Join curator Ashley James as she shares the origins of the exhibition during a live recording of the Art from the Outside podcast with co-host Amitha Raman.

Transcript
Ashley James: Welcome everyone, to the first look of "Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility." I’m Ashley James, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum and curator of Going Dark.

Before the exhibition opened, I chatted about the show in front of a live audience with Amitha Raman, cohost of the podcast "Art from the Outside," a project that endeavors to make sophisticated art-world conversations accessible to broad audiences. Together, we teased out some of the major threads of the show.

Amitha Raman: I want to talk about the exhibition "Going Dark." And Ashley, this is actually your third exhibition at the Guggenheim but your first major rotunda show. Can you tell us about where the concept for the show came from?

James: So "Going Dark," it essentially brings together these 28 artists who obscure the figure in some way. So visibility in two ways: as a formal concept but also as a social concept. So, what does it mean for us to be visible in public space? To be visible in our careers? To be visible in art history? And so forth. And so I was really interested in artists who in very many different ways give you something of the figure but then take it back or never give it fully.

Many of you have potentially seen these images of enslaved figures’ daguerreotypes made in the mid-19th century—you know, frontal, sometimes in profile view. They were part of a project that was essentially undertaken in the advancement of ideas around scientific racism, essentially making this argument that there is a specific type, or there are many types of humans, of which Black people are at the lower end.

So the question is, what does it mean that the Black subject kind of finds its originary moment in the space of photography, or one of the originary moments in the space of photography, in this very, I mean, objectification is the least of it, but in this kind of violent space of dehumanization? And I think that there are many artists who are really thinking seriously about what it means for photography to, basically, have embedded within it this tension.

On the one hand, it offers so much access and visibility that we desire as people for many ways. At the same time, it carries this threat of overexposure and that which can be used against you in circulation. I think that tension of visibility—wanting to conceal but then also wanting to be present and have a kind of legibility in various spaces—the medium of photography is kind of ground zero for that conversation.

Raman: Ashley, what do you hope that audiences will learn from experiencing this exhibition?

James: There is this really exciting, I think, formal experimentation at the heart of it, because it is a challenge to conceal and reveal at the same time. And I think there’s a lot that can come from engaging in the limits of something, because at that edge is where you learn about the parameters of a thing.

at guggenheim.org/audio

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