Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions
A series of exhibitions and programming in San Francisco and Houston that examines the shifts in dilated time, ritual, memory-keeping, and community-building in artistic practices in the years 2020-2024.
Blaffer Art Museum: October 11, 2024 – March 9, 2025 Opening reception: October 11, 6-8 pm
KADIST San Francisco: October 3, 2024 – February 15, 2025 Opening reception: October 3, 6-8 pm
In fall of 2024, KADIST San Francisco and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston are co-organizing Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions, an exhibition in two parts with programming examining the shifts in dilated time, ritual, memory-keeping, and community-building in artistic practices in the years 2020-2024. Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions traces the cyclical nature of improvised, responsive yet sustained systems of mutual aid, information sharing, and embodied knowledge and their intersectional, intimate, and enduring effects, as magnified by the COVID-19 global pandemic.
The exhibition considers artists as prognosticators and traces their evolving practices and approaches, informed by activism and the creation of mutual aid networks spurred from lived experiences such as the still ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic and Black and Brown grief. The artists assume the role of narrators for memetic memory, muffled silences, and informal archiving against power structures sanctioning conditions of personal isolation, cultural amnesia, and planetary extinction.
Amplifying the concurrent exhibitions presented in Houston and San Francisco, public programs are activations and timely engagements of the current moment, during the final months of the 2024 U.S. presidential election cycle. Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is a diary of experiences, encompassing not only what happened but also the possibility of what never happened in the ongoing process of remembering and recollection, as a form of ‘protest against forgetting. The years 2020-2024 began with the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, which continues to expose systemic inequities disproportionately affecting historically marginalized communities. In the 2022 book What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology, Judith Butler advocates for intertwinement as a “collective effort to find or forge the best form of ‘interdependency’ as one that most clearly embodies the ideals of radical equality.” The concurrent exhibitions in Houston and San Francisco and their related public programs are guided by entangled ethics in order to untangle forms of sustained solidarities inching toward liberation.
Exhibition Images
Exhibitions
The Blaffer Art Museum’s exhibition (October 11, 2024 - March 9, 2025) includes Indira Allegra, Richard Bell, Tony Cokes, Kiri Dalena, rafa esparza, Jes Fan, Alicia Henry, Every Ocean Hughes, Jarod Lew, Helina Metaferia, Eduardo Navarro, Rajni Perera, Michael Rakowitz, Marwan Rechmaoui, Varunika Saraf, Pangrok Sulap, Kenneth Tam, James Webb.
James Webb’s Prayer (Houston) Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, USA, 2024 is co-produced by Blaffer Art Museum, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, and KADIST.
The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston is the interdisciplinary arts resource for students, faculty and staff, and the general public. In order to bridge disciplines, stimulate dialogue and support the creation of innovative work, the Mitchell Center supports a variety of programs such as lectures and workshops, performances and exhibitions, scholarships, residencies and visiting artists.
Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions will open at the Blaffer Art Museum on October 11, 2024 and remain on view until March 9, 2025. Artists co-presented by KADIST San Francisco include artworks and performances selected through the 2024 Texas Biennial Open Call are embedded and intertwined into Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions. The 2024 Texas Biennial The Last Sky activates overlapping and amorphous forms of cultural production and cross-pollination shaped by artist collectives and community involvement.
KADIST San Francisco exhibition (October 4, 2024 - February 15, 2025) comprises over 40 artists: Indira Allegra, Brook Andrew, Edgardo Aragón, Carmen Argote, Yoko Asakai, Saif Azzuz, Kent Chan, Tony Cokes, Moyra Davey, Jim Denomie, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Rahima Gambo, Juliana Góngora, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull, Gordon Hookey, Pao Houa Her, Every Ocean Hughes, Kite and Corey Stover, Steffani Jemison, Subash Thebe Limbu, Tessa Mars, Joe Namy, Eduardo Navarro, Antonio Obá, Juan Obando, Nour Ouayda, Prabhakar Pachpute, Antonio Pichillá, Michael Rakowitz, Jamel Robinson, Sherrill Roland, Asha Sheshadri, Rania Stephan, Kenneth Tam, Moses Tan, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Kaylene Whiskey, Carmen Winant
Programs
Closed World and Open Bodies
To coincide with Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions, the Blaffer Art Museum, along with venues in Indonesia, Peru, and South Africa, will host a four-part film program entitled Closed World. The film program is designed as four exercises in healing that encompass grief, memory/remembrance, resilience, and rebuilding/recovery. The exercises are designed as a generative system replicated to spaces of the home, theater, or gallery space. A ‘Closed World’ or ‘Closed Loop System’ examines the earth as a whole—as a complete and interconnected system.
A closed world is built and unbuilt through the progression of the four-part exercises and the community taking part; it is not enough to talk about healing or grief, we must all go through the complete healing process as a community and ensure rebirth happens on a communal scale. Co-curated by Innocent Ekejiuba and Erika Mei Chua Holum.
Open Bodies
San Francisco’s public program series, titled Open Bodies, extends across the city in collaboration with arts and cultural organizations, as a collective body that tends to various organs, perceptive faculties, and phenomenologies: sound/listening (The Lab), body/movement (CounterPulse), and language (McSweeney’s Quarterly).
Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at the Blaffer Art Museum is co-organized by Erika Mei Chua Holum (Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum and co-curator of the 2024 Texas Biennial), Lindsay Albert (Program Manager, KADIST San Francisco), and Jo-ey Tang (Director, KADIST San Francisco). The co-institutional partnership and curatorial research for Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions was initiated by Joseph del Pesco (International Director, KADIST) and Steven Maticijo (Former Jane Dale Owen Director & Chief Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum). The 2024 Texas Biennial The Last Sky is co-curated by Erika Mei Chua Holum, Ashley DeHoyos (Curator, DiverseWorks), and Coka Treviño (Curator and Artistic Director at Big Medium and Founder and Curator of The Projecto).
Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at KADIST San Francisco is co-curated by Lindsay Albert (Program Manager, KADIST San Francisco), Joseph del Pesco (International Director, KADIST), and Jo-ey Tang (Director, KADIST San Francisco).
About the venues
KADIST is a non-profit contemporary art organization that believes artists make an important contribution to a progressive society through their artwork, which often addresses key issues relevant to the present day. Dedicated to exhibiting the work of artists—from more than one hundred countries—represented in its collection, KADIST affirms contemporary art’s role within social discourse, and facilitates new connections across cultures. Its local hubs in Paris and San Francisco organize exhibitions, physical and online programs, and host residencies. KADIST stays apprised of developments in contemporary art via a global advisor network, and develops collaborations internationally, including with leading museums, fostering vibrant conversations about contemporary art and society.
Founded in 1973, the Blaffer Art Museum endeavors to further the understanding of contemporary art through exhibitions, publications, and public programs. As the gateway between the University of Houston’s Central campus and the City of Houston, Blaffer Art Museum is a catalyst for creative innovation, experimentation, and scholarship. Its exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public, create community through dialogue and participation, and inspire an appreciation for the visual arts as a vital force in shaping contemporary culture.
The Texas Biennial is a geographically-led, independent survey of contemporary art in Texas. The program was founded in 2005 by Austin nonprofit Big Medium to provide an exhibition opportunity open to all artists living and working in the state. In its eighth edition, the Texas Biennial is the longest-running state biennial in the country. Since its inception, the program has brought the work of over 300 artists to new audiences, springboarding many artists’ careers and underscoring the diversity of contemporary practice in Texas.