“Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying” Exhibition

EFA Project Space

[Image: Amalle Dublon and Constantina Zavitsanos, Caduceus, 2016. A reworking of Benjamin Franklin's daily timetable from the series “Crip Time,” in the Canaries publication Notes for the Waiting Room, 2017.]

This event has ended.

Curated by: Taraneh Fazeli

Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying focuses on how the body is articulated in various discourses oriented around health. It proposes that better incorporation of the states of debility, disability, and rest into society (particularly their temporalities) could be resistive to forms of oppression and provide possibilities for rethinking collectivity. Dragging on, circling back, with no regard for the stricture of the work week or compulsory ablebodiness, the time that this multi-prong curatorial project investigates is non-compliant. It refuses a fantasy of normalcy measured by either-in-or-out thresholds and demands care that exceeds that which the nuclear family unit can provide.

We are all united by the fact that we will experience fluctuating states of debility throughout the course of our lives, whether we currently identify as sick or not. Furthermore, many of us are exhausted from living and working in a capitalist system as insufficient infrastructures for care have further deteriorated. Considering the fact that the failures of public health and biomedicine are felt by some disproportionately due to race, class, gender, sexuality, etc., this project provides a platform to explore collective forms of healing to deal with structural processes of exclusion and the way in which trauma is held in the body. To this end, artworks dealing with care, illness, fitness, sleep, somatic sustainability, labor, alternative temporalities, and wellness culture will be shown at EFA, in an exhibition on life/work balance that provides a locus for ongoing conversations about transitional architectures for relief and potential repair.

Notes for the Waiting Room is a commission comprised of three interlinked parts: newspaper, installation, and distribution network. Canaries, a support group and art collective for people with autoimmune diseases co-founded by Cohen and Lazard, was invited by Fazeli, a member, to contribute texts and images addressing the question: “How do you take care of yourself during a flare-up of your symptoms?” The resulting publication, distributed in art contexts as well as in doctor’s waiting rooms, challenges the unilateral and hierarchical transmission of information from doctor to patient and, much like the overall art and advocacy work of Canaries, fosters solidarity and embodied knowledge sharing instead.

Danilo Correale’s video installation, No More Sleep No More, 2015, investigates the political life of sleep, particularly the encroachment of working time on sleep in the late-capitalist push towards a never-ending production model. Juxtaposing images Correale made when he was sleep-deprived with a series of conversations with various experts on sleep, No More Sleep No More suggests that sleep is one activity that still has the potential to resist standardization and normalization.

Jen Liu’s video SAFETY FIRST (BAD, DON’T TOUCH, MERCY!), 2013 addresses how industry disavows the negative impacts of labor on the human body and expects workers to adapt their movements to most efficiently fit the needs of production. Invoking factory safety posters and videos from the 70s, this piece of speculative fiction imagines a future return of industry back to the “first world,” prompting us to consider the current threats to bodily wellbeing that workers endure in order to work.

Zavé Martohardjono’s Liminal Bodies workshop offers facilitated improvisational movement practices they’ve used to make work about healing through socio-political crisis as a queer, trans, artist of color. These practices also inform the choreography of their performance Rubbertime, which explores non-Western temporalities, Martohardjono’s fractured relationship to Indonesia, and decolonizing the body.

The video playing on the three immersive screens atop Sondra Perry’s exercise work-desk features an avatar of the artist generated by software that had difficulty reconciling her body type with pre-existing templates. The avatar asks viewers to consider how forms of discrimination negatively affect black folks’ health and what revolt might look like when social reproduction, be it through fitness or social media, is ultimately only valued for how it adds to one’s labor potential.

Cassie Thornton has investigated the impact of economic systems on public affect and behavior for some time and, like Canaries, is currently exploring methods of social healthcare. As financial debt creeps into the dreams, desires, and bodies of all people, she recently visited Puerto Rico, Greece, and Spain to learn about the mutual aid movements that have arisen in the wake of financial collapse. Thornton will use the exhibition as platform to test a model for de-financialized care that responds to the experience of crisis.

The memory foam mattress topper of Constantina Zavitsanos’s sculpture i think we’re alone now (Host), 2016 bears traces of years of rest by the artist and guests in the form of marks, tears, hair, and bodily fluids. While recreation and rest are activities not often taken as “productive” work, Zavitsanos questions assumptions around what is or is not labor by reminding us that reproductive activities such as sleep and sex are life sustaining.

The central questions posed throughout this project will be:
How do we envision ways to care for ourselves and others in a manner which eschews placement of guilt on the sick individual and avoids pathologizing non-“normative” bodies or behaviors?
What is the relationship of care to reciprocity when seeking personal wellness alongside caring for others? What is care’s relationship to rage and resistance?
In considering how we move through (and redistribute) the effects of pain, what role does immediate relief play versus long-term repair?
What is art’s role—with its potential to convene diverse publics to participate in cultural rituals that envision alternative systems and new metaphors—in forming us and how might action in the sphere of the arts help us envision and enact such a transitional architecture?

RELATED EVENTS

In order to support creative exchange between communities of care in varying contexts, particularly those in red and purple states where poor institutional support has long synced with a prevailing “maverick” ideology of independence and entrepreneurship, there will be a parallel programming series, Warp and Weft of Care, occurring between New York and Houston, Texas during the course of the show.

The initial phase of Warp and Weft of Care will include public performances and closed-door collaborations between artists from the EFA show and groups in Houston. Working in partnership with arts organizations focused on the health of communities disproportionately facing violence, Warp and Weft of Care supports community efforts through existing creative platforms, such as Project Row Houses’ Young Mothers Program (a residency for low-income single mothers in the historically black neighborhood of Houston’s Third Ward) and the collaborative program between FotoFest and Angela’s House (transitional housing and support for women immediately following incarceration).

As our increasingly secular society loses intergenerational knowledge and undervalues epistemologies that are not mind-centered, cultural rituals seated in struggles of justice are infinitely valuable to collective wellbeing. Certain people, such as women, immigrants, people of color, and queer people, have frequently turned lack into surplus by building communities of care; feminist, indigenous, black, and queer artists have long investigated how trauma gets held and expressed through collective gestural, somatic, and haptic experiences. Artists will facilitate such encounters with the partnering groups in the form of listening investigations, movement exercises, the sharing of community healing histories, etc.

While a portion of this will unfold out of the public eye, the artists will conduct versions of their programs for broader audiences in NYC and Texas to share what they learned through those closed-door interactions.

The artists contributing to Warp and Weft of Care will be Fia Backström, Jen
Liu, Zavé Martohardjono, Sondra Perry, Carrie Schneider, and Cassie Thornton.

EVENT SCHEDULE

At EFA Project Space:
Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time opening reception: Friday, March 31st, 6-8 PM
Calling in Sick, workshop with Taraneh Fazeli (by registration only): Date TBD (May)
Secret Chakra: Feminist Economics Yoga, a workshop with Cassie Thornton: Date TBD (May)
Rubbertime, a performance by Zavé Martohardjono: Date TBD (May)
In Houston, TX:
The Growth and Its Perennials, a performance by Fia Backström: Saturday, April 8th, 5-7 PM
A video screening and conversation with Jen Liu and Sondra Perry: Saturday, April 22nd, 2-5 PM
Liminal Bodies, a workshop with Zavé Martohardjono: Date TBD (May)
Secret Chakra: Feminist Economics Yoga, a workshop with Cassie Thornton: Date TBD (May)