About
A reading by Demian DinéYazhi' and Alán Peláez López.
This event is presented in collaboration with apexart in parallel with their exhibition Native Feminisms, curated by Elizabeth S. Hawley, and as part of Speculations on the Infrared, curated by Christopher Green for EFA Project Space.
Native Feminisms, curated by Elizabeth S. Hawley, showcases the aesthetic richness and political power of artworks produced by contemporary Native North American artists whose practices address intersectional issues of feminisms and indigeneity. Today, issues regarding women's rights, elders' protection, and environmental concerns are critical for many North Americans, particularly in the contexts of the #MeToo Movement, the COVID-19 pandemic, and continued fossil fuel extraction. The artists in this exhibition grapple with the specific ways Native communities experience these and other concerns, addressing decolonization efforts, feminine aesthetic traditions, Indigenous ecocriticism, customs of gender fluidity, violence against Native women and Two-Spirit peoples, and Indigenous futurisms. Native Feminisms was selected through apexart’s NYC Open Call and is on view now through March 6, 2021. View Native Feminisms online and visit in person at apexart, Thursday-Saturday, 1-6pm. Reservations are available here.
Speculations on the Infrared, curated by Christopher Green, explores tactics of speculative Indigenous futurism that foreground and redeploy the subsumed and repressive nature of the settler state’s relationship to colonized peoples as a potential tool of sovereignty. Considering infra- as “below,” as in the spectrum below visible light, but also that which is “further on,” the works in this exhibition speculate on the latent desires for Indigeneity and the subaltern Indigenous DNA of the settler national identity and mythos. Considering how such undercurrents might be aestheticized while viewing celebrations of visibility and inclusions with skepticism, the contributors imagine how sovereign structures, relations, and visions might be erected upon the rubble of what is, from an Indigenous perspective, already a post-apocalyptic colonial landscape. Visit the show by booking an appointment here.
About the Readers
Demian DinéYazhi´ (born 1983) is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulative, exploitative, and supremacist nature of hetero cis gender communities post colonization. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center its politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupies and refuses to rightfully give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail. @heterogeneoushomosexual
Alán Peláez López is an AfroIndigenous poet, installation and adornment artist from the coastal Zapotec community of Oaxaca, México. Much of the artist’s work is invested in thinking with and through theories of fugitivity, language, grief, ancestral memories, and the role of storytelling in migrant households. Pelaez Lopez is the author of Intergalactic Travels: poems from a fugitive alien (The Operating System, 2020), a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, and to love and mourn in the age of displacement (Nomadic Press, 2020).
Image: Demian DinéYazhi', disrupt the settler colonial simulation, 2020. Reflective vinyl wall installation. 108 x 108 in. Courtesy the artist. Image Description: A rainbow reflective vinyl film on a black matte wall with the words "sacred body" in a blackletter font.