American Inquisition
On American Inquisition
Shiva Addanki and Nikholis Planck in this collaborative exhibition ‘American Inquisition,’ at No Place bring this scene, amidst the paradox, this quiet and searing airing, as geographies and temporalities fold into an ecology of capture, extraction and resistance. Land in Addanki and Planck’s investigation offers a blurring of what they refer to as the settler interior and exterior, unsettling the blue that canopies the gaze, the frame, the flag, and its meandering assumption of place. In the canvas of their work, presented as frames, within measurement, etched, drawn, painted, hand worked in response to the condition that is memory, the frames of what late historian Mike Davis theorised as disaster ecologies, ecologies of fear, geographies of the constant encounter. Here, the image is operationalised for a range of agential interests. The state, its corporations, the materials and regimes it seeks, often merely contrasted by the Euro-American reading of the alleged resilient, constantly countering, other, which appears in the historical development of settler colonial image making, from its foreign correspondents to its painters of a landscape of self. An American Inquisition here read normatively is a state of critique but given the opportunity to marble, is a state of paralysis, at-least personally - a pause for the ledger, a pause for this sugar, to let that blue from the ocean and sky do the work in unmaking containers.
A brass oxidized appendage of metal floats onto a green rectangle of a closed discourse. A signalising sovereign textile fleets through the air on the warmth of men carrying the heat. Seen from a distance, anthropogenic clouds clout the upper ring of the eye. A man sits exhausted in the back of a truck. “Regime Change at the Ends of Spring.” Turbulent blues in the red sea, deep historical turquoise keeping afloat the monsters of billions in life, un-distill into energy. Troare, look. I refuse to describe this perpetuity of the killing, this repeated iteration that blooms every industrial and fiscal form of the current ledger company on turtle island, the spaceship is here, and seems deeper than ever before, right here as we stand among friends in ohi:yó, this name that is actually water. Water, that pipes into watering the seeds of the monocrop, split by the same company that split atoms, for implosions of the other, and the terrestrial rejection of native land, and everything that grows, and where patented incorporation becomes the culture of annual harvests, not to be eaten but to be circulated through logistics as fuel. Fuel grown, fuel circulated, fuel celebrated, and in between all of that, here, a place named after a man who never made it here, for shallow myths like the crisp of cherry made out of petroleum that sits above a curly soft ice cream. Add up the debt.
Addanki’s work is a visual essay, offering us an opportunity to read, and Planck extends this mirror into the viscerality of deeper landscape, of how an artistic practice can perhaps teach us a moment of disalienation, and critical engagement. Water soluble oil on wax paper, water soluble oil on wax paper, water soluble oil on wax paper. Cuts and etches. Handworked canvas. The monocrop here has caught fire, and in the drop perceived through the painting, you will see tears in the tent, chaos, and breathing memories of ambient red, a smog that resides in the inner soul of your lungs. In what is addressed as a Desert Study, the rug’s print struggles to shine against the sand which is also red. The door is seen to be open, not to an outside, but to a closeted interior, dried fungal spores leaking through the walls. A slippage into a New York archipelagic blue canopy for the goods from the Atlantic, ikea : fog : end points in the oceanic highway : an east after the west : floody gaze in the air. Between the bridge over the beautiful sky and the grass that grows from the sand, it is difficult to say much else. Theory has been painted. Persistence, stresses for a pause, and as Fred Moten once said in a poetry reading, “I don’t want to talk about those motherfuckers. I just need you to know that this shit is killing you too.” Did you know that we could play jazz on a shallow tide day right next to that grass under the bridge. What I describe as the grass might just be the twigs left behind, but sometimes the gift of the painting is to not know the answer. The blue breaks the measurement of the frame.
Harshavardhan Bhat