Repository and Repertoire

Chicago Artists Coalition
January 29th - March 11th, 2021

Repository and Repertoire stages a conversation between the archival processes of Jazmine Harris and the haptic choreographies of José Santiago Pérez. They arrange and compose images, objects, attitudes, and issues that articulate historical and social, collective and individual relationships between local knowledge and global narratives. 

In the last year, the feeling of little to no control weighs heavy as we move through ongoing, everyday crisis and loss. In a time of not knowing entirely how to live, how do we process the emerging present and unknown future? How do we be reflexive about a contemporary history as one lives it?

Repository refers to cultural events that are preserved permanently, such as in writing, photographs, or recorded tapes, in archives, libraries, and collections and, therefore, are perceived as stable and unchanging over time. Through the scrapbooking of recent financial news headlines, family photos, and handwritten notes-to-self, all created and found within the last year, Harris repositions her personal archive against the scale of larger cultural powers that seek to determine the course of her life. By first displacing then reduplicating already existing photos, she untethers photography's tie to a time. This release allows for a fluidity to create new temporal relationships to memory and, thus, new narrative structures that position Black women, across generations, to be self-determined agents of their making. 

Repertoire applies to a culture embodied in the practices of events such as dances and plays; they follow a script but are perceived as temporary, fragile, and easily forgotten. However, a ritualized, formalized, or reiterative performance does not disappear. They replicate themselves through a process of memorization and internalization. A repertoire could extend from the stage into the everyday through repeated habits of adjusting and modifying our bodies to bear burdens over time. Pérez reworks traditional burden baskets through performative processes to build a language between time and touch. Through the repeated work of twisting and coiling, weaving is both a meditative space for Pérez to process the events of the last year and also a method to create vessels for anyone to pour their mental burdens and momentarily unload emotional weight. 

Although archival and embodied knowledges seem to work in opposition, these two ways of storing personal and collective histories illuminate and invigorate one another. Harris and Pérez not only offer their photographic and performative works as systems for processing the ever-shifting present. They also present a way of knowing that stems from within themselves, from their record and embodiment of a historical moment. When the world is unknown and dominant forces seem to determine our course, the artists' rearrangement and rework reveal how in such times people direct their lives and assert agency.

Repository and Repertoire is curated by Stephanie Koch. This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

You may reach out to the curator, Stephanie Koch, for questions on the exhibition or to be put in contact with the artists at stephanie@stephaniekoch.com.

Rehearsal: José Santiago Pérez’s In process work Unburdenings

Live streamed every Sunday in February 2021 from 1 to 4 PM CST

Through a series of four weekly open rehearsals, José Santiago Pérez will share the making of a new performative work Unburdenings. Alongside Kim Chayeb, Zachary Nicol, and Kai Shariq, Pérez will build a range of movements and gestures which both ask and seek to answer:

• How do our emotional/psychic/social/historical burdens transform our bodies?

• How do we adjust and modify our bodies to bear burdens over time?

• Which burdens are inherited from generation to generation? Which burdens belong to us? Which burdens are forced on us? How do we know the difference?

• What does rest, relief, and release look like? Feel like? What conditions make rest, relief, and release possible?

These rehearsals serve as the embodied component of an initial developmental phase aimed at producing a fully realized durational gallery performance at a future time. Unburdenings enacts the exploratory process of early choreographic development, through a series of structured improvisations. It performs process. In the context of this exhibition, rehearsal is performance.

Unburdenings arises in relation to a series of sculptures titled Un/Burden, which are installed in the gallery on low movable plinths for the residency exhibition. In this project, plastic lacing and emergency blankets are transformed into human-scale abstract baskets made to hold the mental, emotional, and psychic burdens that so many of us carry in the context of a pandemic, ongoing racial violence, and the separation and internment of immigrant children. Referencing traditions of burden baskets (carrying baskets, working baskets), the five sculptures to be on view during the exhibition pursue the idea of the human vessel overflowing its contents into a material vessel. For utilitarian burden baskets, the structure eases the load for the gatherer and laborer. Ceremonial burden baskets allow for an individual to pour any mental burdens and momentarily unload emotional weight.

As a cycle of abstract choreographic gestures, movements, and active stillness, Unburdenings extends the physical objects of Un/Burden into the register of live art. This shift into the realm of time and embodiment creates a spacetime for asking questions about how the body carries burdens or how we create vessels to carry the load and how we share the weight of burdens by being in relation with others? How do we help an/other carry a burden and carry on? 

Video description: José Santiago Pérez’s Unburdenings with Kim Chayeb, Zachary Nichol, and Kai Shariq - February 28, 2021

Video description: José Santiago Pérez’s Unburdenings with Zachary Nichol and Kai Shariq - February 21, 2021

Video description: José Santiago Pérez’s Unburdenings with Kai Shariq and Kim Chayeb - February 14, 2021

Video description: José Santiago Pérez’s Unburdenings with Zachary Nicol and Kim Chayeb - February 7, 2021

Exhibiting artist Jazmine Harris will be in conversation with curator Stephanie Koch alongside artists Sasha Phyars-Burgess and Cameron A. Granger. Through a discussion of Black visualities, they will share their recent shifts in making to create new ways to disseminate and care for images of Black life. The recorded conversation will be posted for viewing here on February 1st and available throughout the month of February.

Articulating Worlds: Interviews as Third Space
As part of the University of Chicago Department of Art History’s Speaking of Art Roundtable Series
February 11, 2021 at 11 AM CST

Jazmine Harris and Stephanie Koch share their definitions of third space theory as it relates to creating intimate and informal spaces of dialogue. Through a presentation of the use of interviews in their artistic and curatorial practices, Harris and Koch discuss the generative possibilities of third space, or that "in-between place of informal social interaction," whether that physical place is a stoop in Bronzeville or a gallery in Pilsen.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
The presentation concludes with a Q&A, where the group dives into questions including, but not limited to: “Now that in-person gatherings are limited or nonexistent, does the spatial politics of third space need to be tied to a physical site? Or is the ‘interruptive, interrogative, and enunciative’ qualities of third space due to the conversations had? Where does third space exist in the virtual?⁣⁣”