stand and watch in the dark
Aram Kavoossi and Luca Lum
April 18 – 25, 2025
Open 12-6pm on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and Tuesdays. Open 12-7pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Closed on Mondays.
Opening reception on Friday, April 18 from 6:30-9pm.
Opening Night Artist Talk: 7:15–8PM | Elegies in Real Time moderated by Harris Chowdhary
Shadows cut, processes drone, effigies sit in and watch the dark. Through moving image, sound, installation, and scenography, Luca Lum (SMACT ’25) and Aram Kavoossi (SMACT ’26) explore what it means to live in a depleted present, a present whose material qualities and resources feel pre-determinedly arranged by future projections and the curation of the past, by tracing what Renée Green describes as the “emotional fullness in locations of perceived absence … shifting remains.” Both artists plumb the respective shadows of their respective sites to harness their elegiac tonalities. For Kavoossi, this refers to an intimate, alienated choreography of the Western landscape; for Lum, this resonates with animacies, grief, and loss in anticipatory structures in Singapore and America that arrange how time is felt or relocated.
It is within the supposedly impossible and impassable where new contours of life may be found, albeit in ruinous forms, seeking address. In this respect, the artists echo Edouard Glissant’s proposal that “We are told, and it is true, that everything is disorganized, confused, decrepit, madness is everywhere, the blood and the wind. We see it and we live it. But it is the whole world that is speaking to you, through so many gagged voices.”
Lum and Kavoossi’s moving image pieces will each run after the other.
Luca Lum (SMACT ’25) is an artist and writer attuned to arrhythmias of time, memory, and affect. She considers the technological, semiotic and informational as material, relation, and predicament.
Aram Kavoossi (SMACT ’26) is an artist, writer, and editor currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Aram Kavoossi’s audiovisual installation explores the sensory construction of particular understandings of land, belonging, fixity, itinerancy, and time. A fragmented road-trip-home-movie follows two characters who are considered, or consider themselves, aliens almost everywhere they go as they traverse the episodic landscapes of the American Southwest – stages both deeply strange and endlessly familiar to the two travelers. A broken feedback loop emerges between intimate and mass-produced images of the Southwest as Kavoossi quietly retraces minor histories of movement, prospection, mining, drilling, ghost towns, alien invasion paranoia, tourism, transnational cinema, and land use interpretation.
Troubling the promises and fantasies of the Hollywood desert imaginary, these home-road movies are overlaid with the artist’s own DIY musical practice which has accompanied him since childhood. Kavoossi deploys sound to unsettle and recombine mainstream perceptions of the American Southwest, recutting the meaning-saturated images of desert landscapes to the sonic experiments of his personal audio archive dating back to 2014, echoing and recomplicating authorships of migration, diaspora, indigeneity, and alienation.
A pair of effigies representing the travelers sit back and ponder their experiences, perceptions, and perspectives as their journey unfolds and replays before them. Onlookers can only stand and watch in the dark. The artist hopes that despite the initial alienation of this experience, audiences will linger to take part in a new language of perception where the existing no longer works for us.
Ghostless (Notation 3. )
I.
Meandering the halls of the American Museum of Natural History, I craned my heads to peer at the dioramas. The last time I had been here was a decade ago. Halls of exhibits have been shut down in response to updated regulations under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). I lingered and allowed myself to be carried by the dioramas’ enchantments. What creates animating qualities in dead things? Each animal is positioned as gazing at something specific – another animal in the scene, a distant horizon beyond the glass.
II.
Silence is never empty; often it is built of perverse architecture. If you touched something deeper outside of the narrative that allows a feedback loop, you suffer a paralyzing cognitive dissonance. A silence that meets us in return speaks more about the predicament of our environment than the value of whatever it is we hold together.
Ghostless (Notation 3.) is part of Luca’s larger body of inquiry around the regulation of haunting and the ghost in contemporary times. The ghost or haunting – as metaphor, as force – is, to paraphrase sociologist Avery Gordon, a tether to other temporalities. She is interested in what it means to live in a present already choreographed by the future – how we might locate, sense, and re-animate the kinds of time that emerge when space, subjects, and objects get arranged in anticipation of endangerment and crisis.
This cut primarily focuses on mise-en-scènes from the American Museum of Natural History, with special focus on its habitat dioramas from the early 1900s by Carl Akeley, American taxidermist and sculptor, and the Boston Museum of Science’s display of “Spot” the autonomous robot by Boston Dynamics doing repetitious loops in its enclosure.
While the Akeley dioramas capture an imagined environmental past meant to produce a desire to protect a certain “wildness”, “Spot” represents a form of presence that transacts with “dangerous” environments in place of human intervention. Danger here is coded; human presence might involve culpability – the dog is a way to decouple that.
Tying both sites and scenes together are spectres of endangerment and the figure of animacy – something ambiguously, challengingly agentic, aware, mobile, approximating life, and close to death.
The long, hushed sigh accompanying the piece is a pitched and stretched sound from quantum computing refrigerators. Itself a breath of anticipation, speed and scale, of computational possibility that alters reality in seconds. It is an anticipatory structure that rearranges both the material and imagination of the present.
