Bric Presents REENACTMENT

BRIC presents Reenactment, a group exhibition examining and agitating the aesthetics and politics of historical reenactment in contemporary art (January 18-February 25). In traditional reenactments, events like the American Revolution and Civil War are embodied by amateur performers using storytelling and props, all too often approaching history as unchangeable and absolute. Through work in performance, video, and photography, this exhibition-curated by Jenny Gerow, Assistant Curator at BRIC-looks at six artists of color who are unsettling cultural mythologies and origin stories, and who approach history as fluid. With works from Ken Gonzales-Day,Crystal Z. Campbell, Marisa Williamson, Maria Hupfield, Alicia Grullón, and Farideh Sakhaeifar, the histories represented range from civil rights activism and gentrification in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighborhood to the refugee crisis in Syria and the American Revolution, asserting the experiences of people underrepresented throughout history. In conjunction with the exhibition in the main gallery space of BRIC House, will be an installation byKenseth Armstead, Master Work: Slaves of New York 1776 in BRIC's Project Room (January 18-25); and an evening of performance, featuring Hupfield and Grullón (January 24).

In a film installation by Crystal Z. Campbell, the artist reanimates a piece of recently erased local history. Prior to the demolition of the Slave Theater, a theater in Bed-Stuy where Reverend Al Sharpton held rallies and rose as an activist figure, Campbell trespassed on the abandoned property, unearthing a roll of undeveloped film of amateur kung-fu movie, called Go-Rilla Means War. (The theater's former owner-Judge John L. Phillips, Jr.- sometimes called the "kung fu judge," was the director of the film.) From that film, whose 20,000 frames Campbell manually scanned then soundtracked with a part-historical, part-fictional narrative, the artist created an installation chronicling the story of Judge Phillips, his kung fu movie house/social justice epicenter, and Robert Kennedy and the Community Development Corporation movement combating redlining. Now a casualty of local gentrification, a new complex of residential and retail spaces will soon stand where the theater once stood as a black neighborhood hub.

A more distant Brooklyn history is evoked in Alicia Grullón's performance work-back to the Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, the first large battle in the Revolutionary War, following the Declaration of Independence. By inserting herself, a woman of color, into reenactments of this battle, the artist questions what "revolutionary" histories we're so widely taught. Four photographs from a reenactment at Green-Wood Cemetery appear in the exhibition, alongside texts including the press release for the "Trail of Broken Treaties" delivered in Minneapolis MN in 1972 and James Foreman's "The Black Manifesto" delivered at The Black National Economic Conference on July 10, 1969 (which Grullón carried in her boots during the reenactment). On January 24 at 7pm, Grullón will give a performance- A rehearsal of the past for the future-where she will dress in period costume from the Battle of Brooklyn, and in a mic check fashion, will lead the audience in the steps of holding and preparing a musket to fire while reciting pertinent verse. Grullón formerly explored the critical potentials of reenactment at BRIC in 2016 through Filibuster, in which she reenacted the 11-hour filibuster by Texas State Senator Wendy Davis, as part of BRIC's Whisper or Shout exhibition.

Ken Gonzales-Day's Bone Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River series-created over two decades ago-flips the perspective of the traditional 19th century frontier novel, which persistently used Native and Latinx characters as inferior backdrops for the heroic tale of Western conquest by white characters. Via an installation comprised of 19 photographs hung within a hand-painted mural, a printed copy of the artist's novella, and a severed head in snow, Gonzales-Day traces his genealogy through camp aesthetics, reinventing his ancestors as characters, and performing them through the photographs. The story centers on the characters of Ramoncita, a Native/Latina indentured to a rancher, and Nepomuceno, a New Mexican soldier. Through an expansive photographic narrative, Gonzales-Day uses these characters to uncover missing histories surrounding the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-48), as told through a queer, intersectional critique. The themes Gonzales-Day touches upon in this series, such as immigration, US-Mexico relations, the AIDS crisis, and the transgender rights movement, are reflected thematically through his still painfully relevant vantage point of the 1990s, when AIDS continued to consume queer lives and the U.S. government imposed new militaristic border policies.

Marisa Williamson takes a performative, character-driven approach to the reconsideration of perspective in looking back through history. The artist took on the persona of Sally Hemmings-the enslaved woman of mixed race owned by President Thomas Jefferson who was thought to be his mistress-carrying out a continued performance that included giving tours of the American Wing period rooms at the Met, leading "full-body" workouts as Hemmings; and even placing Hemmings in a postmodern talk show alongside the likes of Monica Lewinsky, Oprah Winfrey, Ben Affleck, and Tituba of Salem Village. For the exhibition at BRIC, Williamson is creating all new work, turning a queen sized bed into a prototype for Sally Hemming's grave site, complete with a full mattress of living plants and an epitaph that reads "Dream On." Also included is a video installation interweaving Hemming's history with that of Cherry Jones, Williamson's second cousin and history interpreter at Monticello.

Farideh Sakhaeifar's latest works find humanity and its absence in particularly brutal recent histories. The prints from her You are in the war zone series depict the Syrian Civil War and refugee crisis, and overexpose drawings made of the media's coverage of conflict and human suffering with photographic scenes of everyday life in New York City. HerUntitled (Halabja) linocuts pair text from The Inconvenient Atrocity: The chemical Weapons attack on the Kurds of Halabja, Iraq by Susan Schurman with imagery that sets decontextualized faces and body parts cut from magazines against the insinuating outlines of her linocut prints, bearing the subtle traces of tragedy. Sakhaeifar will hold open rehearsals in the gallery space for a performance relating to the Untitled (Halabja) with dancer Isabel Umali. Based on the first-person account of the victims of the chemical warfare attack the resulting performance presents the expression of trauma through reenactment.

Opening up the collaborative potential of reenactment is the multidisciplinary artist Maria Hupfield. An artist of Anishnaabe (Ojibway) heritage, and a member of Wasauksing First Nation, her work includes object making, video, performance, and community activism. Often creating work by hand-sewing industrial felt, she builds forms based on ritual or traditional clothing that become activated through performance. Her work is focused on the production of shared moments that open spaces for possibility and new narratives. Located in the windows of BRIC House will be the 30 ft. Solidarity Acknowledgement Banner, part protest banner, part land acknowledgement, with text in the form of a concrete poem: "speaksolidaritybuild solidarityradicalsolidarity awakesolidarityaction." Hupfield will also perform Electric Prop and Hum Freestyle Variations: BRIC, a 20 minute, multimedia performance piece in collaboration with fellow BRICworkspace artist-in-residence, Tusia Dabrowska, activating objects currently on display in the gallery (January 24 at 7pm). This project incorporates scored and un-scored movement, sound, and vocalizations with the live electric music by Wiktor Podgorski.

Kenseth Armstead's ancillary exhibit, Master Work: Slaves of New York 1776, also opens on January 18 (with a reception on January 17, 7-9pm), and runs through February 25 in the BRIC House Project Room. Master Work, while standing alone, also further intensifies the discussions at play in Reenactment. In the confines of a room cramped with coded Revolutionary-era objects, 20,000 duck feathers-one for each slave in the colony of Revolutionary War-era New York-are tarred to perforated steel frames along the walls. The other objects, denoting the messages of freedom from British oppression and the ensuing promises of the American dream, evoke innumerable ideological hypocrisies in their placement against the mired symbols of the people to whom such visions of autonomy and empowerment were denied.

Reenactment comes at a time where America simultaneously reckons with and perpetuates histories of oppression. Conversations about historical monuments and legacies that have been upheld for far too long open the floor to perspectives the country has, throughout its history, cast into the margins as a defense of power structures supporting the white, rich, and male. Reenactment brings together a diverse array of personalized histories from people of color in an assertion of the inherent problems of the singular nature of the word "history."

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