the landscape reconstitutes itself absolutely brings together a selection of ten moving image works that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, and question narratives of socio-ecological crisis contributing to the displacement and erasure of peoples and lifeforms. Speculating on the inherently diasporic nature of materials, the program situates land as an ever-shifting conceptual terrain and imagines how an alternate reality, one unbound by coloniality, can emerge and embody a time of its own. Moving from the planetary to the cosmological, and interrogating various historical and geopolitical contexts, these artists rethink catastrophe and violence through improvisational and communal practices that conjure generative knowledges and mutual alliances. In their works, place is no longer constituted solely by its destruction, but also by newly learned gestures, rituals, and resilient lifeforms that change a site over time. Critical issues range from the waste crisis in Lebanon and the loss of contested lands in the United States, to larger pressing concerns about impending ecological disasters.

The program simultaneously considers the migration of information, objects, and individuals, and how notions of place and belonging are spatiotemporally destabilized through radical survival strategies. As such, by looking at artists’ considerations and engagements with speculation, fiction, play, dreamlike states, it asks: How do we reconceptualize states of conflict as sites for speculation, social reproduction, and invention?

*This program is an extension of the curatorial project, A grammar built with rocks, which was conceived and organized with Shoghig Halajian in Los Angeles.

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Her work begins at the intersection of art and politics, treating image-making as steeped in colonial pasts and modern surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and programs at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), Hammer Museum (all Los Angeles); Oregon Contemporary, Portland; Sursock Museum, Beirut; and UKS, Oslo; among others. She often works collaboratively, most recently with Kunstverein in Amsterdam and Human Resources in Los Angeles. She was granted The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian for the arts journal Georgia, and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. Halajian is a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

With moving image works by P. Staff, Sky Hopinka, Cauleen Smith, Bassem Saad, Caitlin Berrigan, Mariah Garnett, Gelare Khosgozaran, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Sindhu Thirumalaisamy