We at the Henry Art Gallery live and work on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples, and the shared waters of all tribes and bands, named and unnamed, including Suquamish, Duwamish, Tulalip, and Muckleshoot nations. The land acknowledgment reminds us of our connections, indebtedness, and responsibilities to the peoples and the more-than-human kin where we live and work.
We invite you to join us in paying respects to elders past, present, and future and to consider what paying those respects means within the work that we do as individuals and within institutional frameworks.
A.K. BURNS: WHAT IS PERVERSE IS LIQUID – A COMMUNITY RESPONSE is the sixth volume in the Interpretive Guide series. Started in 2020 by former Associate Curator of Public and Youth Programs, Mita Mahato, Ph.D. and former Programs Manager, Ian Siporin, this series is an ongoing print project that invites community partners to respond to one of the Henry’s exhibitions. The Interpretive Guide aims to help dismantle the idea that there is one right way to experience and respond to art. The Henry offers this guide as an alternative to the traditional wall text, giving space to voices outside of the institutional museum framework.
Installation view of A.K. Burns: What is Perverse is Liquid, 2024, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle.
Pg 7: Aqua Net [detail]. 2022. Glass, silver nitrate, copper mesh, carbon, dematerialized: jean seams and twine. Courtesy of the artist.
EDITOR’S
Shameka
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Matter is never a settled matter. It is always already radically open… Nothingness is not absence, but the infinite plentitude of openness.
– Karen Barad, from “What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice”
The multimedia works in A.K. Burns’s exhibition What is Perverse is Liquid form a vast and sensuous network that brushes the depths of Karen Barad’s plentiful void. Rather than centering fixed perspectives and measurements of this infinite space, these works embrace multiplicity and transformation, playing around and beyond the boundaries of knowing.
This Community Response Guide further engages a sense of “radical openness” by introducing a multiplicity of perspectives in conversation with the exhibition. The guide features contributions from six community members working across disciplines and mediums, who each selected an artwork or a grouping of works to focus on and create a written response.
The resulting interpretive responses move and slip like Burns’s titular liquid across the show’s intersecting themes, seeping into and through the porous boundaries between land, water, bodies, and space. Like Burns’s work, they flow between genres and styles, tethered to each contributor’s respective practice as well as a multitude of events, locations, and materials.
These material subjects include the soil and waters of the Caribbean archipelago, the dusty rubble from occupied lands, the lukewarm foam from a full bathtub, the porous skin that separates inside from outside, the irradiated grains that rain from nuclear testing grounds, and the gallons of water that cool massive data servers. Through their writing, each contributor unsettles this matter, shaking out its particles and examining the place it holds within a network of relationships that connect human and more-than-human kin. From these often-overlooked fragments of the present and the past emerges a possible future – though, like Barad’s void, its possibilities are unfixed and ever-changing.
EM CHAN
What is Perverse is Liquid— A Community Response Editor
Curatorial Assistant
AN EMPIRE’S TRACE ON LEAVE NO TRACE (POEM)
BY JO COSME
my entire life’s been shaped by the corrosive cycle of empire and colonialism. a Boricua Islander is born into Resistance against double colonization. forced into survival praxis, we aren't afforded the luxury to exist on our own Land. stay and submit. serve the settler and tourist; sing ‘despuhceetoh’, pour piña coladas, drown into subjugation and erasure. repeat. or…leave and bleed out, learn to live with a dislocated Heart.
We are simultaneously your invisible colonized subjects, and your Caribbean fantasy. We’re meant to leave our Land without a trace for you.
christopher columbus is found lost in the Caribbean Sea by the Taíno Tribes, 1493. first massive Taíno Rebellion, 1511. no longer able to identify as Taíno on the census and loss of our Arawakan Language, 1600s. leave no trace.
spanish-american war, 1898
insular cases, Boricuas are “uncivilized alien races who can’t self-govern and shouldn’t have the same Rights as a continental u.s. born citizen”, 1901 - ongoing. forced “americanized” assimilation, second attempt to erase the common language and culture, 1902 leave no trace.
the start of eugenics, pill testing and forced sterilization of Boricua Women, 1937. u.s.-born women now have birth control pills, we are but a testing playground. Ponce massacre, start of the suppression of Borikén's Pro-Independence Uprising, 1937. leave no trace.
Vieques is the marine’s bombing playground, 1941. gag law: Our Flag, Anthem and any talk of Liberation is illegal, 1950. fbi’s cointelpro project assassinates and prosecutes Liberation Activists, 1950.
Boricua Liberation Leaders Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irvin Flores, and Andrés Figueroa are taken into custody after attacking the u.s. congress, 1954. leave no trace.
president obama reinforces neocolonial policies by implementing a u.s. oversight board, 2016. Hurricane María real death toll is 4645, president trump mocks us, 2017.
Borikén is considered to be three times poorer than the poorest State, 2021. leave no trace.
“you’re from POHRTO RHEECOH?! FUN!”
We’ve been reduced to vacation resorts. the north american people are in avoidance of their complicity. unacknowledged privilege blinds the person and harms others. since 1493, the hurricanes never left the Caribbean Archipelago of Borikén. leaving a clear trace of Resistance in our bloodline, but bloodshed in the empire’s.
TRANSFORMATION ON UNTITLED (GRAIN)
BY SASHA SU-LING WELLAND
The chiaroscuro of photography is alchemical, an experimental history of manipulation, exposure, expiration.
At the end of the day, an experimentalist put his matter away, a chunk of uranium carelessly pushed into a drawer containing a photographic plate. He later discovered a luminous transformation: emulsion shot through as if by sun, by what we now say is radioactive decay.
He walks into the canyon alone, a camera slung across his chest, seeking something larger than life on the horizon.
To the newcomers’ eyes the desert was deserted, open to extraction, but only after their generals removed the Diné from their land. Later, having found uranium there, they requisitioned them back, native hands pushed down deep, mining ore from underneath watchful guard.
They walk into the canyon together. One a ghost image of the other, he carries his daughter in the hollow of his heart, rent open, leaking marsh elder seeds.
Four sacred mountains fed, unceremoniously, the experimental drive to build a bomb. And then they tested more, one after another in proving grounds at the end of the world. As spectacular clouds plumed on the horizon, fallout silently rained across the land, dusting film stock thousands of miles away with ghostly grain.
It’s ok, she whispers, to open your eyes now the sun has set.
The ancients stand witness, their figures looming tall, pigment-stained high on striated canyon walls, in clusters and in solitude, some wide-eyed, some with horns. A traveler once passed, long ago, beneath their silent guard and pushed into the shadows a carrier bag containing seeds, chipped stone, and shard of
antler bone. Later, eons later, the antelope-skin sack emerged intact from windblown sandstone, offering sustenance still.
A dark velvet bag of stars, turned inside out and draped over four mountain tops, blankets the world in grainy night.
Untitled (Grain). 2012.
Digital C-Print from expired 35mm film. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Sean Fader.
HUMAN/ NATURE ON WHAT IS PERVERSE IS LIQUID (NS 0000)
BY CYNTHIA BROTHERS
Young workers clad in jumpsuits and badges clock into a corporate-type job/captivity. Sequestered in spare, sanitized office space that feels mildly sinister and dystopian, they work in isolation from the outside world (occasionally peering outside), save for prescriptive interactions with natural elements that have been repackaged for human use and consumption: bottled (water), bagged (dirt), cast and minted (copper and zinc).
Their day appears occupied with computer work and mundane, perhaps nonsensical tasks: pushing around carts of “waste,” melting down coins, swapping out water bottles, stripping wiring (that may yet feel familiar to anyone who’s worked a soulsucking office position). Resource extraction and conversion, commodifying natural and chemical elements. Productivity that reinforces and values itself…is it for its own sake? I can’t help but think of the water required for computing power: a 100-word AI-generated email could use up a whole bottle of water for the cooling needed at data centers1; and the water consumption tied to a single Bitcoin transaction, on average, is enough to fill a small backyard pool2. Water powers the workers; water powers the technology.
The vastness of the bare office floor - a human-built environment that can exert control over land as well as our behaviors - is visually juxtaposed with the expanse of a swamp. Two bird-like creatures perform repetitive behaviors and vocalizations. There are certain rituals people in capitalistic societies also perform; different modes and means of survival. Waking up every day to an alarm; assembling parts on a line; compiling TPS reports (shoutout to Office Space); clocking in; clocking out. We are all animals responding to our surroundings.
An owl inside the empty office begins and ends the video. Is this nature in captivity, or nature reclaiming the built environment? Amidst constant conditioning and control, what is our human nature?
What is Perverse is Liquid (NS 0000). 2023. 3-channel HD video installation (color, 5.1 sound), 35:54 mins. Two projection screens, freestanding projection wall, plexiglass, sandbags, sand, rubber pool liner, and pennies. Courtesy of the artist.
1 Pew Research Center analysis, as cited in “AI Is Everywhere Now—and It’s Sucking Up a Lot of Water.” Inside Climate News, September 28, 2024.
2 Cell Reports Sustainability study, as cited in “It’s not just electricity — Bitcoin mines burn through a lot of water, too.” The Verge, November 29. 2023.
SACRIFICE IN THE FORM, RATHER THE OFFERING ON SCULPTURAL WORKS
BY SHAMEKA GAGNIER
Undefinable.
Between the ways plaster, bone, rebar, and the weight of our consumption covers everything. Rendering the air unbearable1.
I want to know when we became more drawn to the lines and boxes to hold the sum of our crowded hearts1.
Our desire for control,
Our unnatural tendency to be shut off, shut down from everything that supports our very life.
The beings that sacrifice themselves to nourish our bodies. In that living contact our ancestors made with the plants, the animals, and all of life.
Do you know?
Do you see the sacrifice here in the form?
Living with the discarded fused to our very bodies.
Alters, these bodies, sanctuary these forms, Blown apart, notwithstanding the betrayal1.
Our children betrayed and given to be crushed under the weight of unacceptable conditions1.
Tell me of a map to write the world whole, the body, her body scared.
Tethered to a core of spirit, to stars, to dust.
And now you live your daytime, and even your dream time1 for these boxes and plastics. Fused to these sacred forms.
Let us write a map to the next world2.
Void of these storage units1, these boxes of plaster, steel, and lumber kept us stacked one on another.
Filed and alone.
Loneliness grapples with the refuse and languishes in the heat of unquelled rage2. When we rejected our hearts, refused our grief, and lost the part we should have saved1.
The parts that made us honest, made us conscious, and made us connected.
As you see these forms, think upon the face of promise, shellshocked eyes. Haunted.
Brown skin, black hair covered in the powder of plaster.
May we be haunted by the screams so we can end this madness.
May we see all the children as our own.
May we build a starbridge on the promises our ancestors made to keep the balance. Those covenants are not lost.
Somewhere buried in our marrow, to be awakened and reappear again and again2...
She Was Warned. 2017. Cement hydrocal mix, concrete, rebar, steel wire, steel concrete reinforcement, plastic, pigmented resin. Courtesy of Miller Meigs Collections, Portland, OR.
1 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
2 Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World: Poetry and Tales (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000).
This page and opposite: The Trash Serpent. 2024. Powder-coated steel rebar, concrete, cast urethane, resin, cinder block. Courtesy of the artist.
LYING ON THE FLOOR AT THE HENRY ART GALLERY ON CORPOREAL SOIL
BY MITA MAHATO
GET IN THE BATH ALREADY ON LIVING ROOM (NS 00)
BY MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE
Sit with me, between the cushions and the end of time. We all know it already ended anyway. Foam will be our breakfast, soil our dinner. Don’t even ask me about lunch, just a hunch, munch and munch, crunch, honey, crunch.
Get in the bath already, it’s time to end the museum. Don’t tell me about the cost of news, it’s too expensive to subscribe anymore. Let’s paper the walls with our failure. When the paper dries, time flies.
I needed an infusion, you needed a delusion. This is how we match. Get in the bath already, it’s time to end the museum. Bed, Bath, and Beyond terror. The communalism of cake. Sugar crash.
Impeach the present. Repeat the suture. Some form of air, now that we’re beyond language. Me? I’m learning French with my long Covid, moving the brain beyond the beyond. Get in the bath already, it’s getting cold in my heart. We need a new pattern for the post-apocalyptic sofa.
Get in the bath already, I’m dying for your pain. Is there a position for this decomposition? Who’s moving in, who’s moving out. The cracks in the walls, the falls, the cat-calls and the rubber balls, bouncing down the eternal stares, who cares, who shares, who glares, who tears through the paper in the parking lot beyond time, beyond crime, beyond slime, beyond the beyond, yes, get in the bath already, I need an institution for what you know was never there. An infusion of care. Stop. Listen to my condition. Let’s paper the walls with our failure to dream.
Living Room [NS 00]. 2017. 2-channel HD video installation, 5.1 surround sound. Courtesy of the artist.
Photo: Production still by Eden Batki.
Living Room (NS 00). 2017. 2-channel HD video installation (color, sound); 36:00 mins. Projection wall, sheet of drywall, stripped couch frame, plastic couch cover, LED strip lighting, dirt, foilwrapped hard candy, urethane resin, topping soil, epoxy resin, off-white carpet, wall with exposed studs. Courtesy of the artist.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOS
CYNTHIA BROTHERS is the founder of Vanishing Seattle, a media movement that documents and celebrates the disappearing institutions, small businesses, and cultures of Seattle. Vanishing Seattle has received coverage in publications including the Seattle Times, New York Times, KUOW, and King 5 TV. The award-winning Vanishing Seattle film series has screened at Local Sightings Film Festival, Seattle Black Film Festival, Alaska Airlines in-flight, and more. Cynthia was the curator of the 2023 Vanishing Seattle exhibit for Forest For The Trees at RailSpur and released her first book, Signs of Vanishing Seattle, in 2024. She was named one of “Seattle’s Most Influential” in Seattle Magazine in 2023 and 2018, and Seattle Met’s “Best of the City” in 2021. Cynthia is a founding member of the anti-displacement organizing group Chinatown-International District (CID) Coalition, aka #HumbowsNotHotels. She will readily admit to local clichés like playing in bands, once making espresso for a living, and is a proud alumna of the high school where Bruce Lee first demonstrated his famous “one-inch punch.”
JO COSME is an award-winning multimedia Native Boricua artist originally from Borikén (Puerto Rico), who was displaced to Seattle after Hurricane María. Through her art, she confronts ignorance about her homeland, tackling themes of US Imperialism and disaster capitalism. With a BFA in photography from Puerto Rico’s School of Fine Arts, her work has graced prestigious venues, including Museo de las Américas (PR), Galerie Rivoli 59 (Paris), and Whatcom Museum (WA). In 2021, she earned the Puerto Rican Artist Fellowship at MASS MoCA’s A4A Residency, followed by numerous grants and accolades in 2022 and 2023. In 2024 she inaugurated her solo exhibition, Welcome to Paradise: ¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre! at 4Culture Gallery. She plans to expand this project throughout the year, with a residency at Anderson Ranch Fine Arts Center in fall 2025.
SHAMEKA L. GAGNIER is a non-tribal descendant of Indigenous peoples from North (Carolinas/Purepecha-Mexico), South (Ecuador/Colombia) Turtle Island, Africa (North/West), and Europe (West). Through this confluence, they move to co-create spaces and possibilities to provide care for the Earth, the Waters, and our communities. Shameka has been a visitor on the territories of the Squaxin Island, Nisqually, Muckleshoot, and Duwamish peoples for the last twenty-two years. They have had the honor of working in collaboration, relationship, and partnership with many community partners, schools, non-Native and Indigenous non-profits, and city/ state entities. Shameka’s work centers on connecting plant communities to their
usual and accustomed territories, coordinating/working with BIPOC youth job training education cohorts and events. Their work also includes leading place-making and restoration events, writing curriculum, and teaching project-based arts integrative education throughout Washington State. The long-term mandate for their contribution is committed land and water rematriation made through actionable steps in tending and contributing to plant diversity, reciprocal healing, art, and creative tools, guided by the wisdom and hands of First Peoples, Black, Native American, and Indigenous community.
MITA MAHATO is the author and artist of Arctic Play (The 3rd Thing, 2024) and the collection In Between (Pleiades, 2017). Her poetry comix have been published in PRISM, Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, and her practice has been supported by Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Loghaven, Storyknife, Black Earth Institute, Short Run Seattle, Mineral School, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and The Arctic Circle. She teaches comix and poetry at all levels and currently lives in Seattle.
MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE is the award-winning author, most recently, of Touching the Art (2023), a finalist for a Washington State Book Award and a Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her previous title, The Freezer Door (2020), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award and an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, she’s the author of six books, and the editor of six anthologies, most recently Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis (2021). Sycamore’s next novel, Terry Dactyl, will be published by Coffee House in November 2025.
SASHA SU-LING WELLAND is Professor and Chair of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, and China Studies faculty member at the University of Washington. She is the author of A Thousand Miles of Dreams: The Journeys of Two Chinese Sisters (2007) and Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art (2018). Her current research on embodied ecologies examines the entanglement of military and medicine, nuclear colonialism and racial capitalism in the Anthropocene’s production of everyday carcinogenic relations. An editorial board member of Journal of Visual Culture, Welland has published in Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Studies, positions: asia critique, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. She has curated feminist art exhibits in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.
EXHIBITING ARTIST BIO
A.K. BURNS is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, City University of New York. Using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and collaboration and working at the nexus of language and materiality, Burns troubles systems that assign value and explores their sociopolitical embodiment. Burns has exhibited internationally, including at 2018’s FRONT International, Cleveland, Ohio; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf, Germany; MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; New Museum, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists in the Greater Economy), a nonprofit artists’ advocacy group. Community Action Center (2010), a video made in collaboration with A.L. Steiner that re-imagines pornographic cinema for queer womxn, trans and nonbinary bodies, has screened internationally, including the Tate, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Burns is a 2023 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow; a 2016 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award Recipient.
Opposite: Not Today. 2024. Powder-coated steel rebar, cast urethane resin, concrete, nylon sock, syringes and medical waste. Courtesy of the artist.
PHOTOGRAPHER
All images by Jonathan Vanderweit unless otherwise noted.
DESIGNERS
Summer Li
Emeka Alams
A.K. Burns: What is Perverse is Liquid is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Senior Curator, with Em Chan, Curatorial Assistant. An important precedent for the Henry’s exhibition is A.K. Burns: Of space we are... (2023), curated by Kelly Kivland, former Head of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts and current Director and Lead Curator for Michigan Central’s Art Program.
All Henry exhibitions are realized with the support of staff across museum departments. For a complete list, visit henryart.org/about/people
Exhibitions at the Henry are made possible through the generous support of our annual sponsors, 4Culture and ArtsFund.
Cover: What is Perverse is Liquid (NS 0000). 2023. 3-channel HD video installation (color, 5.1 sound); 35:54 mins. Courtesy of the artist.
