Bodies Of Knowledge

With artists from Iraq, China, Iran, Europe, Morocco, South Africa and the United States, Bodies of Knowledge brought a global perspective to questions surrounding cultural preservation and historical memory, asking us to envision history as a form that can be constantly erased, rewritten and asserted anew.

Zhang Huan’s Family Tree documents a day-long performance in which he worked with calligraphers to cover his face with Chinese characters taken from poems and folktales, personal recollections, and the artist’s own personal family history. Over the course of nine photographs, we witness the layering of words on his skin until his face is completely blackened, and the writing totally obscured.

Family Tree shows us how we are all marked by our culture and history, our faces and bodies carrying many different influences and experiences, past and present, familial and external, and real and imagined.

As Zhang has said, “The body is the only direct way through which I come to know society and society comes to know me. The body is proof of identity. The body is language.”

Zhang created Family Tree shortly after he immigrated from China to New York; the performance also reflects on his personal experience of immigration to the United States.

In his 2012 video Black Mask, Wilmer Wilson IV slowly obscures his face with black post-it notes. Through this act of erasure, the artist asks us to consider the ways in which black bodies are at once hyper-visible—subject to constant surveillance, censure and even violence—and also absent from many histories and narratives.

Wilson IV is known for what he calls “social skins”—performances in which he covers his body with objects such as postage stamps, peroxide strips and brown paper bags.

Black Mask illustrates how marginalized people are often caught in this bind between visibility and invisibility.

In Bodies of Knowledge, Black Mask was presented alongside a new series of artist books that document Wilson IV’s recent Running Tour performances.

Filled with photographs the artist snaps without halting his stride, these books are parodies of a tourist guidebook, filled with blurred, disorienting images that ask us to consider whose stories get told and why.

Wafaa Bilal's 168:01 is a monument to the staggering cultural losses Iraq has endured over the past several decades. This bookshelf commemorates the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, during which the College of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad lost its entire library due to looters who set fire to the collection.

During the fire, more than 70,000 books were reduced to ashes. More than sixteen years later, few books remain in the library for art students to read and study.

With the goal of restocking this lost library, 168:01 invited museum visitors to fill these shelves with books requested by Iraqi students, and take one of the blank white books on the shelf in exchange.

As book donations accrued, the austere white bookshelf became saturated with knowledge and color, while the blank white takeaway books served as a reminder to their new owners that not everyone has the same access to knowledge.

During the exhibition, 500 books were donated by NOMA visitors, and are now in the process of being shipped to the University of Baghdad, to help with the process of rebuilding.

168:01 references a thirteenth century legend in which Mogul invaders threw the books of the Bayt al-Hikma—the House of Wisdom—into the Tigris River, where their pages bled ink for 168 hours. Bilal’s title, 168:01, refers to the first minute after such a loss, which is also, for him, the starting point for recovery.

168:01 was accompanied by four photographs from Bilal's The Ashes Series. On first view, these images seem to document the aftermath of violence during the War in Iraq, upon a closer look they reveal themselves to be fictions.

These photographs are taken from miniature, hand-made models that Bilal constructed. Each of these models references a journalistic photograph of Iraq that circulated during the conflict.

Each photograph includes a scattering of ashes that commemorate the destruction of cultural heritage, and the futures that will never come to pass as a result of the war.

Adriana Corral’s installation Memento responds to the widespread phenomenon of enforced “disappearances” of women along the border between the United States and Mexico. Focusing on the 2001 homicides of eight young girls in Ciudad Juárez, Corral worked in collaboration with a human rights attorney to research the names and identities of the women who were disappeared.

Corral transfers the names of missing women directly onto the gallery wall. Then, through a process that is akin to a ritual act, she burns these name documents, creating an ash burial plot sifted onto the museum floor. In this transfer process, the names become illegible, showing us the way such histories are often intentionally erased, and also offering belated recognition to the victims of these crimes.

William Kentridge’s film Zeno Writing is set against the backdrop of World War I, layering stop-motion animations of the artist’s charcoal-and-pastel drawings with footage from live performances, documentary films and musical scores.

Kentridge laboriously drew, erased, and redrew scenes upon a single sheet of paper taken from his own personal journal. Through this relentless reworking of text and image, the shadows of erasures left behind from earlier versions become the basis for new drawings, making visible the ongoing transformation of history, politics, and memory.

Born in South Africa, Kentridge’s drawings and films often critique his country’s colonial and apartheid histories, which continue to inform the present. As the artist has stated, he is fascinated with the stories of “people stuck at the edge of a historical project about to implode, stuck waiting for the eruption to happen.”

Manon Bellet's installation Brève braises highlights the fragility of paper as a carrier of text and keeper of histories. Composed of hundreds of fragments of burned paper affixed to the wall, Brève braises loosely resembles a musical score or a series of calligraphic marks. The paper—a material that typically carries the weight and value of its written inscriptions—is left to speak for itself.

Throughout the exhibition, a series of musicians performed in front of the installation.

During these performances, the improvisational energy of the musicians —and the movement of audiences as they respond to the music—caused the papers to slowly drop from the wall and crumble to the ground, signaling the ever-shifting and ultimately impermanent nature of written texts and histories.

This photograph was presented alongside a looped presentation of three of Neshat’s moving-image works, Rapture (1999), Turbulent (1998), and Fervor (2000), in NOMA’s Stern Auditorium.

Garrett Bradley’s multi-channel film installation America proposes that there was an entire body of silent film made by and for African-American audiences in the early 20th century, that has since been lost.

A filmmaker and artist based in New Orleans, Bradley took as her starting point a 2013 survey conducted by the Library of Congress which states that 70% of silent films created in the U.S. between 1912 and 1929 have gone missing.

America reimagines this lost archive through a collection of new films created entirely in New Orleans with a community of local non-actors.

The film interweaves visual quotes from recently rediscovered silent films like Lime Kiln Club Field Day that feature African-Americans, with storylines that shed light on little known aspects of African-American history.

These include a chapter devoted to the story of Florence Price, the first African-American woman to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra, and another focusing on James Reese Europe, the first African-American to receive a public funeral in New York City.

Offering new imagery of human connection and collectivity, America demonstrates the power of rebuilding lost archives and reimagining past histories.

For Bodies of Knowledge, New Orleans based dancer, choreographer, and actor Edward Spots--a lead performer in Garrett Bradley's film America--choreographed Black Magic, a new site-specific dance performance for NOMA in collaboration with dancer Donna Crump.

Treating the body as a carrier of cultural memory, Black Magic conveyed movement as a language that can call forth the many different histories our bodies keep.

Black Magic conveyed joy as a form of resistance to dominant depictions of the black experience.

Black Magic was performed by Spots, Crump, and twelve youth dancers from Dancing Grounds, a New Orleans-based nonprofit organization that works at the intersection of dance, education, and social justice.

Mahmoud Chouki created a series of site-specific performances entitled Safar, which means “to travel” in Arabic. Through collaboration with a group of international musicians in New Orleans, Chouki created a series of five live performances in NOMA’s Great Hall, and a series of improvisational concerts within the exhibition space.

These concerts incorporated musical influences from across the globe, ranging from European classical, Andalusian from Southern Spain, Levantine music from the Middle East, Maghrebian music from North Africa, Latin American music, and jazz from the Southern United States.

This series of performances culminated in a final performance on the closing day of the show in which all of the musicians Chouki worked with over the course of the project came together to collectively perform Chouki’s new composition.