The writers and artists in ROOM 2.25 bear witness to what must happen in ourselves, our communities, and our political movements for truth to be faced and change to occur. Some write from amidst genocide, others from their country’s fascist turn, and still others from the impact of environmental catastrophe. Each of these life-threatening events inscribes itself differently on our souls. We live in terrifying times.
Chiharu Shiota, born in Osaka in 1972 and based in Berlin, draws inspiration from personal experiences and emotions, exploring universal themes such as life, death, and relationships. Through immersive thread installations enveloping everyday objects like shoes, keys, and dresses, she investigates the idea of “presence in absence,” conveying intangible emotions in sculptures, drawings, performance videos, and photographs. Awarded the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists in Japan (2008), Shiota’s work has been showcased in prominent institutions globally, including the Grand Palais, Paris (2024), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023), ZKM, Karlsruhe (2021), and Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019). She has participated in notable exhibitions like the Sydney Biennale (2016) and represented Japan at the Venice Biennale (2015).
Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking, and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold and works toward destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state. Maksud earned her BFA in painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a diploma in art and curatorial studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice, and an MFA in visual arts at Columbia University. Her work has shown at the Cue Art Foundation, Goodman Gallery, Salon 94, Huxley Parlour, Bamako Biennial, National Museum of Contemporary Art−Seoul, Galería Nueva, and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil.
Think what it would be like,” Italo Calvino wrote, “to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language… ” Of course we know that no person and no theory can ever escape the limited perspective of Calvino’s “individual ego.” Taken together, however, the authors and artists in ROOM 6.24 are giving language to a world that is rendering us all increasingly speechless.
Kara Walker was born in Stockton, CA, in 1969, and raised in Atlanta from the age of 13. She received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art (1991) and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1994). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award in 1997, and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012 and became an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2019. Her work can be found in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including Kunstmuseum Basel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI), Rome; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.
McKenzie Stojnić is an NYC-based media performance group composed of Jon McKenzie and Aneta Stojnić. Their work operates at the intersections of art/life, theory/practice, and episteme/doxa through talks, lecture performances, comics, videos, texts, and workshops.
Yes, there was a blue wave in November 2018, but many of the races were achingly close. Even factoring in the distortions of gerrymandering, the country is torn. As a liberal New York psychoanalyst who has spent time in Christian — including Evangelical — circles, I think we on the left have difficulty understanding how frequently we are seen as hypocritical in the moral sphere.
In all obvious ways, I am not an outsider. I am not isolated from the majority by dint of my sexual orientation, skin color, class, religion, disability, or appearance— all the notable and painful ways one can become marginalized.
Room’s definition of itself as a “sketchbook of psychoanalytic action” got me thinking: What is psychoanalytic action? Is it action informed by considerable analysis of all its components and determinants?
Sitting down to write these words on Inauguration Day felt like the exact right thing to be doing. For this is another inaugural — of ROOM. Perhaps we can even…