Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions
120 Fine Arts Building, Houston, Texas
San Francisco 94110
USA
Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is a series of exhibitions and programs at KADIST San Francisco and Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston that examines the shifts in time, ritual, memory, and community-building in artistic practices between 2020-2024 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions considers the role of artists as prognosticators and narrators of mimetic memory, challenging power structures that enforce isolation, cultural amnesia, and planetary extinction. The exhibition draws from Judith Butler’s notion of intertwinement from What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology, focusing on ‘interdependency’ as an ideal of radical equality, while examining how ritual and memory merge through intimate and communal acts that drive social change, reflecting the circadian nature of movements and revolutions.
In San Francisco, over 40 artists are presented, predominantly from the KADIST collection of over 2,200 artworks, with many making their West Coast debut and highlighting conversations across continents emphasizing Indigenous, tribal, and Aboriginal voices. Anchor works in the exhibition act as makeshift memorials of community-building toward Indigenous resistance, care work, and demands for an abolitionist future: Jeneen Frei Njootli reclaims Indigenous sovereignty; Jamel Robinson explores grief and the Black experience in America; Joe Namy connects Arab American civil liberty, media representation, and the politics of sound; Carmen Winant reflects on collective and intergenerational care work.
Artists: Indira Allegra, Brook Andrew, Edgardo Aragón, Carmen Argote, Yoko Asakai, Saif Azzuz, Kent Chan, Tony Cokes, Moyra Davey, Jim Denomie, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Rahima Gambo, Juliana Góngora, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull, Gordon Hookey, Pao Houa Her, Every Ocean Hughes, Steffani Jemison, Kite and Corey Stover, Subash Thebe Limbu, Tessa Mars, Joe Namy, Eduardo Navarro, Antonio Obá, Juan Obando, Nour Ouayda, Prabhakar Pachpute, Antonio Pichillá, Michael Rakowitz, Jamel Robinson, Sherrill Roland, Asha Sheshadri, Rania Stephan, Kenneth Tam, Moses Tan, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Kaylene Whiskey, Carmen Winant
Learn more about the exhibitions in San Francisco and Houston.
Public programs, San Francisco
Open Bodies
Conceived as a collective body that tends to various perceptive faculties and phenomenologies—sound/listening, body/movement, and language—the program series acts as the ears, the limbs, and the tongue to the exhibition.
Open Ears, in collaboration with The Lab
Temporary exhibition on view November 7–9 and 14–16, 2024, 12–5pm
Location: The Lab, 2948 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103
Exploring sound's social and political dimensions, from toppling monuments to rematriating artifacts. Michael Rakowitz’s Behemoth II (2024), an inflatable replica of the Ulysses S. Grant statue, is paired with Asha Sheshadri’s video Portmanteau (2021), a virtual pandemic-era museum tour of looted objects.
Listening from the Gut, a listening session with Joe Namy
January 11, 2025, 2–5pm
Location: KADIST, 3295 20th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
A collective experience using deep listening to build community and resilience against systemic injustice. Namy invites cultural practitioners to share sounds and songs that resonate with the themes in their installation Half Blue (2019).
Open Arms, in collaboration with Weaving Spirits Festival and CounterPulse
February 6, 2025, 8pm
Location: CounterPulse, 80 Turk St, San Francisco, CA 94102
A choreographic performance by two-spirit performers, invited by the Weaving Spirits Festival inspired by Jeneen Frei Njootli’s casino chips fall out of you, broken hearts and baggies too (2021), which will share stage at CounterPulse.
Open Tongue, in collaboration with McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern
February 15, 2025, 3–5pm
Location: KADIST San Francisco, 3295 20th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
A reading by award-winning author Venita Blackburn (Dead in Long Beach, California), followed by a conversation with Rita Bullwinkel, editor of McSweeney’s and author (Headshot), delving into time, ritual, and memory-keeping practices, on the occasion of the launch of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue #77.
The exhibition at KADIST San Francisco is co-curated by Lindsay Albert (Program Manager, KADIST San Francisco), Joseph del Pesco (International Director, KADIST), and Jo-ey Tang (Director, KADIST San Francisco).
