Chapter One

Chapter One: January 2023-March 2024

Starting January 2023, JOAN’s programming consists of exhibitions and parallel programs organized thematically into different chapters that embrace propositional modes and experimental formats. Our first chapter running from January 2023 through March 2024 brings together four exhibitions and parallel discursive, performance, and film programming that explore the limitations of language, potentials of voice, and transmission of sound from a sociopolitical perspective.

This theme is inspired by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark (1961), a novel preoccupied with the inconclusive nature of language. Lispector treats lapses in language as a throughline of her novel, questioning how one can narrate experiences that are incommensurate with language, while also speculating on what a loss of words can allow. Similarly, the upcoming exhibitions and filmic, textual, and sound acts consider the transmission of information through language to be both a necessary and slippery means of capturing lived experience and global realities. They simultaneously recognize the impossibility of language to accurately depict how things objectively are, while acknowledging the possibilities of other forms of knowledge transference, such as nonhuman modes of communication. Unraveling as individual yet interconnected parts, projects and interventions explore the ways in which absence, silence, speculation, mis/translation, annotation, and mythology give new meaning to language. Still, poetry, song, and sound take center stage in their ability to convey the in-between, as artists embrace ambiguity and alternative cosmologies, refusing the available vocabulary, in their search for unknown frameworks for thinking and expressing.

Programs include a listening session, On seeing with one’s ears: seeking sama’ by Arshia Haq on January 21, and a solo exhibition, Cassandra with a flood in her mouth by Caitlin Berrigan, opening February 4. The exhibition is Act 1 in three acts of public programs to expand upon the project’s themes and associations, and will be presented throughout the run of the exhibition. The second Act, Cassandra with a flood in her mouth: A chorus, a riot, a cult, a swarm, is a film program followed by a conversation at REDCAT on February 27 that brings together works by Sofía Córdova, Rana Hamadeh in collaboration with Sara Hamadeh, Erin Johnson, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Bassem Saad. More information is coming soon!

We are also thrilled to announce the launch of our small print press, Autograph. For this first chapter, a publication will be produced as part of select exhibitions that includes a new text, artwork, conversation, or their combination, in printed form to expand upon the project’s concepts, and offer a different entry point to an artist’s research and process.