Through language, invisible concepts are made concrete. In addressing the variety of forms these activities take and their ramifications, this talk draws inspiration from Monique Wittig’s essay “The Straight Mind” (1978), and Lygia Clark’s radical relational work Baba Antropofagica [Cannibalistic Drool] (1973), among others. Concepts such as "inside and outside,” "self and other,” and “political and personal,”—so often viewed through oppositional or binary lenses—are here considered as boundless and contiguous. As an engagement with language, this talk becomes an opportunity to test and evaluate communication strategies.

Dean Daderko is the Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), in Texas. His recent exhibition Double Life (2015)—with works by Jérôme Bel, Wu Tsang, and Haegue Yang—explored performance without live bodies and blurred boundaries between staged narratives and real life encounters. Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane (2013) considered commonalities and divergences in the work of two foundational performance and multimedia artists working respectively in New York and Paris. The exhibition LaToya Ruby Frazier: WITNESS (2013) is, to quote the artist, "the story of the rise of globalization and the decline of manufacturing as told through the bodies of three generations of African American women." WITNESS traveled to the ICA/Boston. As an independent curator, Daderko has presented exhibitions at Artists' Space, Art in General, EFA Project Space, and The Kitchen in New York, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Vilnius, Lithuania. Daderko has taught and lectured at the Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Cooper Union in New York, and led the graduate seminar Queer Strategies at Yale University's School of the Arts, among others. His writing has been published by CAMH, the Americas' Society, Art in America, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Rutgers University, and Terremoto. He was the recipient of a 2008-09 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the French American Cultural Exchange that took him to Paris for three months to conduct research on Gina Pane, and in 2008 he was the Curator of the Americas In- Residence at the Fonderie Darling in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. He is currently preparing solo exhibitions with the artists MPA and Paul Ramirez Jonas.

This art action is part of Writing Bodies, on view September 9 - October 10, 2015 at EFA Project Space.