Anna Cahn

Courtesy of Martina DaSilva

Anna Cahn is a curator and writer based in New York City who is particularly interested in the intersection of performance and interdisciplinary media in contemporary artistic practices. She recently curated the exhibition In Longing at the CUE Art Foundation, which explored the emotionally and politically charged power of longing. From 2016-2020 she worked as a Curatorial Associate at the Rubin Museum of Art, where she assisted with exhibitions and curated

performances and artist talks such as the Refiguring the Future series. She has held previous positions as guest curator and visiting critic for Residency Unlimited, adjunct lecturer at the City College of New York, and research fellow at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and Spiral. She received her BA from Clark University and an MA in Art History from the City College of New York. She is currently a PhD student in the Art History & Criticism Department at Stony Brook University.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in October 2021.

GM: What was your path to becoming a curator?

AC: Being a native New Yorker and living here for most of my life has played a really big role in shaping my interests. New York is such an amazing, influential place. I was introduced to art history in high school, but decided to be a history major in college. I was taking all these history classes, but they were extremely male dominated and I felt really out of place. I was interested in ideas of speculative history and felt super misunderstood by my colleagues and fellow students. I started taking art history classes again and realized, “This makes more sense. This is my truth and how I see the world. ” After graduating, I had a brief transition of coming back to the city, living at my parent’s house for a year, and working at the front desk of The Met before going to graduate school for my master’s. […] Having internships in the curatorial departments at the Guggenheim and the Met was foundational for me, and made me realize I wanted to be a curator.

GM: What is your background in curating exhibitions relating to the intersections of performance art and media art?

AC: Growing up in New York City, I went to LaGuardia, a performing arts high school, and studied music there. I was classically trained as an opera singer and performed from ages 14 until 20. The reason why I stopped singing is because I had really terrible stage fright. I hated performing and the nerves I got; I felt like I was going to throw up or cry. I don’t miss performing, but the feeling that I got from singing and using my body in a performative way. Still to this day, singing was the thing that made me feel most embodied; that feeling of connecting with your body and also the voice’s reverberation. (Continued)

SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, REQUEST-->LURE-->RESPONSE-->REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE, 2017. Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation

I think that my work with performance art is me secretly trying to chase that feeling again, and working with artists who have those moments of bodily relation and resonance with their audience. I worked at the Rubin Museum of Art as a curatorial assistant and helped out with exhibitions for five years, and had the opportunity to curate the performance series “Refiguring the Future. ” This was in response to the Rubin’s thematic approach at the time, where they programmed each year of exhibitions to revolve around a central theme. The exhibition that was up at the time was about futurity from a very traditional, historical Buddhist perspective. I thought it would be super interesting to be in dialogue with contemporary artists who don’t necessarily have a Buddhist practice, but one that could be intersected with ideas of futurity, alternative understandings of time, non-linearity, and contemporary myth making. I also curated a show with Residency Unlimited. I’m really interested in having a studio visiting practice where even if an artist doesn’t have a formal studio, [I could] just regularly meet with artists and have the dialogue that takes shape with wherever they ’re working. I like to think of exhibitions as really being led by the artists and their ideas.

Raymond Pinto, what is left, if I am earth, 2021. Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation

GM: Can you discuss your experience curating “In Longing” (2021) at CUE Art Foundation?

AC: It was a super wonderful experience. There’s a really great support team at CUE, and just the resource of having an [accompanying exhibition] catalogue produced for the show and being given the opportunity to work with a curatorial mentor, especially one as brilliant as Legacy Russell. Working with her was such an invaluable experience, because I felt super supported and like I had someone who had gone through this process before that knew the ins and outs of curating an exhibition, nonetheless during COVID. I started thinking about this exhibition in December 2019; I had just finished reading Ocean Vuong’s book, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (2019). [I was] thinking about how poetry can inform curatorial and artistic practices, specifically his ideas on longing and desire. I conceived “In Longing” as a performance show with at least three live commissioned performances and submitted the proposal in March 2020. (Continued)

After the proposal was accepted that June and I started planning the exhibition later that summer, it became very clear that we needed several contingency plans and that the performances weren’t going to be able to be fully executed like we imagined. It was a very difficult situation to work through. I found that there was a sense of loss, not only with the artists that I was working with, but the art world and those who work in performance - in general for the people who had passed and all the horrible things that had happened, but also the loss of a medium. The raw materials of performance – the spontaneity, liveness, and interaction with the audience – could not happen in the same way. We were simultaneously grieving and trying to create at the same time. It was really difficult and challenging, but also a super illuminating experience, to see the artists and myself work through these issues in real time. All of the performances happened in one way or another, and I’m really proud of that and the artists in the show The featured artists were Alison Chen, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Raymond Pinto, Marie Ségolène, and Xirin, who are a group of very talented and diverse artists who work in very different mediums, but performance unites their practices. I was interested in how they all utilized movement, whether that be dance, everyday gesture, or performance to inform their understanding of longing and desire. All of the performances happened in hybrid models of live streaming or performance film; they were all amazing, but something super interesting happened with Xirin’s performance, which was originally supposed to happen in the gallery.

Xirin, Belly Kiss Performance, 2021. Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation

Alison Chen, In and Out, 2005 – Ongoing. Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation

GM: Are you talking about her performance “Taste Test: Dinner Banquet” (2021)?

AC: In her [exhibited] film,

“Hope Eats The Soul” (2019), there’s an egg pass between her and her partner. We wanted to expand that performance into “Taste Test: Dinner Banquet” , where she and her partner would have a three-course meal of the food pass in a kitchen. Instead of building a fake kitchen in the gallery, she made it site specific to a cooky kitchen in Brooklyn and we invited a live streamed audience. It became really cinematic in that way and was reminiscent of DIY performances of the 1960’s and 1970’s, where people went to each other’s lofts to watch a performance. It was really cool that we could do that, and I don’t think that that would’ ve happened if we’d hadn’t had to re-think the performance.

GM: Do you believe that art institutions embrace performance art and media art in terms of exhibition and programming thematics?

AC: In the past year, a lot of institutions have turned to BIPOC performance artists who make political work as a way of figuring out the museum shit for them. I don’t think that’s enough, and it also enacts some sort of violence back onto these artists. I want to think about if it’s possible to do these political performances without simultaneously redeeming these institutions. These institutions have a lot of financial support they can offer, but how do artists and curators utilize these resources without redeeming these capitalist, racist agendas that are so often perpetrated at these institutions? I don’t have an answer right now, but I’ll let you know if I ever do. One of the other reasons why I’m so drawn to performance art is that there’s a certain urgency that is translated, unlike any other medium, because of its spontaneity and how things play out in real time. The way that institutions interact with artists directly affect their performances. A few years back at the Rubin, I was working on a performance with two artists, Morehsin Allahyari and Shirin Fahimi, which was about breaking through geographical, political, and emotional borders. (Continued)

This was during the beginning of Trump presidency, during the travel ban, and these two artists were Iranian. Shirin was living in Canada at the time and had just gotten a Canadian passport, but didn’t know until two days before the performance if she was going to be able to get through the border because she was a citizen of Iran. It was just so metaphorically charged that the performance itself could possibly break down due to these political implications. Luckily, she was able to come and it was an amazing performance. That was such a pivotal moment for me to see the political powers of performance.

Installation view of "Rogue Gogue" by Marie Ségolène, 2021. Photo by Adam Reich and Courtesy of CUE Art Foundation

GM: What are you currently working on in your graduate studies?

AC: I’m a first year in the PhD in Art History and Criticism program at Stony Brook, so I’m still figuring out what I want to focus on. I’m really interested in looking at the ways in which experimental movement and choreographic practices intersect with the New York art scene in the 1970’s and 1980’s. A lot of the artists that I’m

looking at right now, both curatorially and as an art historian, are artists that use the body in a poetic way and explicitly map out gestures of yearning, longing, and desire, and what that means to them. Going back to what I said in the beginning, I have issues with feeling disembodied and a little on the outside of my [own] body, so I’m drawn to artists that show me how to sit inside of my own desire.

*All photos in this section are installation images from the exhibition "In Longing" (June 3 - July 14, 2021). Curated by Anna Cahn for CUE Art Foundation