Cally Spooner: Deadtime, an anatomy study

OPENING PROGRAM
A Thesis on Spillage, a Symposium-like Gathering
Saturday, February 17, 2024
10 a.m.–7 p.m.
Assembled by Cally Spooner and Hendrik Folkerts with: Nuar Alsadir, Marquis Bey, Wendy Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tony Cokes, Melody Giron, Irena Haiduk, Sarah Herda, Ralph Lemon and Darrell Jones, and Maggie Segale, among others

The Graham Foundation is pleased to announce artist Cally Spooner as a 2024 Graham Foundation Fellow. As a part of the fellowship, Spooner will present a large-scale exhibition at the Foundation's Madlener House galleries featuring a repertoire of works from Deadtime, a multi-year research project started in 2018.

Deadtime stages an anatomy study of how performance quantifies the social body. In Deadtime, living and mediated bodies, not always human, appear and reoccur, both vital and corpse-like. At the Graham Foundation, the installation unfolds across media, spills through the Foundation’s architecture, and throws open the frame to ask: how does the present neoliberal condition deaden the social fabric, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead? Deadtime is formed from twenty works, including sound works and sonic scenographies, films, commissioned paintings, sculptural propositions, and anatomical-architectural interventions.

Opening to the public on February 17, 2024, Deadtime begins with “A Thesis on Spillage, A Symposium-like Gathering”—featuring performances, choreographies, conversations, and lectures by Nuar Alsadir, Marquis Bey, Wendy Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tony Cokes, Hendrik Folkerts, Melody Giron, Irena Haiduk, Sarah Herda, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Maggie Segale, and Cally Spooner, among others.

As part of Deadtime, Spooner developed “A Hypothesis of Resistance,” a series of five essays on “performance.” In each, Spooner holds and examines temporalities which defy and eclipse the standardizations that drive individual and societal bodies to perform toward an entirely metric-oriented future. Beginning with “Asynchronicity,” then extending to “Rehearsal,” “The Present Tense,” “Undetectability,” and “Duration,” the series unfolded over five issues of Mousse magazine between 2022–23, and emerged alongside and symbiotically with convenings organized by Spooner. These public programs were hosted by Kunstverein Cologne and Ludwig Forum, Aachen (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022); O—Overgaden, Copenhagen (2022–23); Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art Copenhagen; and Graham Foundation, Chicago (2024) with contributions from practitioners across fields including political philosophy, biology, data science, queer studies, speculative fiction, poetry, feminism, music, disability studies, dance, and “deep time.”

First conceived in an early iteration at the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), curated by Folkerts, parts of Deadtime have been shown at Swiss Institute, New York (2019); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, (2021); gb agency, Paris (2021); ZERO..., Milan (2022); Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2023); and O-Overgaden, Copenhagen (2023). The work now returns to Chicago in its fullest iteration as Deadtime, an anatomy study.

At the Graham, Deadtime is cocurated by Graham Foundation director, Sarah Herda and Hendrik Folkerts, curator of international contemporary art and head of exhibitions, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Event details