There is no vacancy in this world, no void, no vacuum. This is one thing I learn when I encounter the artwork and read the essays by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa. Every moment in life is durational, and every image we happen to see within it, an unfolding reel through which the social world is rehearsed, or composed, or erased, or betrayed, or determined. What do we desire from images? Whose lives are risked? In his installations and exhibitions, as in his precise, angular writing about art and photography, Wolukau-Wanambwa guides his viewers and readers into the darkly layered logics of idolatry, difficulty, and exposure that undergird photography’s capacity to represent black and gendered bodies, and the violent regimes of white supremacy and patriarchy that produce them. 

I first saw Wolukau-Wanambwa’s work in person as part of the 2021 iteration of Greater New York at MoMA’s PS1, where a suite of images and objects were displayed against an entirely black background. Vivisecting the space was AMWMA (2021), a free-standing wall on either side of which was hung two, nearly identical life-size photos of the actor Anna May Wong. On one side, the actor looks back at herself in a mirror; on the other, we see her within her reflection, looking back at herself as an actor, or perhaps through herself, to the audience that made her. In the hall of mirrors Wolukau-Wanambwa constructs, Wong momentarily escapes the hell of racial idolatry and spectacle through which we are otherwise conditioned to see her. 

This Spring, I spoke to Wolukau-Wanambwa about his artmaking, writing, and teaching. We talked at length about the thresholds we cross in our encounters with art—full of visceral feeling, complicated tolerances, and the timely interferences—and writing’s attempts to describe them. We also discussed how this idea of threshold informed his recent exhibition Scene at Eastman at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, which included a revolving selection of images, objects, and cameras meant to produce a scenario in which, however briefly, we might become more present to ourselves and to one another.

 

 

 

With exhibitions and in my writing, I’ve become increasingly invested in really taking seriously the faltering nature of our intersubjective encounters with art (whether verbal or visual) and the catalytic capacities of encounter itself, which I think of as occurring at thresholds.

 

 

 

Your latest exhibition, Scene at Eastman included several iterations: the work on view changed at very specific moments over the course of the exhibition’s run. What was the logic behind this? How did you decide when and what to change?

Scene at Eastman comprises pictures that are very deliberately selected for the way that they enter into a dialogue with the George Eastman Museum, with the figure of George Eastman, with the contributions he made to the history of film and photography, with the region of western New York—and, very deliberately, with the presidential election that unfolded over the course of the exhibition’s run, which spanned October 2024 through till April 2025. 

The opportunity to make an exhibition inside of Eastman’s actual home, and within an institution that’s played such a profound role in the popularization of photography, film and television, seemed a good provocation for me to consider the structures of theatre and the logics of the theatrical scene, as those dynamics play a role in the space of art and its exhibition. So, the works in Scene rotated over the course of the exhibition’s run: the first rotation happened very deliberately on January 6, 2025, and the second on February 24, so that there were effectively three two-month-long exhibitions over the course of its six-month run. 

It's important to add that just as Scene unfolded during the re-election of Donald Trump, that in the Christmas immediately following his first election in 2016, the George Eastman Museum elected to screen the film Holiday Inn (1942). It’s a romance starring Bing Crosby, Marjorie Reynolds and Fred Astaire, and the romantic union between Crosby and Reynolds pivots around a performance of Irving Berlin’s song “Abraham,” performed in blackface by the couple in the middle of the film. Berlin wrote songs for various performers including Stepin Fetchit, who appeared alongside Shirley Temple in Dimples (1936), another film parenthetically incorporated along with Holiday Inn into the structure of the show. I felt obligated to respond to these historical precedents, and to think about the mechanisms of normative good feeling that undergird the popularity and presumptive innocence of such emotive scenes.

Practically speaking, I had to decide on the checklist with my curator, Phil Taylor, well before the exhibition opened, so we made a selection of works which we finalized in the early spring of 2024. I was working with an almost absolute certainty that Donald Trump would win the presidential election, and so I was able—or, maybe obligated—to make choices about the temper of the context in which these objects would enter into exhibition. My hope was that the show would change texture and sense over time. Rotation seemed a particularly useful approach at a regional museum, where audiences visit collections and special exhibitions regularly. Our rotations anticipated a future present tense, as for instance on January 6, 2025 when we unveiled works like ward (2021), a picture of a sleepy fachhaus at night from a Providence suburb, and count (2024), which shows a swastika carved squarely into the center of a set of wooden foot lockers, on either side of which appear the number “55.” I was envisioning the moment of that work’s revelation on the anniversary of yet another murderous white American riot, anticipating that the genocide in Gaza would absolutely be ongoing, and that the moral calculus of that unfettered violence would remain a festering (if also disavowed) feature of the show’s present tense. 

In all these choices, I’m trying to make use of a threshold that briefly connects me with somebody other than myself, by sharing this work and its envisioning of the present publicly. Its exhibition or publication is my way of gauging its legibility to a present we unevenly share.

I love this idea of the “threshold.” Can you speak more about how this concept relates to the images you make and the essays you write? 

With exhibitions and in my writing, I’ve become increasingly invested in really taking seriously the faltering nature of our intersubjective encounters with art (whether verbal or visual) and the catalytic capacities of encounter itself, which I think of as occurring at thresholds. Toni Morrison’s brilliant short text “The Fisherwoman,” in Robert Bergman’s profound book A Kind of Rapture,¹ thematizes this threshold spatially as ‘the property line’ that divides her from her titular subject. As both an artist and a writer, I’ve become much more concerned with how one can engender a conscious engagement with that reality, rather than an unconscious acceptance of it. This might mark the point in my work at which traditions of conceptualism necessarily merge complexly, and at times antagonistically, with documentary forms. Artists like Lorna Simpson and Christopher Williams are key here.

To me, photographs constitute thresholds, and crucially they are irrepressibly polyvocal. All their elements speak simultaneously, and they are susceptible to a cacophonous plurality of readings. I think of language as a site for the contestation of meaning(s); its etymologies accumulate an accretion of dissonances and resonances over time. In that sense, language has a sort of plasticity: its meaning is always in development, or made (over) in its enactment. But there’s also often a certain kind of indeterminacy, or incoherence in language, which I’m deeply drawn to. I think of photography’s relationship to language as being one of a kind of frustrated proximity. Photographs create liminal spaces in which they seem to speak (often forcefully), and yet, none of that speech ever coheres into definitive articulated structures. 

In pragmatic terms, part of what this understanding of the threshold does in my art, or in my writing, is to produce gestures that rupture the fourth wall. In Scene, that happened right at the opening to the show, where we exhibited a monochrome work entitled mark (2024) showing a pure white image projected onto a pure white piece of framed paper (like a Hiroshi Sugimoto cinema screen in long exposure²), and where we mirrored the interior glass surface of the gallery doors and walls, so that when the audience entered the exhibition, the gallery extended off in two directions simultaneously. These types of gestures signal readerly or spectatorial activity in a way that theatricalizes it, that makes their actions and choices conscious objects within their experience of the work. They also spatialize things structural to seeing and showing images.

To my mind, there’s an ethical contract at play in this approach, inasmuch as it’s a way of saying: you’re here reading or seeing with me, you are an active agent in this experience, you are not its unwitting and passive subject or object. I know that this approach exposes people, and that that exposure can be experienced as unconscionably violent by a viewer who expects seeing to be unilateral, not multilateral; or, by one who wants to be told what things mean in advance of, or immediately after seeing them; or, by one who does not want not to have to author their own aesthetic experience. But I’ve made my peace with the extent to which working in this way might exacerbate antagonisms like those. I think that specifying meaning in art is a lot like fixing the location of shorelines bordering seas: easy from a great distance, far more diffuse and indeterminate once one is in close proximity.³ 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How is the threshold experience activated in, or as part of, your exhibition Scene at Eastman?

When viewers approached the two galleries that Scene was exhibited in, they would have first walked past an array of old cinema and photographic cameras displayed under plexiglass enclosures, along with a vast collection of dyes used in the development of color film. They would have passed the Lunar Orbiter Camera that NASA sent up into space to image the moon. They would also have passed a raft of security cameras, all of which were looking directly at them. Their first visual encounter with my art will have been with mark (2024), and deixis (2022) on the exhibitions’ title wall. The latter work shows the amputated index finger of an anonymized religious sculpture staged in front of Holy Ghost Church, in the city of Providence. So, cuts, ruptures, the circumscription of the index (finger)—the withholding of visual form through an act of constant projection—these were primary material and symbolic factors in the show’s unfolding. They were invitations not just to look, but to think about looking—to think about pointing, as well as to consider ‘the point.’ The show then staged both a dictionary definition of the word “scene,” on its title wall, and offered this introductory text around the corner alongside the entrance to the galleries:

 

“The selection of objects in the opening rendition of the exhibition ("the works") will be subject to change. Some works will be removed, displaced, or substituted by others not in evidence at the opening. Different viewers will thus experience differing exhibitions over time.

Scene at Eastman comprises works produced in various locations including, but not limited to: Republic of South Sudan, England, South Africa, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the states of California and New York. The works describe a variety of figures, places, and objects-some recognizable, others perhaps obscure or esoteric, others still not physically in evidence. Viewers are alerted to the presence of cameras within the exhibition space: to enter the galleries is to be observed.”

 

Unlike many other exhibition spaces at the museum, where an expository wall text is often placed close to an exhibited work, in my show there was just that brief text external to the galleries, which people quite often missed or ignored. There was then no wall text in the interior, although we did provide a printed handbill that listed all the works in the exhibition, and that featured a broken grid of film stills from Holiday Inn’s “Abraham” scene, beneath a floorplan that marked the locations of the art works. We situated the handbill at the farthest point from the entrance, so that you could use it on your way back out of the show, to rub words up against the images and sculptures you had already seen. 

So, upon entry, you crossed a threshold when you entered the galleries, and because the interior side of this threshold was mirrored, if you happened to look back after stepping in, the whole exterior of the museum that you’ve just been part of is phantomized. You see yourself seeing in a kind of phantasmatic vacuum: me, myself and eye.

If you feel antagonism about what you don’t know, that too should be allowed. A scandal is not a necessarily bad effect. 

Exactly, I completely agree with that, and in one of my meetings with a group of students at the exhibition, one was generous enough to articulate their negative reaction to the lack of explicit instruction or information on offer in the show, pointing to how classed certain forms of thought about reflexivity are, and thus how uncommon or inaccessible. Once you were in the galleries, you were unmoored from any outside, any visible before or elsewhere. I know some people struggle with that, and that some people resent that sense of opacity or abandonment. In a sense, at its entryway the show became a black box, both figuratively and literally, in the case of the second gallery, which was painted black and dimly spotlit. All this was driven by a desire to respond to the constitutive material and symbolic features of cinema and of photography, and to respond to the theatrical infrastructures of museum exhibition as well. Scene asked you to see the apparatus of exhibition, of photography, of cinema, along with their ‘autonomous’ objects, and a lot of people aren’t accustomed to an unguided experience of that sort of invitation.

But I think it’s also important to acknowledge that within normative centers of American liberal culture, which is hegemonically (and often hysterically) white, there is a tremendous anxiety at the opacity of black speech. Not knowing what things are ‘supposed to mean’ can exacerbate an already existing set of anxieties, or frustrate unexamined entitlements. We do not all know the same things, think the same way, nor see the same things in the same light. All too often, the presumption is that black public speech is obligated to generate transparency, and, to renew a comity—a universality— across lines of racial difference. My work can require work from its viewers, and that may well not be a welcome realization for someone expecting that it bridge divides in such a way that it requires little of them but their assent, or the strength of their ‘fellow feeling.’ 

The show offered context architecturally, materially and verbally. If viewers used it, it could help to illuminate connections, but that decision would require a willingness to accept that ‘just looking’ is not enough, and in the normative space of fine art photography, ‘just looking’⁴ is a deeply entrenched orthodoxy. 

Images stay the same over time. And yet they also change profoundly. This is, in part, because we change. How we arrive at and return to them changes. The world changes. But that first, perhaps aggrieved, encounter might shape how a person remembers an image five years from now, when they circle back to a memory, or run into this project again: they might think about the object very differently in that moment, and it won’t have changed. That will have been a classically photographic experience of delay and estranged simultaneity.

That’s in some ways the kind of optimism of this method: I want to leave the threshold permanently open. I want to work in ways that respect the realities of our many differences, without seeking to flatten or resolve them into a false kind of inclusion or unanimity. 

 

 

 

 

Part of what excites me about the opportunity to make work reflexively, and with some kind of responsive specificity to the institution, the city, the moment of encounter, is simply that the moment of exhibition offers the possibility of historicizing our relationship to an (un)common present. 

 

 

 

 

Do you consider Scene at Eastman a performance? 

I’m not a performance artist, nor am I a theorist of performance, but inarguably performance is in play within Scene. We could say that performance is literally at play in the case of the portraits of performers: Shirley Temple, Bing Crosby, an unnamed female model for a DeBeers ad, an unnamed young Asian-American man dressed like a grunt from the Vietnam War, wearing an Abe Lincoln t-shirt, the mid-century beefcake model Patrick Burnham giving a gymnast’s salute that is perilously similar to a Nazi sig heil. Performance traverses those figures, their forms of address to the viewer, and the questions that they generate. The show also explicitly reminds its audience that they are being filmed, as well as mirrored, and (in the case of cut (2024)) surreptitiously observed.

Maybe I can say that in Scene, the objects play roles in an ensemble, and only appear as autonomous and individual ‘things’? Maybe I can suggest that they act on their viewers? Differently, but in some ways very predictably, as in the sculpture cut (2024), a one-way mirror framed in aluminum which covered a literal cut in the wall dividing the two galleries in the show. That sculpture proved to be an irresistible Venus flytrap for selfies, or for brief beautifying acts of ‘self-improvement,’ even though its mirrored surface reflected a blackface orchestra as background to the viewer’s face. I should add that cut appeared plausibly like a mirror from the first white gallery space, but that in the second black gallery, it allowed viewers to watch people in that first space from an unobserved vantage point. Or, ‘in the blind,’ to use a hunting term.

Performance is a thing that’s happening in Scene, not in the objects themselves, but in the mooted relations to and effects of their presence in space. I certainly heard from a few people who visited and delayed their exits so that they could watch other people watching. We carpeted both galleries, which reduces the reverberation of sound in the space, intensifying a general feeling of quiet. The white gallery’s tiles were optically white, and those were left deliberately uncleansed over the run of the show, so quite quickly after opening, you could also see where and how people had moved through the initial set of works. 

When the show opened, I told the curator, Phil Taylor, that we could summarize it as being concerned with the social situation of seeing. That’s another way, I suppose, of saying threshold. An exhibition can offer an opportunity to experience the social nature of interaction consciously, and to expand beyond seeing to include consideration of other registers of one’s experience. Working to facilitate both thinking and feeling offers a way to call attention to our human tendency, in the midst of aesthetic experience, to need or want to fall into the space of fiction. I wanted to confront the ways that we can be resistant to attending to our own proclivities as readers or as lookers or as movers through social space. The ‘straightness’ of the photograph is helpful here, because of its propensity to solicit our suspension of disbelief, in ways that conventional non-figurative ‘abstractions’ are not.

It makes a tremendous amount of sense to me to be concerned with these questions after the lockdowns in which we all experienced an extended period of invisibilized mass death and enclosure. We were in such segregated silos, and segregation and siloing became a positive thing to desire, as much as they also, obviously, became a reality to survive and endure. At this point, in the evolution of the techno-military-industrial complex and its profound appropriation of all of the organs of power, I think that it is worthwhile to work in a way that requires one to be conscious of representation’s solicitation of our suspension of disbelief, and to be conscious of how that mechanism enlists us, how it interpellates us. This is clearly not a new thing at all.

I was recently speaking with a Palestinian friend about the fact that in the US, and across the western world, we are experiencing a rapid paradigm shift when it comes to the ways we cannot trust our media. As a Palestinian, however, that mistrust has always been a foundational condition. The only thing that’s happening in the west is that these channels for misinformation are now becoming legalized; the same corruptive forces that exist everywhere else are now becoming law. 

Arthur Jafa said something like this around the time that Love is the Message, the Message is Death blew up: that Black people are from the future. He’s continued to say this. I think what he means is a variation of Aimé Césaire’s “boomerang” in A Discourse on Colonialism⁵, which is simply that the technologies that have historically been deployed globally and outside of the imperial metropole are all coming back, and so you, as good metropolitan subjects, are experiencing them for the first time. This seems new, but intergenerational familiarity with what is ‘new’ to the imperial core is also a brutal historical inheritance (for a Palestinian, for instance). You may construe the experience and structure as new, but it – for example ‘fake news’ – has been perfected in every treaty that the US government signed with its Indigenous population, in the plantation, and in the colonial periphery, and now it’s being redeployed at home. Part of what excites me about the opportunity to make work reflexively, and with some kind of responsive specificity to the institution, the city, the moment of encounter, is simply that the moment of exhibition offers the possibility of historicizing our relationship to an (un)common present. 

 

 

 

 

How does the threshold inform your teaching and writing? 

I’ve been working at that threshold as a writer in my use of language for a while now—writing in the first person singular, addressing my reader directly, insisting on the use of thick description to account for the objects I want to intellectualize in a way that makes their material character publicly available. For about a year, I was fortunate enough to work with the artist Alex Strada, who came into the department I was teaching in deeply versed in Mary Kelly’s “Concentric Pedagogy.” We deployed her method in class during the lockdown—right on the cusp of that first new academic year under Covid. 

The method requires that every person in the class respond, and that they do so by beginning with brief one- or two-word responses to just one specific object in a critique space. The method moves you around the group, who move you around their chosen works in the room, gradually, iteratively, and without affording anyone scope, in the early phases, to offer large definitive interpretive framings of the totality of things. It’s deeply phenomenological, and, because it’s iterative and all inclusive in its early phases, it socializes differences without setting them into contention with each other. Contributions add, but nothing can stake a proprietary claim. It’s only in the concluding phases of a critique that broader thematizing responses are allowed, and by that point, a tremendous amount of dissonant difference has likely widened everyone’s awareness of the variety of perceptual experiences at play in response to the work. Just as importantly, the material facts of the work’s staging cannot be passed over, since you begin there, so there’s a common ground already articulated and shared. You can’t begin in abstraction and then disappear into this art history or that theoretical debate. You can convene a great plurality of differences at this threshold by asking everybody to forestall the impulse to immediately ‘know’ all the work. It builds a bank of sensory and psychic experience, a collective sense in common that belongs to no one, and thus to everyone involved.

I can’t describe just how immediate and transformative the application of that methodology was to the life of the classes we taught; how enabling it was to require everybody to slowly, reflectively begin to account for their experience without immediately intellectualizing it. It also had the benefit of forestalling the tremendous lemming-like conformity that so often drives conversation in critique space (and in public criticism’s deference to the press release). Some people like to wait for consensus to articulate itself before offering their point of view, but this method doesn’t afford you the opportunity to hide. Equally, it does not compel you to know more than your own experience, and that can be infused and informed by those of your classmates, because it creates space for them all to contribute, and requires that they be generous. 

I also found my writing changing because of that experience. The way that I begin and conclude my essay on Paul Pfeiffer’s work, Spectacular Opacities (published first in my book Dark Mirrors, then adapted in e-flux Journal) was a direct consequence of using Kelly’s “Concentric Pedagogy” as a method. It’s taught me how to say to stay in the present tense of that encounter, which hopefully offers an accounting of the work that acknowledges the writing’s contingency, and does not pretend to the sovereign stance of ‘the one who knows all,’ in that classically Western analytic anonymity of the first person plural. All of that candor, all of that material, contingent, particular, individual, and historical context is part of acknowledging the presence of the threshold, and a way of trying to create conditions to transcend it. 

You are collaborating with a few friends to make a film version of Scene at Eastman, and you’re also working on a book in which the visual components of the show will be re-articulated. How do these forms of documentation expand or challenge the immediacy of perceptual practice, which is so central to your work? 

I’m acutely aware of how few people see exhibitions, and, persuaded that they are events worth sharing for a wider audience than those fortunate enough to be nearby. Seeing is part of an ethic of encounter (in ways that extend beyond the purely retinal). I’m interested in how we look, how we think, how we feel, and how those three things are entangled—that’s a very fundamental and ongoing concern of mine. I’m interested in the constitutive violences of modernity as well—its pathological alienation, its need for brutality, its abjuration of difference, and its vampiric dependence upon difference. Given the scopic intensities of Western society, perceptual experiences are fundamental to how we understand the world, and aesthetic practice helps define what becomes thinkable and possible. 

So, I think that my work’s interest in this entanglement of forces is one that can be fruitfully extended through the medium of film, as well as in the malleable forms of the book. I think that one can develop a certain span, or work within a bounded but ample space in taking up these phenomena in distinct forms, and I’m excited to do so. Film gets into us differently than still pictures on a wall, or poetry on a page. The bounded space of a book is so distinct from the open darkness of a cinema. I earnestly want to figure out other possibilities. My new book, INDEX²⁰²⁵ (Roma Publications), is a spiral-bound black and white object made with all the conventional textures of reference, and deeply engaged with meaning. The spirals, the indices, the grotesque typeface, the Japanese folds, these material dimensions give spatial or physical expression to ideas about referring, looking, knowing, seeing, finding, hiding, working, going forward and then back, again and again… 

What are you reading, thinking about, or writing now? 

What I find really generative at this stage as a writer is sinking my teeth into something that requires weeks and weeks of study, and coming out of that by producing something longform. The most recent text I published in the April issue of e-flux Journal, “ECHO—LOCATION: On Properties, Bass, Bounty, Sunshine State, and Exodus,” is one example of this. I’ve drifted away from the short exhibition review or the 1 - 2,000-word article, although I still do those on occasion. My preference for the long essay has to do considering and valorizing work that richly rewards thinking. When I claim that one should consider paying attention to a certain practice, or a specific set of projects from within a practice, part of what I am doing is making an argument that it is worth the time it takes to really study the work. That’s a claim I want to substantiate in the quality and in the structure of my response to that art. 

So I’m reading to help write longform essays at the moment, primarily in response to art in exhibition, where the phenomenological dimension of experience is primary in the writing. At the moment, that means reading Fred Moten on seriality and cinema in his extraordinary “Preface for a solo by Miles Davis,” or reading Tom Holert on Susanne Pfeffer’s Typologien, Hubertus von Amelunxen on Lewis Baltz, and always poetry of some kind. Diane Di Prima’s voice is one that resonates while I’m thinking in this kind of context, so I’m re-reading her Revolutionary Letters for the way they occupy and understand time, state violence, love and (dis)connection, and I’ll be re-reading Renee Gladman’s “We Were Glowing Dark Inanimates” at least ten or twenty times this summer. Her prose poetry leaves me dumbfounded.