PRESENTATION: Cally Spooner-Deadtime, An Anatomy Study

Rooted firmly in her training in philosophy, Cally Spooner’s practice is generated through writing, unfolds as performance, then lands as film, sound, sculpture, drawings or scores. Her performances incorporate duration and rehearsal as acts of resistance to corporate, digital and performative climates in which it is hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Graham Foundation Archive

Through installations, writing, and performance, Cally Spooner stages absurdist replays of the political, economic, and media rhetoric of our time to reflect on the patriarchal order that controls it. In doing so, she reveals the ways in which contemporary subjectivity and the human body are subject to continuous changes dictated by technological and economic conditions. Her exhibitions and performances are anchored to feminist philosophical processes which physically, acoustically, and conceptually incorporate duration, erosion, maintenance, rehearsal, and collapse as practices of resistance. These strategies are adopted in opposition to sudden fluctuations in global markets, to the unstoppable flow of digital data, and to the imperative demand for performance and productivity. As a part of the Graham Foundation fellowship 2024, Cally Spooner presents “Deadtime, An Anatomy Study” a large-scale exhibition featuring a repertoire of works from “Deadtime”, a multi-year research project started in 2018. “Deadtime” stages an anatomy study of how performance quantifies the social body. In “Deadtime”, living and mediated bodies, not always human, appear and reoccur, both vital and corpse-like. At the Graham Foundation, the installation unfolds across media, spills through the Foundation’s architecture, and throws open the frame to ask: how does the present neoliberal condition deaden the social fabric, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead? Deadtime is formed from twenty works, including sound works and sonic scenographies, films, commissioned paintings, sculptural propositions, and anatomical-architectural interventions. The exhibition begins with “A Thesis on Spillage, A Symposium-like Gathering” —featuring performances, choreographies, conversations, and lectures by Nuar Alsadir, Marquis Bey, Wendy Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tony Cokes, Hendrik Folkerts, Melody Giron, Irena Haiduk, Sarah Herda, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Maggie Segale, and Cally Spooner, among others. As part of “Deadtime”, Spooner developed “A Hypothesis of Resistance,” a series of five essays on “performance.” In each, Spooner holds and examines temporalities which defy and eclipse the standardizations that drive individual and societal bodies to perform toward an entirely metric- oriented future. Beginning with “Asynchronicity,” then extending to “Rehearsal,” “The Present Tense,” “Undetectability,” and “Duration,” the series unfolded over five issues of Mousse magazine between 2022–23, and emerged alongside and symbiotically with convenings organized by Spooner. These public programs were hosted by Kunstverein Cologne and Ludwig Forum, Aachen (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022); O—Overgaden, Copenhagen (2022– 23); Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art Copenhagen; and Graham Foundation, Chicago (2024) with contributions from practitioners across fields including political philosophy, biology, data science, queer studies, speculative fiction, poetry, feminism, music, disability studies, dance, and “deep time.”

Photo: Cally Spooner, Still Life, 2018. Fresh pears, assistant. Continuously. Courtesy the artist

Info: Curators: Sarah Herda and Hendrik Folkerts, Graham Foundation, Madlener House, 4 West Burton Place, Chicago, IL, USA, Duration: 17/2-11/5/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-17:00, www.grahamfoundation.org/