Cally Spooner: Deadtime, an anatomy study

The Graham Foundation is pleased to announce Cally Spooner as a 2024 Graham Foundation Fellow. With the fellowship, Spooner presents a repertoire of works from Deadtime, a multi-year research project started in 2018.  

Deadtime stages an anatomy study of how performance quantifies the social body. In Deadtime, living and mediated bodies, not always human, appear and reoccur, both vital and corpse-like. At the Graham Foundation, the installation unfolds across media, spills through the Foundation’s architecture, and throws open the frame to ask: how does the present neoliberal condition deaden the social fabric, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead? Deadtime is formed from twenty works, including sound works and sonic scenographies, films, commissioned paintings, sculptural propositions, and anatomical-architectural interventions.

At the Graham, Deadtime is cocurated by Graham Foundation director, Sarah Herda and Hendrik Folkerts, curator of international contemporary art and head of exhibitions, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Opening to the public on February 17, 2024, Deadtime begins with A Thesis on Spillage—featuring performances, choreographies, conversations, and lectures. Aligned with previous iterations of the Deadtime works, Spooner and Folkerts developed the following score that structures the event. 

A Thesis on Spillage, a Symposium-like Gathering: February 17, 2024, 10am–7pm
Assembled by Hendrik Folkerts and Cally Spooner with: Nuar Alsadir, Marquis Bey, Wendy Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tony Cokes, Hendrik Folkerts, Melody Giron, Irena Haiduk, Sarah Herda, Ralph Lemon and Darrell Jones, Maggie Segale, and Cally Spooner, among others.

In the morning
At 10am, Cally Spooner introduces the day, scored with DEAD TIME (2018), accompanied by Melody Giron, on cello. At 10:43 and 55 seconds in the am, Cally phones Wendy Brown, political scientist and staunch critic of neoliberalism's stealth revolution to ask: WHAT HAPPENED?

At 11:45am, Maggie Segale does a spine roll.

At 11:53am, we will have a coffee break.

At 12:10pm, Joshua Chambers-Letson, author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (2018), spills a communion that does not leave our dead behind but draws them into the present. At 1pm, Marquis Bey, expert on fugitivity and stealing themselves back, delivers a manifesto on spillage.

At 1:15 everyone eats lunch. 

In the afternoon
At 2:30pm, artist Tony Cokes considers fragments, in relation to each other. At 3pm, Maggie Segale dances Still Life on a Single Breath. At 3:10pm, choreographers and long-time collaborators Ralph Lemon and Darrell Jones rant.

At 4pm, we will have a coffee break.

At 4:30pm, psychoanalyst and poet Nuar Alsadir presents a spillage of Animal Joy (2022).

Frrrrrrr, prrrrr, frrrrrrrr, prrrrrrrr, mmmmmrrrrrr, throughout the day and at 5:15pm, artist Irena Haiduk inhales thick smoke issuing from the fallen buildings and then, only moments later, exhales billions of zero-shaped smoke rings.

At 6pm, we will stretch our legs.

In the evening:
At 6:15pm, Maggie Segale dances SWEAT SHAME ETC. At 6:18pm, a critique of the day will be provided.

At 7pm, we transition.

Learn more about Deadtime, an anatomy study, A Thesis on Spillage—a symposium-like Gathering, and the Graham Foundation Fellowship here. 

About the Graham Foundation
Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. For updates on our programming and grantees, join our mailing list.