ART CITIES:N.York-In Longing

The group of artists, In the exhibition “In Longing” are united by their grappling with the emotionally and politically charged power of longing. A central question of the exhibition asks: how is desire affected by the oppressive systems of patriarchy and white supremacy? With diverse practices of performance, installation, text, and movement, the artists engage with the restlessness of longing while closely drawing us into the profundity of inner and outer worlds.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Cue Art Foundation Archive

The exhibition “In Longing” features eight artworks and premieres two new performances by Xirin and Raymond Pinto, accompanying their installations in the exhibition. In the front gallery of CUE Art foundation, Marie Ségolène debuts her mixed-media installation, “Rouge Gorge” (2021). In her video performance and installation, soil, vegetation, worms, and wine are unearthed and consumed in queer rapture. SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY’s sculpture, “REQUEST–>LURE–>RESPONSE–>REWARD(?) OR A COVERING FOR THE CAGE” (2017), si shown in New York for the first time. The sculpture references what is known in BDSM as “puppy play” and features a human-sized digitally printed blanket with text draped over a large dog cage. The power dynamics between sub and dom, human and animal, and the upright and the kneeling are explored. Alison Chen’s video work, “For One Night Only” (2015), depicts the artist and her partner moving through the familiar, mundane, and sometimes awkward gestures of intimacy. Investigating both banal and erotic moments within a relationship, her work affirms, critiques, and questions the role of feminine subjectivity. “Taste Test: Dinner Banquet” will feature Xirin and her partner Sebastian Chacon as they consume a three-course meal together while exploring the act of regurgitation. The performers will experiment with ideas of oral fixation, sensual pleasure, and excess. “Taste Test: Dinner Banquet” is a site-specific performance that will be livestreamed on CUE’s website on Saturday, June 26th at 7pm ET. “what is left, if I am earth” is a performance by Raymond Pinto and a collaboration with Fana Fraser. They will examine notions of longing as it intersects with Black queer experiences through improvised and experimental movement, as well as using organic materials such as geodes. The performance will feature recorded songs by London-based musician Klein as a musical score. what is left, if I am earth will take place in CUE’s gallery and will be livestreamed for an audience on Wednesday, July 14th at 2pm ET. Alison Chen is a Los Angeles-based visual artist working with video, performance, photography, and text. She earned an MFA in Photography and Related Media from Parsons School for Design. SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. As an artist, Raymond Pinto mixes disciplines of movement and distills remnants of gestures that attend to non-locality. Most recently, they are concerned with a notion of bodilessness. Their research investigates the statehood of having no body. The transmogrification of internal experiences crystalizes to form critical choreographic dispositions rendering fragments of intimacy, abjection, and stick-to-it-iveness. Marie Ségolène holds a BA in Creative Writing and a BFA in Intermedia Cyberarts from Concordia University (Canada). She completed her MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Xirin is an Iranian, New York-based multidisciplinary artist whose work reclaims romantic tropes, emphasizing the ways idealistic notions of attachment cause pain. In her work (composed of performance, painting, video, and installation), she frequently uses the form of the duet to explore how larger social power structures locate themselves within intimate relationships. Through a series of autofiction, she investigates what it means to love men as a feminist within patriarchy. With her body often situated as the subject, Xirin’s work embraces intimacy, optimism, and romance as erotic, transgressive tools against social apathy.

Participating Artists: Alison Chen, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Raymond Pinto, Marie Ségolène, and Xirin.

Photo: Marie Ségolène, Documentation of Esquisse pour Rouge Gorge, 2021, Photo: Santiago Tamayo Soler

Info: Curator: Anna Cah, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, Ground Floor, Between 6th and 7th Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 3/6-14/7/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://cueartfoundation.org