LIGIA LEWIS: STUDY NOW STEADY

Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA)
September 30, 2023 – February 4, 2024

PRODUCTION
Video projection and audio design.

THE EXHIBITION
In study now steady time loops and bends. Dance, in Lewis’s work, is an exploration of embodiment, an encounter that disrupts linear time, where performers and spectators must attend to the body as both a troubled archive and a polyphonic chorus. An assembly of dancers and performers in shared space construct an alternative temporality where cultural and racial hierarchies are exposed and destabilized, while the question “Is transformation possible?” lingers, unanswered.

Lewis’s performances animate the psychic dimensions of seeing and being seen. She embraces fugitivity in the face of entrenched and seemingly intractable systems of domination. Her choreographic explorations take into consideration the challenges of representation inside the deathly scripts of racialization, so normalized in the everyday, in that which has been made all-too-familiar. Through this embodied struggle, what remains are urgent ruminations on repair, revenge, and the possibilities of other forms of life, beyond that which we know.

A Plot A Scandal conjures and taunts specters of history and embodied memory, including Enlightenment thinker and slave trade beneficiary John Locke, Cuban artist and revolutionary José Aponte, and Lewis’s own great-grandmother Lolón Zapata. Lewis and performer Corey Scott-Gilbert dance between seeing and being seen. Through histories of marronage and the tropes of racialization, they invoke, in full irreverence, a desire to “fuck up the plot.” The word “plot” in this haunting takes on a triple meaning—at once a reference to narrative structure and linearity; an allusion to property relations and “plots of land” as theorized by Locke; and a scheme or plan, an attempt at fugitivity and revenge. Locke’s Enlightenment ideas of humanity, freedom, and liberty, rooted in profoundly violent conceptions of whiteness and property, are central, terrifying fictions that Ligia explores and subverts through A Plot A Scandal.

The show's live commission, study now steady, is a directed rehearsal made durational, exposing the practices that have given form to stage and film works such as minor matter (2016), Still Not Still (2021) , Water Will (in Melody) (2018), and deader than dead (2020). “Dancing,” as Lewis says “[produces] its own theoretical framework, its own set of rules, and its own ethos, coherent to itself.”

Through dark humor and in the form of a critique, Lewis mobilizes embodied activations that act as unrelenting reminders that “ghosts don’t die so easily.” study now steady is curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director and Chief Curator, with production and exhibition design by Agustin Schang, and curatorial assistance by Marian Chudnovsky.

INSTALLATION VIEWS

CREDITS
Curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director and Chief Curator, with production and exhibition design by Agustin Schang, and curatorial assistance by Marian Chudnovsky.

Audio/Video Consultant: Matthew Shattuck
Construction: Rachel Cha-os
Painting: Steven Doyle
Graphic Production: Full Point Graphics
Graphic Design: The Rodina
Photography: Helena Goñi & Liz Ligon