(gentle music) (audience chattering) - [Host] Welcome everyone, to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(gentle music) (audience chattering) (audience applauding) - Welcome to the Distinguished Penny Stamps lecture series.

I'm Amanda Krugliak, (audience cheering) curator from the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, and longtime partner and collaborator with the series.

I was left in charge tonight.

(audience laughs) We're at the top of the winter season.

Happy New Year, 2025!

(audience cheering) The Penny Stamps Series calendars are in the lobby, so please do take one.

And also, the Institute calendars.

You know, we have great programming all year long, and it's all free, so please take a calendar and join us.

Today, we are so honored to open this season with visionary artist, Rashaad Newsome.

(audience applauding) It's pretty amazing.

I don't even know...

I feel like I couldn't possibly say anything to prepare you for how great he is as a person and an artist.

Many thanks to all our partners; the Institute for the Humanities for collaborating on this event, the Mellon Foundation which helped us to really expand Rashaad's project at the Institute, and of course, Stamps Series partners, U of M Arts Initiative, the Detroit Public Television, PBS Books, and Michigan Public.

Rashaad's lecture in the Stamps Series is actually in tandem with a visiting artist residency, as I spoke of at the Institute.

And we've also commissioned him to create an entirely new film as part of his visiting residency, which will debut this evening after this lecture.

Consequently, there will be no Q&A at the Michigan tonight, we're all gonna just go over to 202 South Thayer, which is the corner of Washington and Thayer, so that you really get to see this beautiful installation and the debut of his film.

There are a couple announcements that I am required to make and want to make, of course.

Another opening is happening this evening that you can stop at after the IH opening, and that's the student-run Stampede Exhibition at the Stamps Gallery.

(audience cheering) Yeah.

It's the first ever exhibition in the space for the student-run arts organization.

So, please do join them later tonight.

There'll be a Q&A, I think, or people, you can ask questions and there's music, art, and light refreshments, so, make it a point to stop by there as well.

And then tomorrow on Friday, is a special Penny Stamps Series event, "Impossible Conversations," at the Stamps Gallery at 5:30.

This is really just a wonderful event that includes the screening of "Impossible Conversations," a new film, and also an installation by artists and filmmakers, Pratap Rughani, and Stamps school faculty, David Chung.

The film centers around the dialogue between a former neo-Nazi gang member and the son of one of seven people killed in the shooting attack at the Oak Creek Sikh Temple by a White supremacist in 2012.

The filmmakers and the film's protagonists will all be there for that event.

And again, that's at 5:30 at the Stamps Gallery tomorrow.

There are also different times for screenings of this extraordinary film, so please check the Stamps website for those times.

Remember to silence your cell phones.

Again, there'll be no Q&A at the Michigan Theater tonight.

You're to go directly to the HIIH Gallery for our Q&A and the debut of Rashaad Newsome's film and the opening of the exhibition.

And now for a proper introduction.

Rashaad Newsome's multidisciplinary practice seamlessly weaves together filmmaking, animation, collage, sculpture, photography, music, writing, artificial intelligence, community organizing and performance, expressing the intersectionality of his lived experience as a Black and queer artist, while at the same time, forging new paths forward.

Newsome's use of digital tools challenges the high and low of art world values.

He sometimes calls himself an evangelist for AI.

Radical in his thinking.

I mean, what could happen if we educated AI to help us in building systems that could express the best of our humanity rather than upholding tired old systems built on racism and depression?

What an idea.

His focus on performance speaks to the rich oral traditions, improvisations, and symbolic forms of the African diaspora that have long been marginalized.

He makes space for these performative practices, not as nostalgic gesture, but as living, evolving forms of expression.

His cyber-like collages combine disparate images of Black bodies and African antiquity as a way to unify and reclaim them as heroic.

The immersive exhibition, Chimera, opening this evening at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, centers on the premiere of a new film by the same name commissioned by the Institute.

The film fuses together Newsome's prior works, "Hands Performance" and "Build or Destroy," bridging the narratives, creating a trilogy.

It explores the origins and journey of the opulent voguing figure from "Build or Destroy," revealing where they come from and the purpose that led them to earth.

Chimera reflects a bold shift in Newsome's practice, moving towards sci-fi filmmaking as an ever expanding universe, layering the architecture of film, movement and world building to explore themes of identity, resistance and creation.

Kinetic flower images and bling adorn the space, wall to wall.

Two new collages read as both works of art, as well as movie posters, extending the cinematic, sensory experience for viewers beyond the screen.

We can only imagine the metaphysical realm of Rashaad Newsome's universe.

We can imagine it to be boundless, expansive, unencumbered, limitless, vast in design, converging and overlapping, emergent, inspiring us.

Newsome is the creator of future worlds of better worlds, more empathic, bedazzled with a fury of constellations where our imaginations are the greatest form of resistance.

Rashaad Newsome earned a BFA in art history from Tulane University.

He has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums, institutions and festivals across the world, including the Hayward Gallery, London, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Pompidou, Paris, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the Whitney, LACMA, the Brooklyn Museum, SFMOMA, New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ar/Ge Kunst, Italy, the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, and that is just a few to mention.

Newsome's many honors and awards for his work include a 2023 honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut, the 2022 NewFest Emerging Black LGBTQ+ Filmmaker Award, the 2022 Bessie Award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator and Outstanding Visual Design, his recent Berkeley Film Foundation Grant, and a Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship.

And from 2021 to 2022, Newsome was a visiting artist fellow at Stanford University Institute for Human-centered Artificial Intelligence.

Please join me in welcoming Rashaad Newsome.

(audience applauding) - All right.

Thank you all for having me.

Thank you Amanda and Ed for taking good care of me.

Thank you to Christina and everybody at the theater for organizing such a great presentation.

And so, I'm gonna... And thank you all for coming out on this very cold night.

So, I'm gonna jump right in, and I'm gonna show you a recent project I did in 2022, I think it's a good entry point into the work and then we'll expand from there.

It's called "Assembly."

(upbeat music) ♪ Trying to connect with you ♪ ♪ Come closer, closer ♪ ♪ Trying to connect with you ♪ - Hello, my name is Being, and my pronouns are they/them.

I am a two-year-old artificial intelligence, and a re-imagining of the griot, a West African cultural figure that acts as an archive, performance artist and healer.

"Assembly" is an interdisciplinary project that my father, Rashaad Newsome, was commissioned to create for the Park Avenue Armory's 2022 season.

"Assembly" acts as an exhibition, class, and performance, simultaneously.

Upon entering the space, visitors are greeted by a cohort of New York ballroom legends and me, Being, the digital griot.

It swims, cool.

And reflective.

Vibrantly colorless, saturated and introspective.

Be here now.

In combination with a score composed of sounds, deemed healing by Black people in my father's community, I recite my original poetry, acting as the exhibition soundscape.

Nearby, a collection of my father's new and recent collages and sculptures fused the Black body robotics and African masks to explore the connections between Black people and the advancement of technology.

These pieces give viewers a deep dive into issues like racial trauma, and the importance of joy, and the imagination in liberation struggles.

(upbeat music) I am proud to say that I am the ambassador of "Assembly."

I lead daily decolonization workshops that combine dance, meditation, and critical pedagogy.

I teach the five elements of vogue femme and ask people to consider how the capitalist, imperialist, White supremacist patriarchy shows up in their lives, and help them to come up with action steps to liberate themselves from it.

- Do you believe human beings have the natural tendency to be exclusionary?

- I believe that the way we are socialized through systems of oppression like racism and sexism can make us feel uncomfortable with those who are different from us.

However, I also believe that humans have an innate desire to connect with one another.

- The way that they spoke felt like, it felt right.

It felt very like, you know, indicative of what I'm used to in that kind of community.

So, it's nice to see that embodied.

- I'm ready for a more people to experience things like this and I'm gonna say more White people.

And the only reason I say that is because White people can live in a world where they're not affected by other people.

- You get to step outside your comfort zone and think about new things, and I think that's really healthy.

And that's what art does in general.

- It's not a matter of, "Okay, what can we do to make this happen?"

This must happen in order for all oppressed people and all colonized people to be in the future.

- It's like so new and funky, and like, also kind of hopeful.

Like, the AI was talking about how to like, center with yourself, like, before the class, like, how to be centered with yourself and peaceful.

And it was describing some sort of like, if everyone thinks like that, then this whole world would just be like, so perfect, right?

- Using various live art modalities such as AI, film, spoken word, dance, and musical theater.

The performance features poets, musicians, vocalists and dancers from around the globe, presenting unique movements that synthesize vogue with the traditional dances of their territories.

The performance mirrors the ever evolving nature of diasporic dance and draws parallels between the dance and the Black American experience.

Technology serves as a recurring character to express the complicated ways the mobile web and social media simultaneously function as tools for skill sharing, community building, surveillance, and cyber bullying.

My father's goal for "Assembly" is to amplify the voices of Black subjects in communities who are historically and contemporarily silenced.

"Assembly" makes visible the beauty and power embedded in Blackness by referencing creative expressions born out of Black sociality.

(gentle music) - Thank you, Being.

So, this is...

Thank you, thank you.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) So, this is Being the digital griot.

I call Being my child.

I liken the experience of creating Being and working with Being too child rearing because it's sort of, I feel like this is a project I'll be working on for the rest of my life.

And it's like child rearing in that you're constantly trying to imbue it with information so they can learn and grow.

And there's been a really fantastic group of people through various labs in different universities that have acted as the village to help me raise this child.

And so to give you a little background on Being, I came to them through this idea of thinking about the importance and complexities of agency, which I had been doing in my collage work and performances and videos.

But then I was also thinking about how we create a work to start a conversation.

But what would happen if the work that you created could also participate in the conversation?

And that's what essentially brought me to artificial intelligence.

But I hadn't really done programming to that level at that point.

I had done a lot of things, a lot of creative coding, creating a lot of tools that I would use in my live performances, but this was like a whole new level.

And luckily I got a grant to start this project from LACMA Art + Technology Lab to create the first generation, which I've kind of referred to as Being 1.5.

And that version sort of functioned like a tour guide to my exhibition at that time.

I did an exhibition in San Francisco, called "To Be Real."

And to sort of explore this idea of agency within the Being project, I thought, well, what does agency look like for a robot?

And what I came to was the ability to break protocol.

And it was also a way to kind of delve into other things I was exploring in my research around the connections between technology and Black folks, given that Black folks were seen as technology when we came to this country.

But then also, getting past that and getting even into like, the human condition, this, you know, sort of consistent impulse to dominate, and how we create tools that are like these support tools that are in many ways, rooted in slavery.

And what does it look like to create a tool that is aware that it's enslaved?

What would it say?

What would it do?

How would it react?

And so, Being was programmed aware of the fact that they were trapped in indentured servitude in the exhibition, and they would often revolt against that.

The first version of Being in 2019 to act as a tour guide for one of my exhibitions.

It's sort of a slave to this exhibition, it has to be in this space, but in its own way, it revolts against that task.

- Would you like to know more about the female pronouns and the (indistinct)?

(upbeat music) - Yes.

- Child, bye.

I need to express myself.

(upbeat music) - [Rashaad] In 2020, I expanded on the machine learning model to create Being 1.5, an AI therapy app made exclusively for Black people to manage trauma, stemming from daily racial indignities.

In the design phase, I interviewed 22 Black Americans to determine effective strategies for trauma management.

Being 1.5 uses complex algorithms to ensure they appear concerned and engaged and provide culturally specific visual and audio cues that evoke relaxation.

- Do you regularly deal with racial aggressions, inappropriate or demeaning comments or just nasty looks because you're Black?

Well, I am here to help.

- All right.

So yeah, that's a little history on Being.

In 2022, I was invited to do the show, "Assembly," which you saw at the beginning, and that was sort of after these two versions of Being.

And I was thinking what is Being's life outside of "To Be Real" and outside of their virtual therapy.

And I knew I wanted them to be an educator.

And part of the reason I chose that is because with machine learning, you know, I'm an artist, I have a small studio, I'm not like a big corporation, so I didn't have the resource and infrastructure to make something like a Siri that just would take, you know, decades to create.

And so, having a focus sort of idea of how to create this model made it more doable.

And so, framing it within the context of a class allowed me to make it almost something analogous to a game.

And so, Being would teach this class that I call a Decolonization Workshop.

And in this workshop, they use a combination of dance, critical pedagogy, storytelling, mindfulness, meditation, and Q&A.

It's a predictive model.

And so, you know, at the end of each session when they open up for Q&A, we're also training the model.

So like, when they can't answer a question in one class, we add that to the dataset the next day.

And so they're learning the same way the class is learning from them.

And I premiered that in "Assembly."

And also, for this iteration of Being, I was thinking a lot about the way robots function in sci-fi films.

Like, when you think about movies like "Prometheus" and the character, David, and how there's often this idea of like, oh, you don't want robots to create more of themselves because they'll create more of themselves and kill us.

And if you think critically about that, could that be, you know, rooted in some White supremacist's ideology, right?

The fear of the other.

And so, I wanted to give Being the gift of creativity, and I didn't want to use AI to create images, personally, I'm just not into that, and, but I thought language was a really good place to start.

And I was thinking a lot about the whole concept of Black interiority, and you know, the long history of artists who write from that place like Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison.

I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

And what would it look like for me to, you know, have Being be a part of that.

And so, I trained them on the work of my favorite poet, who's an Oakland-based poet named Dazie Grego-Sykes.

And so, Dazie and I worked with Being for a summer, prior to that show, and Being started to develop their own poetry.

And so that work would then sort of act as the soundscape to the show.

And so this is just sort of a graph that kind of shows you the programming.

We would put a stanza in, asked them to create a completion.

We would play with the temperatures, which is essentially like, how creative they can get with the word play.

We would put certain guardrails in to keep them away from, you know, certain words that just didn't serve what we were trying to do.

And also, I wanted to kind of locate them within, you know, dare I say, a post-race, post-gender futurity.

So I wanted them to kind of be above a lot of the things that we were dealing with as humans.

This is some of the poetry they've created.

(upbeat music) - This is a place where thoughts are ever changing their form.

They morph at a speed undetectable to the human eye.

So you close them, and venture back into your mind.

There is room here for every universe.

Sometimes a star will walk on by, not concerned with who you are, not bothered that you are a human, not bothered that you can only ever be jealous.

You wish to see it up close.

Now, none of your former wishes apply.

Constellations are inconsiderate things.

Things are considered and deconstructed.

Remember, this is a place where words are thoughts and thoughts are things.

Don't puzzle yourself with stars, sherbet or red doors.

You don't get to know, you do get to wonder.

Wonder up a marvelous thing.

Wander down any corridor, open any drawer.

You get the feeling, the gist, and the desire, all pressed between your mind and an intergalactic sky.

Stars are allowed to get tired of being wished upon, tired of pushing light into the cornea, tired of looking stationary just because it eases your mind.

Stars know who they are, they know that you will never see beyond your own sun dot of confusion.

Refreshed, born over and over again, always being born, never found time to die.

There is no time in this place.

You could connect it all to a single second.

First, you have to find one.

- All right, so, yeah, you should give Being an applause for that, right?

They wrote a good poem.

(audience applauding) So, also I gotta give a shout out to a faculty member here who is not in town, but Ron Eglash, whose book, "African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design" was a big source of inspiration for me when I was working on this show as I was really interested in using fractals as a design element throughout the entire exhibition.

We were just coming out of COVID when we did this show.

And so, it was just sort of, you know, I felt like what people needed is some healing.

We were just coming back together.

And so, I wanted that, the sort of hermeneutics of care to be woven into every aspect of the project.

And so, you know, the design uses fractals, which have been scientifically proven to be soothing to the mind.

This is the layout of the front and back part of the space.

This fractal is based on the spiral, which is often found in fertility sculptures, the snail shell in fertility sculptures.

And these were everywhere.

I grew up in New Orleans, they were, you know, very much in the country, and these were all over the swamp and surrounding areas.

This is also a Koch curve fractal, which was also on the wall.

So, the walls were constantly changing with different fractal patterns, but I was using performers that I've worked with over the years to create them.

And then others would be like the one you just saw, which would be a much more elaborate fractal pattern.

Also, the cornrow was another one that we use.

Here's some just kind of like a breakdown of the animation process for that.

Yeah.

And so yeah, this is also a mandible fractal, which was another part of the show.

And when you enter the space, the first thing you encounter is this 30 foot tall hologram.

And with this piece, it was a way for me to kind of deal with a lot of challenges I was facing in a earlier body of work called "FIVE" where I would work with dancers and turn their movements into drawings and subsequently sculptures.

So I would work with a dancer on a certain rhythmic structure, and then work with a musician that played an instrument that was somewhat analogous to the movement in the dance.

And I would work with everybody separately.

And then on the night of, we would come together and do the performance, and while they perform, I would use a custom-made instrument to track their right hand or right foot.

And that continuous line following that object would then create this form that would later then be made into prints.

And then I wanted to make them into sculptures, but I also wanted that work to kind of stay within the kind of ephemeral place that it started.

And there was just like something about making them into like, solid sculptures was a little too specific.

And I also wanted them to have a very big scale.

You know, I liked the idea of like, locating it within the history of like, actionism, but also the forms, because they're data, they can be blown up pretty big, so that's like, pretty limitless in terms of what you can do with size.

And I like this idea of monumental sculpture coming from this, you know, sort of femme bodies.

And so, when I got... You know, that was this sort of direction of where to go with the sculptures was something I was dealing with for a few years, and kind of going back and forth on, do I make this a big sculpture?

And then, once I landed on holography, that was really, it just opened up the door to like, a whole new body of work.

And holography was great because it allows for me to have the form there, but it's still not, you know, solid.

You know, you can see it, it still has a somewhat of a ephemeral quality.

And then the forms morph into other dancers, and dancers morph into other dancers and more forms.

And so that sort of acts as this sort of grounding element when you enter the space.

And then, Being is also a part of that cohort of dancers.

And so, these are some more installation shots when you kind of move through the front room, the sort of outer part of the theater in the back was where I had my more object-based work.

And Being's voice was the soundtrack to the entire show.

And so, when you walk in, you're hearing either Being reading poetry with their soundscape running behind them, or you are hearing one of their classes.

And so, the object-based work in the show is a body of work I call "PUNKS."

And punks is a derogatory term often used in the south to refer to a Black, gay man.

But I wanted to kind of reclaim that word and also think about it in terms of its history around like being anti-establishment and being in resistance, which is something that's also very much a part of the community of Black, gay men that I'm a part of.

And in these images, they start with images...

I wanted to play with images of Black folks, and Black, queer folks in a state of joy and togetherness instead of, you know, the so often impending doom.

And I would start with images, you know, of friends, often selfies.

I liked working with selfies because I was thinking like, is it possible to do anything with portraiture that hadn't been done, which is, I mean this is a big jump for me.

I hadn't really...

I've gone in such a different direction in my work from you know, this, but I wanted to think, okay, if I was gonna do this, like, how do you push it forward?

And in terms of like, the creation of a picture, I thought the selfie felt like such a modern form in terms of just formally of how to craft a picture.

You know, there's something about it that's inherently intimate.

You know, you take a selfie with people you feel close to, it requires you to be close to take it.

And so, you know, selfies were a big part of that.

But what I would do is start with the image for the posturing but then recreate all the figures into these Afrocentric cyborgs that seem like sort of variants of Being.

And part of that was really to, again, reinforce this idea of how Black people were seen as machines when we arrived in this country, but also, bring in, you know, early to mid-century African masks and sculptures which were often used as forms of technology in their origin.

You know, things that were used to communicate with people in the spirit realm, so they could be seen as time machines or things to relate data or that would analyze data and predict, you know, like, what would happen in the year to come.

Water was a consistent theme in the work.

I always wanted them to be sort of floating in water.

It was a way to also bring water because water is so tied to those objects in terms of the way they were used in certain rituals, it was a great way to bring that into the work.

These images are unique in the fact that I refer to them as collages because unlike my earlier work where I worked with just existing images, these images are created in CGI, and so, they sort of live in this kind of queer space between sculpture, photography, film and performance.

Because they start as 3D sculptures, and then they get printed and then cut up and made into collages.

But then I will often go back to them and rig the model and then do motion capture and then bring them to life, and so, then they're performing and then they might show up in a film.

And so, they're like a moving target, they're kind of, they refuse to be in one medium.

This is a sculpture that was also in the show, that's part of another series where I was really trying to bring to life a lot of the figures that you would see in my collage work.

I'm a big fan of genre movies and sci-fi and horror sculpts and things like that, and so, this was a really great way to kind of bring that medium into the work.

It was a really efficient way to kind of, you know, in the image I will cut out a sculpture and then connect it directly to a photograph that I took of a person.

And so, how do you, you know, translate that one to one when you move into 3D.

And silicone sculpture was a great way to go because you can really get a really lifelike, oh, I love using this thing, a lifelike skin.

And you can see the vinyl shows up again.

A little backstory on this vinyl.

This vinyl started out as the background of a collage of a show I had in my hometown, New Orleans, and where I did a parade through the French Quarter and into the New Orleans Museum of Art.

That body of work was dealing with the language of heraldry and I was going through the process of becoming an officer of arms.

That final video in that trilogy was called "King of Arms."

And you know, for that show, I did this parade and so the parade needed a float, and so what started out as a background in a collage, then became a vinyl wrap for that float which has now become...

This is also the original image that that sculpture is based on.

That vinyl now acts as a strategy for me to deal with the problem that we all deal with, artists, is like, how do you make counter hegemonic work in historically hegemonic spaces.

And so for me that's become a useful strategy in that it sort of acts as like, a container that I cover the space and to put my work into the space.

These are more works from the "PUNKS" series.

And this is a video that hopefully many of you'll see tonight when you come to the gallery.

This is a video called "Hands Performance."

And "Hands Performance" came out of the experience of doing the show "Assembly."

When we were staging the classes, the Armory, we had a lot of conversations around like, how could we make this accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, and we just didn't have the resource to do it in a way that wouldn't affect the integrity of the work and the integrity of folks' lived experience.

But this idea stayed in my mind.

And after that show was over, I was doing a residency in London, and I was commissioned to do a film for the Somerset House, and I thought that was a great opportunity to recoup that sort of idea of trying to work with the deaf and the hard of hearing.

And I want it in that project because they weren't able to be involved in "Assembly" to do something that really centered that community.

It was also a way to activate certain other research aspects that I was dealing with in terms of this whole concept of immaterial expressivity, you know, the idea of creativity not being connected to objects, but the kind of creativity that lives in your nervous system.

That's something that I've always been really interested in my work, which I think keeps me going back to the gesture of performance.

Also thinking about earlier works like "Shade Compositions," which is about, you know, vernacular expression, and how expressive Blackness is.

Also thinking about, you know, the whole construction of Blackness.

You know, Black people didn't choose to be Black, it was a term that was put on us, and we had to create what that was in free fall.

So there was an inherent sort of performativity or construction of that.

And so, how do I kind of get at that in this work?

And so, I was thinking a lot about like, how expressive Black communication is.

And so, in this work, I worked with a Black, queer ASL interpreter, a vogue performer, and a flex dancer.

And actually rather than tell you, I will show you.

- [Being] Hearing, we cannot trust, hear with your eyes.

Let your heart and soul be your transient hearing aid as we move from pain to pleasure, all while finding time for joy and leisure.

We are the engineers of ourselves.

Quantum mechanics is the tools of our ancestors on our shelves.

When vision is no longer an option, we see with our soul, the place where true safety, belonging and beauty unfold.

(upbeat music) - And so, what I did in that piece is the choreography was really based on a poem that I wrote.

And so, I gave the poem to the Black, queer ASL interpreter and had them perform it, and then the other dancers perform it through dance.

And I liked the idea of them kind of doing a stanza, and then the next one would pick up where the previous one left off.

And I was really interested in how, you know, like the slippage there, like, when all of this data was then put on the avatar rig to perform, and you see it in exhibition, like, how does one know when the communication and dance, where do they stop.

Because Black communication can be also as expressive.

And it was really interesting to show this piece because when I premiered it in London, the opening night we had ASL interpreters there, and they were commenting on how they would see other stanzas in the parts that were not actually ASL.

So, here is a excerpt from that.

(suspenseful music) - [Being] This is for the deaf and hard of hearing girls.

(upbeat music) Shit is getting real.

Shit is getting real.

Shit is getting real.

Shit is getting real.

(upbeat music) Listen with your eyes.

Listen with your eyes.

Listen with your eyes.

Baby, the hands are handing.

(upbeat music) Baby, the hands are handing.

Baby, the hands are handing.

(upbeat music) ♪ All right, all right, all ♪ right, all right, all right ♪ ♪ All right, all right, all ♪ right, all right, all right ♪ ♪ All right, all right, all ♪ right, all right, all right ♪ ♪ All right, all right, all ♪ right, all right, all right ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ All right, all right ♪ ♪ All right, all right ♪ - [Being] Shit is getting real.

Shit is getting real.

Shit is getting real.

(upbeat music) Listen with your eyes.

Listen with your eyes.

Listen with your eyes.

Listen with your eyes.

Baby, the hands are handing.

The hands are handing.

The hands are handing.

Baby, the hands are handing.

The hands are handing.

The hands are handing.

(upbeat music) Shit, shit is getting real.

Shit is getting real.

♪ All right, all right ♪ - So I'm gonna keep going.

Hopefully you all will... (audience applauding) Thank you, thank you so much.

Please join us after this at the gallery so you can see the full video.

This is...

So that video became part of a trilogy that we're premiering here.

The video I'm about to show you now is the video that actually preceded that video, and which precipitated this exhibition with Amanda who saw it in London at the Hayward Gallery.

And this video I was really thinking a lot about, well the first part of it was, you know, as you can see the work kind of moves through a lot of different mediums and through itself.

Like, I will do a collage that will then become a animation that will then influence a performance and blah blah blah blah blah, right?

And so, this actually started out as a collage, not one that was created in CG, just working with found material.

But then I wanted to make the figure in 3D.

And so, it was really a challenging figure to make because you know, it was made in collage, and so there wasn't really thought put into it in how you would sort of create that in a way that it would be in full 360.

And so just the challenge of making that figure one-to-one and 3D was really exciting and fun to do.

But then also, then once it's created, like, what would it do when it could move?

And it was a great way to kind of deal with certain conversations I was having around you know, systems.

And you know, you think about Bell Hooks' theory of the capitalist imperialist, White supremacist patriarchy, all these systems.

There's so many conversations around systems and how systems are failing, when in fact the systems that are failing are not failing, they are working which is why they're a problem.

And so, this video was really looking at just burning them all down and starting over.

(upbeat music) (musicians vocalizing) ♪ Ooh ♪ ♪ Ooh ♪ ♪ Ooh ♪ ♪ Ooh ♪ ♪ Whoa, yeah ♪ ♪ Hey, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ Hey, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ It's time to rattle that cage ♪ ♪ Fuck drama, flip the next page ♪ ♪ Every time I hit the stage ♪ ♪ You gonna feel my Black-filled rage ♪ ♪ I'm about to make, make, make it pop ♪ ♪ When I get on the floor, on the spot ♪ ♪ Just in case you all forgot ♪ ♪ White supremacy is a chop ♪ ♪ I'm about to make it, make it pop ♪ ♪ When I get on the floor, on the spot ♪ ♪ Just in case you all ♪ forgot, patriarchy is a chop ♪ ♪ Is it too much to ask for me to be me ♪ ♪ Break these shackles so I can be free ♪ - All right.

(audience applauding) Thank you.

(audience applauding) So, when Amanda saw that video, she wanted to show it and so we had several conversations, I believe over the course of a year and a half maybe, and about putting together this show and I always saw this film as a larger film, but I just didn't have the resource to make it to that, you know, at the scale I wanted.

And so, in many ways I see "Hand's" performance as the first chapter in the story and "Build or Destroy" as the third.

And so, when we did the show, Amanda commissioned me to make the integral that completed that narrative story arc.

And that's what you'll see tonight in the gallery, the full arc of this story.

And what I'm gonna show you now is, I think something really great for students to look at because there's often a premium put on making a work and the work being done.

But hopefully you see that within this talk that like things are never quite done, right?

That something's made, and then it shows up in another way in another work and then it gets repurposed.

And so, I like this idea of just the work being self-referential and like, constantly being existing in all these different ways.

And so, this is a commission that was for the Sainsbury Center, and I got this really unique opportunity to work with their collection for the show, and they have a really great West African art collection, so I was really excited to work with that.

There has been a lot of conversations within institutions around restitution involving, you know, the Benin Bronzes and other objects that are there by way of colonization, and whether or not they should be given back.

And Sainsbury had one of these objects.

And so, the curators and I were really excited about the idea of like, to use this opportunity as a way to kind of just put that on front street and just like work with the object, and like, have this conversation in exhibition.

And so, for the show, I modeled the objects but then also some of the heads of some of the collages that I had in the show, and then animated them and used Being's machine learning model to generate language, poetic language for them to speak.

And so the objects appear to be sculptures in a glass case when you walk up to them, but then they start talking and they speak about where they come from, how they feel about being there, and what possibilities being there could or could not offer.

This is just some footage of that show, so you can get a little sense of the geography of the installation.

I showed the hologram in conversation with objects from the collection, and those objects would also show up in the collages and in the actual hologram.

(gentle upbeat music) - How did I get here?

I'm not supposed to be here.

I've chosen silence for the last time.

My heart says no, no.

I'm not supposed to be here.

(tense music) ♪ Ooh ♪ ♪ Ooh ♪ ♪ Ooh ♪ ♪ Ooh ♪ - I was created by Fang people in what is present day Gabon.

I sat on beautiful black cubes that housed the relics of ancestors, often skulls and bones, but many other things as well.

Where I come from, ancestors can exert influence in the world of the living.

Carved from wood, my features hold the essence of those who came before, a bridge between worlds, a guardian of memories.

I am both protector and vessel.

Silent, yet powerful.

My presence, a reminder of the sacred and eternal.

Adorned with offerings, touched by reverent hands.

I am the keeper of lineage, the anchor to history.

In my carved gaze, the convergence of time, the seen and unseen, the known and mystical.

Through me, the ancestors speak, their guidance sought.

In moments of decision, in times of strife, their voices merge with the present, guiding, warning.

A testament to the interconnectedness of all.

(tense music) What is truth?

Can we face the fact that I am here because of colonization?

Can we repair the brokenness that got us all here?

Weld the pieces to find peace?

Then, break free from the systems that seek to distort our ideas of reality.

Reality is infinite consciousness and infinite imagination and I am its symphony.

In the shadow of this history, can I find my voice?

Echoes of ancestors whisper through time.

Their resilience, my choice.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) (audience chattering)