EXHIBITION ARTISTS

60

Confiscated letters written to Heriberto Marín in prison. He served time for participating in the Jayuya Revolt when he was just a teenager. CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA, Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

61

EXHIBITION ARTISTS

ANN MESSNER

Ann Messner is a NY-based multidisciplinary artist. Her work has examined fault lines between the individual and the larger social body as encountered within public realm discourse, investigating the incongruities between notions of private life/space and public/ civic engagement and experience. Her 1970's performative work, interventionist in strategy, took place 'unofficially' within the context of the urban street, and survives as super 8 film and 35mm photos. Messner's first solo exhibition, an ongoing public performance (Franklin Furnace 1978), utilized a crudely over-amplified typewriter with outside speakers projecting the pounding of keys well beyond the parameters of the interior building space. Later, in 1995, these early performances were critically considered together in the exhibition 'subway stories and other shorts, Ann Messner: photographs and film 1976–1980' (Nina Felshin, Dorsky Curatorial Projects).

Messner’s recent work continues a commitment to civic engagement: 'The Real Estate Show and Other Histories', presented at Creative Time's Summit 2013: Art, Place, and Dislocation in the 21st-Century City; 'the underground potato' (in collaboration with activist/ artist Laurie Arbeiter), a food vending media cart, installed in the Essex Street Market Cuchifritos Gallery in conjunction with 'The Real Estate Show: Was Then: 1980; What Next 2014?'; and 'DuBois_the FBI files', commissioned for Du Bois in Our Time, University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMASS, Amherst.

Ann is recipient of numerous fellowships: a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the NEA, 3 NYFA Awards, and a Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship. She was a fellow at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2000) and Princeton University Council on the Humanities (2001). She is currently full professor MFA Integrated Practices Fine Arts at Pratt Institute.

62

the free library and other histories, posters, 60 ✗ 96 in. (each), 2018.

the free library and other histories, 20 pages, offset tabloid, printed on 50lb white newsprint. 3rd edition, 2000 copies, 12.5 ✗ 17 in. (each), 2018–2021.

CHRISTOPER GREGORY-RIVERA

Christopher Gregory Rivera is a Puerto Rican photographer based in New York City. His work is particularly interested in rescuing historic narratives through documentary, still life and archival research to promote a better understanding of the present. He has lectured at the International Center of Photography in New York and his work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. He has been shown in the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Netherlands. He is a founding member of Blackbox, a visual cooperative that merges the creative processes of photography and design to build immersive stories and in 2019 he was selected for the World Press Photo Foundation Joop Swart Masterclass.

Las Carpetas, installed wallpaper, 112.25 ✗ 90 in., 2014–. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. Las Carpetas, photographic wallpaper, 72 ✗ 90 in. 2014–. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

KAPWANI KIWANGA

Kapwani Kiwanga (b. Hamilton, Canada) lives and works in Paris. Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and Art at l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2020, Kiwanga received the Prix Marcel Duchamp (FR). She was also the winner of the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and the annual Sobey Art Award (CA) in 2018. Kiwanga’s Solo exhibitions include Haus der Kunst, Munich (DE); Kunstinstituut Melly – Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (NLD); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne (CHE); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (USA); Albertinum museum, Dresden (DE); Artpace, San Antonio (USA); Esker Foundation, Calgary (CA); Tramway, Glasgow International (UK); Power Plant, Toronto (CA); Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago (USA); South London Gallery, London (UK); and Jeu de Paume, Paris (FR) among others. Selected group exhibitions

63

include Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK); Serpentine Galleries, London (UK); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (CHN); MOT – Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (JPN); Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (DE); Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden – MACAAL, Marrakech (MAR); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (CA); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (USA); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (USA); Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal (CA); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus (DK) and MACBA, Barcelona (ESP).

Glow 2, wood, stucco, acrylic, steel, LED lights, 59 ✗ 23.75 ✗ 8 in., 2019. ©2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Glow 3, wood, stucco, acrylic, steel, LED lights, 69.75 ✗ 39.5 ✗ 10 in., 2019. ©2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Works courtesy of Galerie Poggi, Paris.

MARGARET LAURENA KEMP + ABRAM STERN

Margaret Laurena Kemp is an actor, a multidisciplinary performing artist, writer, director and teaching artist, whose research explores authorship and spatial politics through performance. She has performed at Arena Stage, Mark Taper Forum, Yale Repertory, South Coast Repertory, La Mama Theatre (Melbourne, Australia), Theatre of Changes (Athens, Greece), Red Pear Theatre (Antibes, France), and The Magnet Theatre (Cape Town, South Africa). In the winter 2021 release, Ten-Cent Daisy, she plays a mermaid who visits dry land to seek redemption. Additional film credits include the award-winning Children of God, Shangri-La Cafe and the supernatural film thriller Blood Bound. Her experimental performance films and durational performances have been installed at Women Made Gallery, Chicago (2020), Elaine Jacobs Gallery Detroit (2019). She is a Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis.

Abram Stern is an artist and scholar whose practice engages techniques of opacity and intelligibility within collections of government-produced media and metadata related to surveillance, militarized policing, carceral systems, and their oversight. This work analyzes media through which public bureaucracies address their citizens, subjects, and targets, while implicating and foregrounding the apparatuses of sense-making that make this analysis possible. His artworks and collaborations have been exhibited at New Langton Arts, The Beall Center for Art + Technology, Real Art Ways, and Museum Schnöggersburg. Abram is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Cruz.

64

ORPHAN DRIFT, If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019.

65

Richard Chowenhill is an award-winning composer, guitarist, and audio engineer whose music has been performed the world over. Drawing influence from his experiences performing in rock and metal bands, chamber ensembles, orchestras, jazz groups, an early music ensemble, many theatre productions, and a Hindustani vocal ensemble, his compositions frequently reflect his diverse musical background.

Unburning, video, 3 hr. 59 min., 2021. Score produced in collaboration with Richard Chowenhill.

Unburning, metadata extracted from surveillance footage, printed data, paper, 2021.

ORPHAN DRIFT

0rphan Drift has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision, since its inception in London in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. In its latest manifestation, 0rphan Drift considers Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus—as a distributed, manyminded consciousness. Inspired by embodied cognitive science and radical anthropology, their multiple channel installations suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception. They combine video, animation and text with newer tools such as LIDAR scanning to suggest new spatio-temporal formations and ask what kind of bodies might be possible with these new coordinates. 0rphan Drift works have been included recently in the exhibitions May the Other Live in Me, Laboratoria Art & Science, Moscow, The Archive To Come at Telematic Gallery San Francisco; This Is A Not-Me at iMT Gallery London; 0rphan Drift and Friends, Public Records TV NYC; Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, UK; Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon; Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or; Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery NY and in the book “Fictioning, The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy”, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Solo exhibitions include If AI were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery San Francisco and Unruly City at Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen Germany.

If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019.

Video Production, Sequencing & Animations: Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts

66

Lidar Scan Animations: Jason Stapleton, Lightfarm Blender Effects: Inga Tilda Underwater Filming, Field & Studio Recordings: David van Rensburg Octopus Footage: Ranu Mukherjee, Maggie Roberts & Olivia Berke Audio Textures: Justin Allart

Synth Audio: Aragorn 23 Audio Mix: Maggie Roberts with Mike Maurillo

Catalogue Design: Jack Orsulak Produced with support of Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco

TREVOR PAGLEN

Trevor Paglen was born in 1974 in Camp Springs, Maryland, and lives and works in Berlin. In 2018 his mid-career survey exhibition Sights Unseen was held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog. Further one-person shows have been held at the Barbican, London; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Secession, Vienna; Berkeley Art Museum; Kunsthall Oslo; and Kunsthalle Giessen, Germany. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He participated in the 2009 Istanbul Biennial; 2012 Liverpool Biennial; 2013 ICP Triennial, New York; and the 11th Gwangju Biennale. He has received numerous awards, including a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2014 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for his contributions to counter-surveillance, and the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. His authored publications include The Last Pictures (New York: Creative Time Books; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), a critical compendium of his Creative Time project to launch an ultra-archival disc, micro-etched with one hundred photographs, into orbit around the Earth for billions of years; Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Penguin Publishers, 2009); and I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagons Black World (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2007). Phaidon published the artist's first complete monograph in 2018. (Metro Pictures)

National Security Agency Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, UT, C-print, 36 ✗ 48 in., 2012.

67

Courtesy of Colby College Museum of Art. Museum purchase from the Jetté Acquisition Fund 2013.530.

YAZAN KHALILI

Yazan Khalili lives and works between Ramallah and Amsterdam. He is an architect, visual artist, educator, and cultural producer. Currently he is a Ph.D candidate at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, and a guest artist resident at Rijksakademie. His artistic and cultural practice frames landscapes, institutions, and social and technological phenomena as politicized entities. He is interested in structures, institutional as well as other, and how those structures are built, and how they perform. This aspect can be traced in his work at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, in Ramallah where he led the institution between the years 2015–2019, critiquing funding and the foundations of a cultural institution under settler colonialism and donors’ economy. He is also co-founder of Radio Alhara in 2020.

His works have been exhibited in several major solo and collective exhibitions, including at KW, Berlin (2020); MoCA-Toronto (2020); New Photography, MoMA (2018); Jerusalem Lives, Palestinian Museum (2017), Post-Peace, Kunstverein Stuttgart (2017); Shanghai Biennial (2016); and Sharjah Biennial (2013). His writings and photographs have been featured in several publications, including eflux journal, Assuming Boycotts, Kalamon, and Race & Class. He is also the co-chair of photography discipline at the MFA program at Bard, NY.

Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

68

MARGARET LAURENA KEMP + ABRAM STERN, Unburning, metadata extracted from surveillance footage, printed data, paper, 2021.

70

This publication is prepared in conjunction with Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic, an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design from October 1–December 10, 2021.

The exhibition features the work of 8 visual artists, Christopher Gregory-Rivera, Margaret Laurena Kemp + Abram Stern, Yazan Khalili, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ann Messner, Orphan Drift (Ranu Mukherjee + Maggie Roberts), and Trevor Paglen and includes works of photography, sculpture, video, installation, and print.

Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic is funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional generous support provided by Jeremy Moser and Laura Kittle. The exhibition is organized by Julie Poitras Santos, Director of Exhibitions, ICA at MECA&D, in conversation with Sophie Hamacher, Assistant Professor of Academic Studies at Maine College of Art & Design, and Brendan McQuade, Assistant Professor of Criminology at University of Southern Maine, and will be accompanied by visiting artist talks and a panel discussion. A film series, organized in conjunction with the exhibition by Sophie Hamacher, screened at the ICA at MECA&D, Portland Museum of Art, SPACE Gallery, and Congress Square Park. Preparatorial work for Yazan Khalili realized by Assistant Director Nikki Rayburn; large wall prints for Christopher Gregory-Rivera’s work by generous donation from Designtex.

Ann Messner’s project, the free library and other histories, distributed, with the help of the MECA&D Joanne Waxman Library, throughout the state via Maine State Library.

Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic is part of Freedom & Captivity, a statewide, coalition-based public humanities initiative to explore and promote abolitionist visions and organizing in Maine during fall 2021.

71

The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design cultivates engagement and dialogue regarding contemporary visual art practices, aiming to foster discourse on the critical conversations of our time and to enhance understanding of visual culture.

Located in stunning galleries in Maine College of Art’s landmark Porteous Building, the ICA at MECA&D presents an exhibition calendar of ambitious work by living artists accompanied by public events and artist talks, operates as a learning laboratory for MECA&D students, and as a center for public programming regarding contemporary art that engages with the local, national and global art community.

© Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be published without the written permission of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design.

Logo Design | Brittany Martin Catalog Design | Samantha Haedrich Installation Photography | Luc Demers

The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design 522 Congress Street Portland, ME 04101 www.meca.edu/ica