Listen Until You Hear | For Freedoms x Fotografiska
Eric Gottesman, “Pigment Print from Expired Film and Digital Capture.” The Encounter (2023)
Written by Michael Galati
Edited by Nicholas Sapienza
In an age of 24-hour media consumption, where ancillary noise in newsrooms often drowns out important political information, or where a 15-second viral moment on TikTok becomes culture’s focus until the next 15-second moment, a new exhibition calls us to stop and listen through the static. In partnership with artist collective, For Freedoms, Fotografiska New York has put on a new exhibition, Listen Until You Hear, that features work from six artists: Hank Willis Thomas, Cassils, Maia Ruth Lee, Cannupa Habka Luger, Eric Gottesman and Kameelah Hanan Rasheed. All from diverse backgrounds, these multimedia artists have collected their work that includes photography, film, sculpture, and performance to invite viewers to not only listen with their ears, but to challenge us to intuit the interconnectivity of our relationships with others, known and unknown, like and unlike. In keeping with its consciousness-raising theme, the exhibition also features a “Banned Book Reading Room,” featuring a rotating collection of books that have been banned since 2021, as tracked by the ACLU and free speech and literacy non-profit PEN America. The exhibition is on display at Fotografiska New York until October 22.
Cassils, As It Is (2022)
In light of recent upticks in the anti-LGBT legislation across the country, Cassils, a queer artist, uses film and photography to unearth the physical, emotional and artistic labor integral to queer activism and the progress the queer liberation movement has achieved. Their 14-hour film, As It Is, filmed on what would be their 14th wedding anniversary, features Cassils shoveling sand from sunrise to sunset, enduring a full tide cycle. The film has been edited to sync with the sunrise and sunset of the time zone in which it’s viewed.
Maia Ruth Lee, “Decal, rope, india ink, gel spotlight.” 고향, (2022)
A kind of Sisyphean self-imposed punishment, the practice of shoveling sand for 14-hours requires not only intense mental and physical fortitude, but also requires making peace with one’s circumstance, to accept it as it is and play the cards as they’re dealt, with an eye towards the end, even if there is none. This particular still from the film emphasizes Cassil’s connectivity both with their situation and with the elements of nature, which proves just as important as connection with oneself. As It Is places social and political upheaval in the center of the personal and finds connection to self and others through nature and endurance. It is a testament to queer perseverance and connection.
Hank Willis Thomas, “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”(yellow spectrum) (2022)
A standout piece from the exhibition, Hank Willis Thomas’ reflective panel “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” (yellow spectrum), captures the essence of the role of an artist in the twenty-first century. Featuring the eyes of James Baldwin, the piece calls to mind a quote from one of his foremost speeches, The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity (1963), a quote which may very well be a corollary of the exhibition’s thesis:
The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.
Here, Baldwin discusses what it is to be an artist, especially in a time of such social and political upheaval as we find ourselves in: to be painfully aware and to tell. Thomas’ piece calls us beyond indifference not only through Baldwin, but, ingeniously, by making the installation reflective, Thomas also orients the viewer in the center and in front of the problem. In doing so, it complicates the relationship between seeing and listening as you both see an external object and yourself reflected in a larger socio-political dialectic. The piece asks you to listen to your intuition and hear your conscience. If the goal of Listen Until You Hear is to raise consciousness to our interconnectedness in the face of political and social division, Thomas achieves this by confronting us with the reality that the solution begins with us.
Banned Book Reading Room
Coming at a time when the noise seems to be all that’s heard, Listen Until You Hear cuts through it and asks us to do the same. Its multimedia approach reflects the multifarious media landscape that’s evolved over the past 20 years and challenges us to listen to what our interiority is saying. Its emphasis is on connection as opposed to division, rich histories as opposed to the ones political rhetoric would have us believe, and optimism in our future as opposed to the nihilism found in our media. Listen Until You Hear, much like Thomas’ installation, situates our socio-political complex in front of us to give us perspective on how, together, we can find a way forward. As much as it calls us to see, it also calls us to listen and to hear.
