NORTH ADAMS, MASS.- MASS MoCA is presenting the group exhibition Like Magic. Like Magic addresses contemporary artists’ relationships to technologies associated with magic — including devices, talismans, rituals, incantations — and invites visitors to explore the points where technology and magic converge.
The exhibition features work by Simone Bailey*, Raven Chacon, Grace Clark*, Johanna Hedva, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Cate O’Connell-Richards, Rose Salane, Petra Szilagyi*, Tourmaline, Nate Young*. (*full or partial commission). Using healing earth, witches’ brooms, AI, divination, and more , these ten artists explore how technologies of magic proliferate in times of chaos and uncertainty. Imagining these technologies turned towards delight, care and healing, their work mobilizes rituals and devices to subvert oppressive power.
Like Magic’s curator Alexandra Foradas notes, “When we say something is ‘like magic,’ it is a way of articulating that its operations are beyond the scope of our comprehension, or even are perhaps ultimately unknowable. For those whose lives are surveilled because of their race, sexuality, gender identity, indigeneity, or immigration status, magic’s unknowability can function as a refusal of a system’s efforts to know, categorize, and control their lives and stories.”
Many of the artists in Like Magic explore the architectural language of spirituality. Grace Clark’s newly-commissioned chapel-like installation reflects on the relationship between processes of healing and the natural world, which is for the artist a kind of “church.” At each new moon, visitors will be welcomed to apply charcoal from a hole in the floor of Clark’s installation onto parts of their own bodies that are in need of healing. Petra Szilagyi’s new installation Bless Your Harddrive invites visitors to enter a “counter-apocalyptic devotional space” to offer prayers for a benevolent future for the internet, in which Szilagyi has combined the visual language of technology (including PC towers, cables, gaming chairs, and VR headsets) with natural materials (including wood, leather, and cob).
For other artists in the show, magical technologies provide a mode of engagement with histories — tools charged with the potential for solace and healing, or with the potential to harm. Co- commissioned by MASS MoCA and Southern Exposure, Simone Bailey’s three-channel film Home Training (Bagpipe Piece) explores the shifting meaning of Crann Tara or “fiery cross,” the ancient Highlander ritual used to communicate danger between clans, which was transformed by white supremacists in the United States into an act of racist violence. Nate Young crafts and intricate drawings of reliquaries for horses’ bones, reflecting on the horse that carried his great-grandfather from North Carolina to Philadelphia during the Great Migration. A new sound installation surrounds visitors with the animal’s breath. Rose Salane assembles lost rings from Atlantic City and pilfered shards from the Pompeii archaeological site later returned by tourists wracked with guilt and shame. Invested in the psychospiritual life of what she calls “power objects,” Salane has observed that these seemingly mundane fragments “pose new ways of defining their source” once assembled. In Atlantic is a Sea of Bones (titled after a poem by Lucille Clifton), Tourmaline presents a film portrait of performer Egyptt Labeija. The film draws on the Black queer and trans histories of New York’s waterfronts and examines afterlives of the transatlantic slave trade that continue to haunt the present. Raven Chacon’s graphically- notated scores For Zitkála–Šá are dedicated to the titular Yankton Dakota composer and activist. The scores form portraits of 13 contemporary Native women sound artists – “A graphic score,” writes Chacon, “can resist the history of Western notation, and with that can eliminate normalizations and assumptions of time that influence how we see the universe and whoever created us.”
Many of the artists in the exhibition similarly use magical technologies as a tools for intervening in existing systems of power, towards the ends of healing and joy. “U.S. Customs Demands to Know,” an installation by Gelare Khoshgozaran, transmutes packages from the artist’s Tehran- based parents that were roughly inspected by US Customs on their journey in the country.
Through the artist’s intervention, these parcels become glowing, otherworldly lanterns scattered across the gallery floor. Johanna Hedva’s Who Listens and Learns, a handmade artist book bound in human hair, takes the form of a novella addressing the mystical and political qualities of artificial intelligence, as experienced in times of isolation. Meanwhile, Cate O’Connell- Richards’ series of sculptures fuse traditional broom-making and metalworking techniques with the forms of occult objects to suggest the potential of labor as a site of ritual power. In a presentation that subverts the visual language of institutional museum displays, O’Connell- Richards’ works explore the eerie witchiness lurking beneath tame veneers of domesticity and the rural.
