Down the Line

Art in America
May 9, 2022

“Lineage” might bring to mind bloodlines, family trees, inherited customs, and archives indicating how an individual relates to a larger group. For many contemporary artists, lineage provides a framework for using specific materials and aesthetic references to speak to the nuances of identity, belonging, and relation. Interdisciplinary artists Sholeh Asgary, André Magaña, Keli Safia Maksud, and Ronny Quevedo work with a wide variety of inherited forms—from millennia-old textiles to postcolonial African national anthems to pre-Columbian ceramics—to probe the concept of the nation-state, rethink the parameters of authenticity, and arrive at unexpected material metaphors.

Mira Dayal All of your practices fruitfully engage with the concept of lineage—you’re resisting the idea that your work is necessarily engaging with a Western canon, and actively weaving together other specific lineages that speak to distinct sets of concerns.

Ronny Quevedo It’s probably only in the past two years that the term lineage has concretely presented itself in what I investigate. A lot of my work deals with loss and memory, thinking about environments in which I existed and didn’t exist, and also environments my parents existed in. I look at their background and their lineage as a way to invoke or consider spaces that I didn’t exist in.

Disappearance might be a starting point in trying to identify loss. Oftentimes we can’t see ourselves in certain canons or certain contexts. I name it disappearance to begin with and then slowly start devolving it into something that is much more about self-determination or agency. It’s not about longing all the time, which is not to say that I don’t want to pay tribute to what has been lost or omitted. But sometimes I see it more as identifying a moment in which an identity I was looking for didn’t exist. I’ve always been curious about how artists recognize omission and lay claim to that space. 

André Magaña I feel connected to starting from disappearance in terms of how I grew up and how I arrived in the place where I’m working now. It was a very aggressively assimilated household and a very aggressively whitewashed household. America dissolved my family and broke them down. As the situation became complicated, these assimilated structures also started to break down. That is when I started to learn more about the world I exist in, the reality of the power structures, and what my actual lineage is.

Sholeh Asgary Lineage is like line: what line am I standing in, and what does it mean to stand in a line? I was born in Iran and people in my family were political activists, but I grew up here [in the United States]. What history am I responding to? One of the things that moved me away from a very image-based practice—I used to work with photography—was wanting the image to somehow symbolize something authentic. That led me to an interdisciplinary practice instead, to see what happens if I throw a bunch of lines up and watch them fall, see where they converge. To be careful of what history, or reflections of those histories, I’m responding to.

Keli Safia Maksud Some words that I go back to a lot are wayfinding and wondering and wandering. That is why I’m so interested in lines. Where is this line leading? It’s not leading back to any origin necessarily. Nothing about trying to get back to this authentic whole. It’s a place that is deeply contradictory. But there is something exciting about this question of literally wandering through time and space.

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Read full article at artnews.com.

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