To Conjure: New Archives in Recent Photography
Curated by Sara Ickow, Keisha Scarville, and Elisabeth Sherman.
Curated by Sara Ickow, Keisha Scarville, and Elisabeth Sherman.
Widline Cadet, Koyoltzintli, Tarrah Krajnak, Shala Miller, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Keisha Scarville, and Sasha Wortzel
36 pages
6.75” ✕ 9.75”
400 copies
2025
Edited and designed by Martha Naranjo Sandoval
Based on a design by Aline Enríquez
$24
As much as there seems to be a saturation of discourse about the archive in recent years, I do believe that exhaustive conversations around archives still offer a place to discuss what an archive for the future looks like. Where do new archives emerge, and how do we tend to them? What of our familial, collective, and imaginative resources do we compel into the space of the archive?
Shifting what constitutes an archive, artists are becoming more interested in what resides on the periphery of their institutional enclosures. The work in this show engages errant archives in the service of uncovering latent futures. Its artists locate archives in the elsewhere, the otherwise, the elusive, the familial, the obscure, the speculative, the sonic, and the hereafter. Each challenges established linear structures and broadens our understanding of what the archive can be, activating new conduits to summon spaces for storing, inhabiting, and holding time within its tenuous boundaries.
In the most politically radical sense of the word, the artists in this show are conjurers. They conjure a presence previously unseen but always present. They conjure to affirm the possibility of something more. They are conjuring not in service of resolution within the archive, but for its expansion. They conjure to create, to question, to breathe, to witness, to spill, to break, to convene, to cut, to cloak, to name, to exist.”
—KS
Koyoltzintli is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Upstate New York. She was raised on the Pacific coast and in the Andean mountains of Ecuador. Her work revolves around sound, ancestral technologies, ritual and storytelling, blending collaborative processes with personal narratives. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2019 and 2023, her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the United Nations, the Parrish Art Museum, Princeton University, the Aperture Foundation in NYC and Paris Photo. She has had two solo shows at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery and a solo show at Leila Greiche in 2023. Koyoltzintli has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships, including at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, NYFA, We Women, the Latinx Artist Fellowship by the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) and most recently, the Anonymous Was a Woman award. Her first monograph, Other Stories, was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP. Her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240) and included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer, former chief curator at BRIC. She is part of Flow States: La Trienal 2024 at El Museo del Barrio. Koyoltzintli has performed at venues such as the Whitney Museum, Wave Hill, Socrates Park, Brooklyn Museum and Queens Museum. Most recently, she performed at Performance Space in NYC, curated by Guadalupe Maravilla, at Dia Chelsea for the closing event of Delcy Morelos' El Abrazo and at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY.
Tarrah Krajnak is an artist working across photography, performance and poetry. Krajnak is currently based in Los Angeles and is an Associate Professor of Art at UCLA. She is represented by Zander Galerie, Cologne/Paris. Krajnak is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and was recently awarded the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies and the Hariban Grand Prize, from Benrido, Kyoto, Japan. Krajnak has published three books including El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan (DAIS 2021), Master Rituals II: Weston's Nudes (TBW 2022) and RePose (FW Books 2023). Her work was featured in recent issues of Aperture, British Journal of Photography, The Eyes Journal and European Photography. This past year Krajnak’s work was exhibited in Corps á Corps, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Photography Now, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Aperture's traveling exhibition You Belong Here: People, Place, & Purpose in Latinx Photography and in the solo exhibition Shadowings, Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam. Krajnak’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Pinault Collection, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, among others.
Shala Miller also known as Freddie June when they sing, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of 10 or 11, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where they should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find their way out, and find her way into an understanding of herself and her history, using photography, video, writing and singing as an aid in this process. Taking up skin as a site of history and intimacy with the self and across generations, they hold space for the body’s vulnerabilities and maladies. Miller works across photography, film, writing, music and performance as a means of meditating on the conjunction of desire, mourning, pain and pleasure. Miller holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her book, Tender Noted, was voted best photo book of 2022 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and her artwork is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum, Harlem; the Hessel Museum of Art, New York; the Akeroyd Collection and The Lumber Room, Portland, among others.
Keisha Scarville weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the Studio Museum, Harlem; Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Contact Gallery, Toronto; the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, New York; Light Work, Syracuse, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York and Higher Pictures Gallery, New York. Recent group exhibitions include The Rose, Lumber Room, Portland, OR (curated by Justine Kurland); If I Had a Hammer, the 2022 Fotofest Biennial, Houston and All of Them Witches, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (curated by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons). Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; the Denver Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has participated in residencies at Light Work, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, WOPHA, Miami, Baxter Street CCNY and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has appeared in publications including Vice, Small Axe and The New York Times where her work has also received critical review. She is a recipient of the 2023 Creator Lab Photo Fund and awarded the inaugural 2024 Saltzman Prize in Photography. Her first book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound, was published by MACK and shortlisted in the 2023 Aperture/Paris Photobook Awards. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York.
Sasha Wortzel is an artist and filmmaker exploring how past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Her work has been presented at the New Museum, New York; The Kitchen, New York; the Museum of Modern Art’s DocFortnight, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; True/False Film Festival, CPH:DOX, South London Gallery and Museum Brandhorst, Munich among others. Solo exhibitions include Dreams of Unknown Islands, Cooley Memorial Art Gallery with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art TBA Festival. Wortzel is a 2023 Guggenheim fellow and has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation and a MacDowell fellowship. Recent residencies include the Fine Arts Work Center, Silver Art Projects and ISCP's Ground Floor Program. Wortzel’s work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Studio Museum, Harlem; the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. Her recent films include How to Carry Water (CPH:Dox, 2023), an IDA Awards nominee for best short documentary and currently streaming on the Criterion Channel; This is an Address (MoMA Doc Fortnight, 2020), distributed by Field of Vision; Happy Birthday Marsha! (2018; co-director Tourmaline), which won special mention at Outfest and is distributed by Frameline. Wortzel has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America and New York Magazine.