The Scalability Project: Cacophony of Troubled Stories

GALLERY III

March 19 — April 18, 2021

adrienne maree brown, Anna L. Tsing, biarritzzz, Daria Dorosh, Felice Grodin, Gordon Hall, Klau Kinky, Melanie Hoff, Naama Tsabar, Nahee Kim, Rebecca Jordan Young, and Tabita Rezaire

Curated by Mindy Seu, Patricia M. Hernández, and Roxana Fabius

Curatorial Assistance by Kyna Patel

Website Design by WKSHPS

Edited by Andrew Scheinman 

Dear Reader,

The Scalability Project: Cacophony of Troubled Stories is an online exhibition and publication that includes artworks and interviews with and by adrienne maree brown, Anna L. Tsing, biarritzzz, Daria Dorosh, Felice Grodin, Gordon Hall, Klau Kinky, Melanie Hoff, Naama Tsabar, Nahee Kim, Rebecca Jordan Young, and Tabita Rezaire. It will materialize as a one-month installation at A.I.R. Gallery between March 19–April 18, 2021.

How might you experience an exhibition alone yet feel the presence of others? For the physical iteration of Cacophony of Troubled Stories, the artist Melanie Hoff presents A Contaminated Language (2021), an installation that is driven by the traces and marks we leave behind when we browse online. Projected within the gallery, A Contaminated Language is a collective accumulation of highlighted text and projected drawings made by visitors while browsing the Scalability Project website. The work is an exercise in collapsing the space between an online and a physical exhibition and between individual socially-distanced visitors. How can the digital facilitate gestural contaminations of movement and ideas even as our bodies are held so far apart?

The installation in the gallery responds to and highlights the contents of the online publication. We view the website as a container of troubled stories. It is an active conversation, asking us, the visitors, to pay attention to emergent behaviors, to listen to the silences in between the notes, and to learn from ancestral knowledge. This container accentuates the contradictions rooted in digital technologies. We are looking for the leaks in the transmission, the cracks in the infrastructure, the glitches in the machine where potential liberation lies. Narrative is the tool. By reinterpreting its use, we seek to tell stories that never end, stories that lead to further stories. 

The artists and thinkers included in The Scalability Project: Cacophony of Troubled Stories were asked to share their visions of a feminism that grows not through homogenizing universalisms but through encounters and coalitions. This cacophony is a gathering, with ideas that overlap and conflict but ultimately show the dimensionality of individual experience. This project, in its digital and physical forms, highlights the inherent interconnectedness in this multiplicity of voices.

Warmly, 

Roxana, Patti, Mindy

View the Press Release here.
View The Scalability Project website here.

Photography: Sebastian Bach