Bronx Museum AIM Biennial

Curated by Patrick Rowe and Nell Klugman

"The artworks in this show explore connection and disconnection: to one’s heritage, invoking memory, time, culture, and geography; to society and its norms, practices, and structures, through social and institutional critique; and to other individuals or groups, expressed through ideas of identity, intimacy, and distance. Both individually and seen together, these works map intersections and oppositions, isolation and belonging."

Features:

1. the money is in the blades, 2025

   U.S. cotton flag, white aluminum flagpole, white cast aluminum bracket, galvanized steel caddy, 50 blue Gillette disposable razors, Gillette shaving cream

2. Digital video, 2:30 minutes

   Installation dimensions vary

Courtesy of The Bronx Museum, Photos by Argenis Apolinario

In the durational performance the money is in the blades, Asia Stewart sprays and lathers shaving cream onto a mounted U.S. flag and cuts its fabric into dozens of pieces with disposable Gillette razors. Her actions not only magnify the ritualized performance of shaving, but also directly connect the ubiquity of razors to the United States’ conduct of war. After learning that The Gillette Company’s expansion in the twentieth century was largely buoyed by its role in World War I and partnership with the U.S. government, she felt a desire to recast the everyday object of a razor as an oft-overlooked tool of the military industrial complex. Here, she uses that same item to tear at the seams of a national symbol and destroy it.

Facedown builds on a series of one-on-one participatory performances that Asia Stewart conducted throughout 2023. In those earlier works, each audience member received a Polaroid camera and was invited to command Stewart to perform a desired action, producing a single photograph of her carrying it out. The resulting images, titled with the initials of the anonymous participants, reflect the parts of Stewart’s body that strangers felt most compelled to capture. At Kate Werble Gallery, Stewart transforms these photographs into choreographic instructions, linking the isolated gestures together in a looped sequence. Performing behind a screen, Stewart reanimates these private exchanges while exposing only her silhouette, reframing the dynamics of spectatorship.

Lye is a corrosive solution produced after wood ashes are soaked in water. When combined with animal or plant fats, lye yields soap. Although it is a residue of fiery destruction, soap functions as an instrument of cleansing. leach is interested in this contradiction.

The performance recalls soap’s colonial history and its associations with Christian missionaries who distributed the substance to whiten and lighten supposedly “unclean” racialized subjects. In the name of God, soap was proffered as a commodity that could approximate moral integrity and civility just as easily as it could erase memories of harm committed by evangelizing practitioners.

leach borrows from Psalm 26:6 to construct a sermon around the phrase, “I will wash my hands among the innocent.” Inviting audiences to shed their guilt before washing their hands with homemade soap, the performer Asia Stewart extends the possibility of deliverance, absolution, and forgiveness. Concerned with the cost of cleanliness, this performance interrogates the insistence that benevolence can persist in the face of repeated histories of violence.

Stewart developed the durational performance cat got your tongue after getting diagnosed with an auto-immune disease that affected her mobility. The core action in the performance is straightforward; she chews gum while walking on a desk treadmill. Once flavorless, she sticks the chewed gum underneath her sneaker and places a new piece of gum into her mouth. After chewing and sticking hundreds of pieces of gum to the treadmill, the sticky material overrides the power of the electronic machine and renders it an immovable sculpture.

In this performance, she tests the limits of her own body and the machine, pushing against the expectation that productivity should be optimized and continuous. cat got your tongue ultimately presents Stewart's refusal of efficiency.

Presented in a grammar of attention

The Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program Curatorial Exhibition

Curated by Ntshadi Mofokeng, Kennedy Jones, Tamara Khasanova, and Beatriz Ortega Botas

Adapting Allen Jones' highly controversial "Table" sculpture, Stewart spends the majority of this performance on all fours with a panel of glass balanced on her back. While on the floor, Stewart invites three random members of the audience to don numbered ski masks. Stewart then leads these volunteers through a series of questions, instructions, and challenges related to power, service, and control. Considering tables to be sites of exchange, the performance unfolds as an absurd study of the conversations and interactions that happen at and around them.

Fabric Softener is a theatrical response to Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon and the text's focus on three generations of Black women: Pilate, her daughter Reba, and granddaughter Hagar.

This performance presents three new characters who are not recreations of these women but are instead archetypes: The Laundress, The Celebrant, and The Witness. The performance begins as The Celebrant and The Witness prepare The Laundress for an intervention: a baptism, a becoming, and a funeral for what used to be and can no longer exist.

Premiered at The Shed, Open Call Commission

Cast:

• Asia Stewart: Creator, Director, and Performer (The Laundress)

• Dominica Greene: Performer (The Celebrant)

• Candice Hoyes: Perfomer (The Witness)

• Yaz Lancaster: Composer, Music Director, and Violinist

• Shala Miller: Performer (The Narrator)

[watch in full here]

Free Expression and the Inexpressible brings together eighteen contemporary artists staging connections between the personal and political dimensions of expression and inexpressibility. Through strategies that range from the discursive and polemical to the affective and abstract, they interrogate the edges of this freedom, mine its history, and posit new ways of thinking about what we can and cannot express. The artworks in Free Expression and the Inexpressible not only frame a deeply rooted and ongoing crisis, but also participate in an equally long legacy of resistance, imagination, and transformation. As visual, experiential, and affective provocations, they offer a vision of freedom in an unfree world, and new precedents for how we might make choices in conditions not of our choosing."

Features:

1. DS, 2023, Enlarged polaroid print, 20 x 20 inches

The structure of each performance was simple; viewers had the opportunity to photograph Stewart during a one-on-one experience that could last for any length of time determined by the viewer.

Each participant received a Polaroid SX-70 camera upon entry into the performance space; they were given instructions that they could capture Stewart’s body however they desired by issuing commands.

Each photograph produced reflects Stewart’s interpretation of an audience member's instructions. Titled with the initials of the anonymous participants, the photographs reflect the attention others paid to her body. Strangers documented her in 84 pieces, capturing her face, breasts, stomach, knees, toes, thighs, ass, and genitals: a once-over performed many times but always incomplete.

dreamgurl features a series of self-portraits that explore the production and reproduction of sexually explicit images.

Stewart was inspired to begin this series after a video of her 2020 performance “La Négresse blanche,” which includes nudity, was downloaded by an anonymous Vimeo user named “J” and shared on various pornographic sites without her consent in February 2021. After processing this violation, Stewart felt that she needed to reckon with the fact that her art can be classified as pornographic because it centers her naked body. Rather than disavow this designation, Stewart uses this series as an opportunity to explore the possibility of being a producer of pornographic images.

Stewart started collecting dozens of vintage 1980s Playboy magazines to study the physical language and gestures displayed in archetypal pornographic materials. Cutting out the bodies of white (and often highly bronzed and airbrushed) centerfold models, Stewart embarked on a mission to entirely cover her body in an assemblage of thousands of magazine clippings.

dreamgurl documents Stewart’s construction of garish Frankenstein-esque molds of her body, an act that took place across two days at the Institute for Electronic Arts. The messy performance incorporated honey, Q-tips, saliva, sweat, hair, and dirt.

Asia Stewart performed “Unyielding” in response to Entang Wiharso’s exhibition When Rabbits Eat Meat at Marc Straus Gallery. In “Unyielding,” Stewart returns to Abel Meeropol’s haunting “Strange Fruit,” a song made popular by Billie Holiday. Stewart’s looped and improvised performance of “Strange Fruit” gives her the impetus to confront a Southern magnolia tree and investigate where histories of racial terror and violence reside in its soil, a direct reference to Wiharso's experience of seeing a tree in South Carolina that had been used for lynching, and likening it to the corpse flower, a recurring image in the works on view.

Inspired by Man Ray’s “Obstruction,” Stewart created a dress made of translucent plastic hangers found in her childhood home. In performances of this work, she quickly constructed the sculpture and hung up clothing donated by audience members in the span of 15 - 20 minutes. During performances at The Tank and JACK, Stewart tried to challenge the capitalist desire to accumulate goods with the question: “why is it that we collect so many things?"

MÔR: A Collective Exhibition of Black Lesbian Thought endeavors to illuminate the works of artists who place themselves in the lineage of black lesbian histories, thoughts, practices, and embodiments. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, ‘Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought,’ addresses pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti- blackness while also attending to love, romance, “coming out,” and the erotic.

Curated by Alexandra Jane and Briona Simone Jones

Features:

1. Legs is Legs, 2020, Archival pigment print, 40 x 54 inches

"Through new media, sculpture, performance, and conceptual art, the exhibition seeks to convene and alchemize a new being of blackness through the assembly of art as community practice and community activations."

Curated by black beyond (JAZSALYN, Shameekia Shantel Johnson, and Yvonne Mpwo)

Features:

1. Legs is Legs, 2020, ironing board, nylon stockings

2. No More Blue Mondays, 2021, Digital video, 23 minutes

"Coinciding with the 45th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement, this exhibition looks to the origins of identity politics in order to consider the concept’s continued relevance and contemporary manifestations. In their 1977 statement—one of the most significant texts of the twentieth century and a pillar of Black feminist theory and practice—the Combahee River Collective introduced identity politics as a cogent political analysis that emphasizes personal experience and multi-focal coalition building as wellsprings of revolutionary action. For the Combahee River Collective, identity politics allowed for the recognition that all forms of oppression are interconnected and thus cannot be fought in isolation. While importantly informed by who you are, identity politics poses the more essential question of what you might do with others."

Curated by Christian Camacho-Light & Roxana Fabius

Let’s Play explored how clothing (or its absence) is gendered and surveilled in public. Audience members had the ability to momentarily dictate how Stewart was dressed. Those who attended both virtually and in-person were directed to a Google Form that allowed them to decide whether she would add or remove a layer of clothing. Those anonymous responses were shared aloud via a digital program to instruct Stewart as to how she should proceed. The performance was live-streamed to let audience members view the impact that their commands had on the performance in real time. Over the course of four hours, audience members submitted over 300 commands. Stewart began the performance in approximately 30 layers of clothing. At many times during the performance, she was completely nude, and by its conclusion, Stewart wore nearly 50 layers of clothes.

In this piece, Stewart covers her entire body in dark, artificial hair purchased from a beauty supply store near her apartment in Brooklyn. While clothed in her dress of hair, Stewart performs normal tasks like braiding, tying, and combing her hair, and complete actions like sweeping the floor. Her performance, paired with audio taken from instructional etiquette tapes on hygiene, pokes fun at society’s anxious surveillance of body hair in the name of “cleanliness”, beauty, and femininity.

In Legs is Legs, Stewart engaged in the reiterative practice of binding her body with nylon pantyhose to an ironing board. Through the act of restraining herself with accessories that are commonly used to keep the body “in line,” she attempted to physicalize the constraints that dictate how women can and should present their bodies to others. Bound by over 100 pairs of pantyhose, Stewart renders herself immobile. Her self-imposed entrapment represents the violence that’s enacted to uphold conceptions of gender.

La Négresse blanche is a six hour performance that marks the beginning of Stewart's Graft series. The piece is titled after Mayotte Capecia’s book of the same name and draws off of selections from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. During the performance, a Black subject attempts to become white by covering herself in glue and paint. After waiting for the paste to dry, the subject strips off the glue and ingests bits of it. La Négresse blanche illustrates an epidermalization of whiteness. What happens when bodies renounce a Blackness they cannot escape to approach the asymptote of whiteness? How is the performance of whiteness worn (down)?

The Graft series explores how subjects modify and manipulate their bodies to straddle (ab)normality. The series communicates how a Black subject, determined from without and defined by all she is not, actively participates in her own transformation – a metamorphosis represented by the adoption or removal of a new layer of skin.