(New York, USA)
Until December 11, KinoSaito presents the group show Signaling, curated by Alexander Provan, featuring the Brazilian artist Vivian Caccuri alongside Raven Chacon, Nikita Gale, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, L’Rain, Nicole Miller, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.
To signal is to convey meaning through a gesture or expression — to communicate directly and artlessly, with the clarity of a traffic light or siren. In the realm of online posting and positioning, however, signaling has come to stand for the sharing of generic, fashionable statements, as opposed to genuine convictions, much less complicated opinions. Behind this new, negative definition is the strange expectation that every utterance somehow relay the speaker’s true meaning, or even true identity. But why should signaling be either sincere or performative, reflecting selfhood or groupthink? Why should people always reveal (or even know) what they mean and who they are, rather than expose or conceal themselves based on who is listening and what is at stake?
Signaling focuses on artists who are scrutinizing the terms through which people address and understand (or evade and misread) one another — and insisting on recognition while refusing identification. The exhibition suggests that the dichotomy between candor and posturing is false, and that purposeful communication calls for people to continually recast themselves based on the messages being crafted and audiences being cultivated. Through works in a range of media, Signaling emphasizes the advantages of moving between disclosure and deflection, inclusion and exclusion, especially for people whose expressions have, historically, been derided and suppressed (while also being exploited as entertainment and property).
“Signaling” exhibition view, 2022, from KinoSaito’s website
Many of the artists in Signaling are preoccupied with the conditions that enable certain bodies, voices, and identities to merge, however fleetingly and partially. Music often appears in the show as a model for navigating between insiders and outsiders, authenticity and abstraction, self and persona. But even as the artists in the exhibition seek the freedom of communicating as —and to whom — they wish, they hold up the promise of becoming someone different when addressed as such, when communing with others or tuning in to unfamiliar frequencies.
Vivian Caccuri participates in the exhibition with the work Oratório (Tidal Wave), from 2017. She often deals with the role of music in daily life, especially the performances and parties where communities gather — and relationships emerge from the mixing of sounds and traditions. This work reflects Caccuri’s interest in musical rituals as sources of sociality and ecstasy, but also as targets of repression and forms of resistance. An altar constructed from subwoofers plays a bass-heavy composition, setting in motion the flames of candles held by microphone stands. Based on a fourth-century Christian hymn, Caccuri’s composition evokes the shift in Christian music toward the voice (so as to express the word of God) — and the rejection of bass and percussion as erotic, irrational. European colonizers brought this attitude to Brazil and elsewhere, fueling the denigration of Indigenous (and African) people, whose music was suppressed or banned. Oratório (Tidal Wave) is a meditation on that history as well as a manifestation of the power of bass to move and merge bodies, to enable transcendence.
To read more about the show, click here.
“Signaling”, group show featuring Vivian Caccuri
From September 9 until December 11, 2022
KinoSaito
115 7th Street Verplanck, NY 10596, USA
Friday to Sunday, 10am – 5pm; Thursdays by appointment
Admission is free; a donation to support their work is encouraged
info@kinosaito.org
+1 914 293 7468