Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions is a series of exhibitions and programs at KADIST San Francisco and Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston that examines the shifts in time, ritual, memory, and community-building in artistic practices between 2020-2024 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions considers the role of artists as prognosticators and narrators of mimetic memory, challenging power structures that enforce isolation, cultural amnesia, and planetary extinction. The exhibition draws from Judith Butler’s notion of intertwinement from What World Is This?: A Pandemic Phenomenology, focusing on ‘interdependency’ as an ideal of radical equality, while examining how ritual and memory merge through intimate and communal acts that drive social change, reflecting the circadian nature of movements and revolutions.
In San Francisco, over 40 artists are presented, predominantly from the KADIST collection of over 2,200 artworks, with many making their West Coast debut and highlighting conversations across continents emphasizing Indigenous, tribal, and Aboriginal voices. Anchor works in the exhibition act as makeshift memorials of community-building toward Indigenous resistance, care work, and demands for an abolitionist future: Jeneen Frei Njootli reclaims Indigenous sovereignty; Jamel Robinson explores grief and the Black experience in America; Joe Namy connects Arab American civil liberty, media representation, and the politics of sound; Carmen Winant reflects on collective and intergenerational care work.
Artists: Indira Allegra, Brook Andrew, Edgardo Aragón, Carmen Argote, Yoko Asakai, Saif Azzuz, Kent Chan, Tony Cokes, Moyra Davey, Jim Denomie, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Rahima Gambo, Juliana Góngora, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull, Gordon Hookey, Pao Houa Her, Every Ocean Hughes, Steffani Jemison, Kite and Corey Stover, Subash Thebe Limbu, Tessa Mars, Joe Namy, Eduardo Navarro, Antonio Obá, Juan Obando, Nour Ouayda, Prabhakar Pachpute, Antonio Pichillá, Michael Rakowitz, Jamel Robinson, Sherrill Roland, Asha Sheshadri, Rania Stephan, Kenneth Tam, Moses Tan, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Kaylene Whiskey, Carmen Winant
