ART-PRESENTATION: Devin Kenny-Rootkits Rootwork

Devin Kenny uses music, performance, video, writing, fashion design, and almost any other means possible to explore and complicate ideas on contemporary culture. Kenny’s work often exists online, as websites, blogs, video posts, and audio files. Employing the tropes of social media–driven youth culture to reach a base audience, the work is free to convey broad ideas while subversively inserting political and philosophical theory.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo MoMA Archive

Devin Kenny raises timely questions about the shape of racial politics and community in contemporary America, interrogating the interconnected dynamics of gentrification, displacement, and diaspora. For “Rootkits Rootwork”, his first Museum solo exhibition, Kenny encourages us to consider how the technologies that facilitate online communities and activism develop alongside the displacement and systemic oppression and marginalization of Black people in the USA. Much as his work does, Kenny’s exhibition title links together networks of disparate references. “Rootkits” are a form of computer virus that undetectably alter the underlying operating system; “rootwork” alludes to practices of Black-American folk magic, and both reference the DNA kits that allow people to explore their heritage. In more than a dozen works across a range of media, including some created for the exhibition, Kenny draws particular inspiration from network technologies, locating unsettling intersections of complicity and exploitation, which his work often resists. Employing the popular cultures of memes, music, fast fashion, and viral media, the artist subtly reveals ubiquitous and often invisible structures of injustice and exclusion. The artist has stipulated that the exhibition will be closed to the public for approximately 30 minutes each day. During this time, the artist invites museum guards to interact with his works as visitors would. But unlike visitors, the guards are granted permission to peruse books from Kenny’s personal library on display.  Broadly covering racial and political subjects, with titles such as “Women, Race and Class” (1981) by Angela Davis and “Nobody Sleeps Better Than White People” (2016) by Rin Johnson, the books sit in a small three-shelf bookcase in the corner of the gallery, which also functions as a pedestal for “What if? #12” (2018), the latter work consists of a police cap turned upside-down, resting on its crown. Fabricated for the artist by a supplier to the New York Police Department, the cap is identical to a real one. In a small plastic sleeve inside the cap, where an officer would usually keep photos of loved ones, Kenny has instead inserted a printed screen-grab from the body-camera footage of the horrific 2016 murder of Philando Castile by police officer Jeronimo Yanez in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. It shows a patch of sky. “Ain’t nobody seein’ me (IR mask)” (2014) is a fitted baseball cap covered with infrared LEDs, bearing the logo of WorldStarHipHop, a popular content-aggregating video platform that showcases black music and culture. The wall text explains that LEDs were once worn in this way to overwhelm the sensors of CCTV cameras, but camera technologies have been updated to render this hack obsolete. The negation of the minor rebellion enacted by the infrared mask may suggest a spiritual complication as those who would resist come up against two powerful forces: on one hand, the monetary power behind encroaching gentrification and surveillance, and on the other, the allure of glorified sex, violence, and material wealth in much of today’s popular hip-hop culture. In addition, Kenny has collaborated with The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Information Technology to install Bail Bloc software on a network of museum-operated computers. Throughout the run of the show, the computers are continuously mining “Monero” cryptocurrency, which is then converted into US dollars and used by the Immigrant Bail Fund to post bond for incarcerated people in immigration detention.

Info: Curator: Peter Eleey, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, New York, Duration 9/6-2/9/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Thu-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.moma.org