, film, and performance, attempt to offer a multitude of answers to the question. Or rather, diachronically, the exhibition searches to walk through non-exhaustively the iconology that has answers and reimagines the meaning of American Gurl, and to retrieve the different shades and nuances American gurl has come to embody.

Martine Syms
Meditation
2021
Digital video (color, sound)
Duration: 4:19 min
© Martine Syms
Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue

On view through 30th July 2023, the exhibition co-curated by Zehra Zehra and Kilo Kish brings together eight film works. American gurl is a compound phrase in which the national and cultural identity denoted by Americanness and the dubious gender indication from gurl are engaged in a constant mutual-development. Forever Your Girl, the 2022 film by Ayanna Dozier, for instance, situates the iconic elements from American national flag in a hypersexual ambience as the subject is seen trying to ride a carousel ride. Against the soft-porn aesthetics, there stands still the national flag, giving out an almost-neon color in the 8mm film scenes. Here Americanness becomes a pop culture prop, semi out-of-place, but also partially blended in as the ambiguous light works on its singular color.

Ayanna Dozier
Forever Your Girl
2022
Video
Duration: 7:35 min
© Ayanna Dozier
Courtesy the artist and Microscope Gallery

Also curving out the entangled relationship between Americanness and femininity is Kilo Kish’s film Death Fantasy from her album American Gurl, out of which the exhibition derives its title. Kish’s film travels through the varieties of characters of American girl in popular culture and exhibits a metamorphic, kaleidoscopic panorama of such characters along a dynamic thread. “[T]oying with total freedom and declaring which rules and boundaries would be law”, Kish thus explains her albums.

Kilo Kish
Death Fantasy
2022
Single channel video
Duration: 2:10 min
© Kilo Kish
Courtesy the artist

Death Fantasy, along with other on view films including Quiet as It’s kept – a cinematic response to Tony Morrison’s Bluest Eye, Run – a self-portrait by the former Olympian Savanah Leaf, Antidote – a choreographic film based on motion caption software, and many more, exemplifies a contemporary artist’s evocative approach to visualize the undulating power dynamics between the multiple layers of gender, sexuality, and nationality. And on top of exploring the interaction between American girls and their surrounding context, the exhibition also casts an inward eye to elucidate how the concept of American girl evolves internally as Americanness and sexuality continue rewriting each other.  

Ja'Tovia Gary
Quiet As It's Kept
2023
Single channel
Duration: 26:00 min
Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery