Hope is a discipline
Upper Gallery at The Arts Center at Governors Island
On view through September 29, 2024
Hope is a discipline inhabits the words of Mariame Kaba, who proposes that hope is neither just a feeling, nor a horizon but something we do together, using the resources we already have. This concept of hope inspired the curatorial collective, who envisioned the exhibition to be a traveling project that generates a translocal network of thought partners, who practice hope as communal labor.
The first iteration took shape at de Appel Amsterdam (Netherlands) as a series of gatherings centered on the question, “Can friendship create structural change?” The New York iteration features an ensemble of US-based artists foregrounding memory and political inheritance: Adama Delphine Fawundu, Kyuri Jeon, Suneil Sanzgiri, Bread and Puppet Theater, and Maggie Wong. At LMCC, Hope is a discipline takes shape in art of impermanence, intergenerational research, and the body as an archive. The exhibition stems from the curatorial research questions: How do we find, remember, and share in the struggles of ancestors? How are land, water, and our bodies memory-keepers? How is memory, attention, and time political?
Hope is a discipline at LMCC will be the first time Suneil Sanzgiri’s Barobar Jagtana trilogy will be presented as an installation in New York. The trilogy, stemming from an intergenerational conversation between the artist and his father, has been cited as offering “an expansive understanding of diaspora, not as a crisis of identity and belonging but as an almost revolutionary unruliness” (Murtaza Vali for BOMB). Children of the revolution are honored in an assemblage by Maggie Wong, based on the artist’s in-process book, Unity Newspaper (2024), published by Snake Hair Press and Orbis Editions. The artist intervenes on the archives of The League of Revolutionary Struggle (active 1978-1990), encompassing African American, Asian American, and Chicano movement builders in the United States. The work features reflections of people who, like Wong, had parents in the League and were raised by its childcare program. The question of hope is brought forth in stage paintings, puppets, and ephemera from The Hope Principle Show (dir. Peter Schumann, 2024) by Bread and Puppet Theater, who launched on the scene during Angry Arts Week (1967) in New York, protesting the US’s Vietnam War. During the Korean War (1950-53), the First Army on Fort Jay at Governors Island supplied the U.S. Army with soldiers and equipment. Activating this history, Kyuri Jeon’s experimental documentary, The Flesh Witness, remembers the tattoos of prisoners of war in Korea. Adama Delphine Fawundu’s textile installation draws on the island’s colonial legacies, proposing the place where the Hudson and East Rivers meet as a witness to intergenerational knowledge with answers to contemporary struggles.
Hope is a discipline will be accompanied by a series of three broadcasted conversations featuring Mariame Kaba & Kelly Hayes, Suneil Sanzgiri & Jihan El Tahri, and Haytham El Wardany & Adam Hajyahia — responding to the title prompt, “hope is a discipline.” A schedule of release dates will be announced during opening day.
Hope is a discipline at LMCC is initiated by Meghana Karnik, LMCC’s Curatorial Fellow 2024, and co-curated with Eugene Hannah Park (ISCP Curator-in-Residence, New York/Seoul), Marina Christodoulidou (de Appel Curatorial Fellow, Amsterdam/Limassol), and Billy Fowo (Curator, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin/Yaoundé).
Artists Featured: Adama Delphine Fawundu, Kyuri Jeon, Suneil Sanzgiri, Bread and Puppet Theater, Maggie Wong
Artist Bios
Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and visual artist of Mende, Krim, Bamileke and Bubi descent. Her distinct visual language centered around themes of indigenization, and ancestral memory, enriches and expands the visual art canon. Fawundu co-published the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Columbia University.
Kyuri Jeon is a South Korean artist and filmmaker based in New York. Jeon works with video, essay, drawing, and installation to explore time, vision, and its implications for the future. Through the lens of intersectionality, she questions ongoing transnational discussions about identity, feminism, decolonization, and cultural translation. Jeon’s work has been featured internationally at MassArt Art Museum, Boston; Mimosa House, London; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Glasgow; Festival Film Dokumenter, Yogyakarta; Women Make Waves, Taipei; and DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Seoul. She is a recipient of a Contemporary Visual Art Award at AHL-T&W Foundation and an award winner at the Asian Shorts Competition at Seoul International Women’s Film Festival. Jeon holds BFA from Korea National University of Arts and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and Seoul National University.
Suneil Sanzgiri is an Indian American artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. Sanzgiri’s films offer sonic and visual journeys through family history, local mythology, and colonial legacies of extraction in Goa, India—where his family originates. His first institutional solo exhibition "Here the Earth Grows Gold" opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. His films have circulate widely at film festivals and art institutions across the world including International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doclisboa, Viennale, BlackStar Film Festival, Open City Docs, REDCAT, Menil Collection, Block Museum, MASS MoCA, moCa Cleveland, Le Cinéma Club, Criterion Collection, and many more.
Bread and Puppet Theater The Bread and Puppet Theater is an internationally celebrated company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art filled with music, dance and slapstick. Believing that theater is a basic necessity like bread, the company frequently brings its work to the streets for those who may not otherwise go to the theater. Its shows are political and spectacular, with puppets often on stilts, wearing huge masks with expressive faces, singing, dancing and playing music. Bread and Puppet is constantly active, performing at its farm in Glover, VT, and in local churches, schools and parades. It regularly tours Europe, Canada, and the United States and has recently visited El Salvador, Haiti, Russia, and Korea. Founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side, the theater has been based in the North East Kingdom of Vermont since the early 1970s and is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country.
Maggie Wong is a visual artist and educator who uses research and multidisciplinary art practice to explore political inheritance, memory, and play. Their work builds meaning like a stack of toy blocks, assembling and falling into a relational history rather than fixed narratives in media that include printmaking, sculpture, and installation. This approach acknowledges the impossibility of articulating an entire cultural or political inheritance, embracing Angela Davis's idea that "legacies of past struggles are not static." She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Her work has been shown at the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Comfort Station, Annas Projects, take care (LA), Temple Contemporary, YBCA, and 99cent Plus, and has been written about in ArtForum and Sixty Inches from Center. Her writing has been published by Yale University Press, Viral Ecologies, The Seen, and the Journal of Art Practice.
Curator Bios
Meghana Karnik explores paradoxes between art and social change, spirituality and economy, lived experience and institutional process. Her research plays out across modalities as a curator, arts administrator, artist, and writer. She is currently the inaugural Curatorial Fellow at LMCC, stewarding the New York iteration of Hope is a discipline. Her first book, Process-As-Practice—written with SHAWNÉ MICHELAIN HOLLOWAY, Elena Levi, and Maggie Wong—is being published by For The Birds Trapped in Airports in late 2024. Formerly, she was Manager, Grants & Artist Initiatives at Art Matters Foundation (New York), where she helped implement Artist2Artist, a grant program that gives philanthropic power to artists; Associate Curator for FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (Oh Gods of Dust and Rainbows, 2022); and Associate Director of EFA Project Space (New York), a cross-disciplinary venue where she produced guest-curated exhibitions and SHIFT: A Residency for Arts Workers. She has served advisory roles for The Immigrant Artist Biennial and Critical Practices, Inc.
Eugene Hannah Park (ISCP Curator-in-Residence, New York/Seoul) explores the possibility of learning by collective minds. She curates and produces tools and platforms as an ingredient to share questions and translate worlds. Eugene anticipates connecting different languages of peers hoping this will lead to constructing new constellations. She recently co-curated Hope is a discipline (de Appel, Amsterdam, 2023), and curated Arecibo(TINC, Seoul, 2022) and continues to work as part of collectives such as Against The Dragon Light (ADL) and Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR).
Marina Christodoulidou (de Appel Curatorial Fellow, Amsterdam/Limassol) is a researcher and curator. Traversing curatorial formats, her work emerges from socially engaged practice and self-organized initiatives, often taking the form of discursive exhibitions, writing, film and architecture. Marina is currently a curatorial fellow at de Appel with a focus on land, housing, and self-governance and co-runs Dutch Art Institute’s cooperative study program Assembling Land: Rehearsals towards Place-making. Marina has previously worked with the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale (2015-19), and co-curated the Anachoresis project which represented Cyprus at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021). Among other collaborative projects, Marina has been part of hypersurfacing (2019) at NiMAC in Nicosia, an exhibition and a forum showcasing synergies of contemporary art practices in Cyprus and The Broken Pitcher (2020-ongoing), which traces the colonial history of finance, debt and property as it departs from an eviction story of a house in her hometown Larnaka, Cyprus. In its multifold formations, The Broken Pitcher has been presented in public squares across Cyprus, at Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia; Beirut Art Center; GfZK, Leipzig; Lenbachhaus, Munich; de Appel, Amsterdam as well as international film theaters and festivals.
Billy Fowo (Curator, SAVVY Contemporary—The Laboratory of Form-Ideas, Berlin/Yaoundé) is a curator and writer. With points of interest in various fields and disciplines such as the sonic, linguistics and literature, Fowo questions what is considered to be knowledge and endeavours to rethink the spaces in which it is disseminated. He recently graduated from de Appel’s Curatorial Programme 2023 and acted between 2021 and 2023 as a Tutor at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) in the framework of their COOP Academy.. Recently, he co-curated projects such as It Go Have To Adjust. On Language As Parasite (2023), Unraveling The (Under-) Development Complex, An Ode to Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, 50 Years On (1972 - 2022), SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2022), Wata Go Lef Stone, On the Perpetuity of Accara Across the Oceans, an offering within A Parábola Do Progresso, Sesc Pompeia, São Paulo (2022), ENIGMA #59: ROMAN – a retrospection on / by Paris-based artist Bili Bidjocka, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2021). Billy Fowo is one of the coordinators of SAVVY Records – one of the newly founded SAVVY Pillars.