Monuments to the Future

Global, 2021

This year’s exhibition takes viewers on a virtual journey around the world.  Each station responds to a monument or memorial, reflecting a tumultuous year in which fresh memorials sprung up to grieve the dead and historic monuments to prejudice were toppled and dismantled.  We invited artists to keep these connotations in mind, but ultimately left the terms ‘monument’ and ‘memorial’ open to interpretation.

Yola Monakhov Stockton, Trubetskoy Bastion Prison, 2019

Trubetskoy Bastion Prison, St. Petersburg, Russia

Jesus is the most famous political prisoner in history.  His experience of conviction, torture, and death—at the hands of an opaque, capricious imperial power—resonates not just with Christians, but subaltern voices across religions, cultures, and countries.  Yola Monokhov Stockton recalls her grandfather’s false imprisonment under Stalin as she ruminates on this photograph she took of a cell for Russian political prisoners.  At the same time, its deliberately bleak, nondescript space could be located almost anywhere, challenging us to reflect on those held captive today, with similar cruelty and indifference.

Gol Kamra (Dua Abbas and Jahanzeb Haroon), Koson Door, 2021

Ancient Minars in Lahore, Pakistan

Not only did Jesus’ life end in a journey, as he trudged up the hill of Golgotha, it began on the road.  Not long after his birth in a roadside stable, he was hastily evacuated to Egypt by Mary and Joseph to escape the murderous reach of Herod.  Dua Abbas and Jahanzeb Haroon draw a powerful parallel between this sojourn and the perilous migration of millions between India and Pakistan during the British Partition of India in 1947.  They focus on the kos minars, 16th-18th century milestones that their forebears would have passed as they fled from their ancestral homes in India, across the newly delineated border.

Michael Takeo Magruder, Aftermath (Coventry Cathedral 16/11/1940), 2021

Coventry Cathedral, Coventry, United Kingdom

The ruins of the medieval Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War, have become an iconic symbol of needless, vindictive destruction.  Yet amidst this rubble, clergy gathered medieval roofing nails, which they forged into crosses.  These Crosses of Nails have since become symbols of reconciliation and recovery, distributed around the world, including to Coventry’s sister church, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, destroyed by Allied bombs.  Takeo invites us to consider how we respond to moments of collapse, and what we build next, both literally and metaphorically.

Arent Weevers, Well, 3D stereoscopic installation, loop, 2017

Great or Lebuinuschurch, Deventer, The Netherlands

Weevers is a pastor and grief counselor as well as an artist, and the images he creates speak to deep experiences of loss and vulnerability.  Here he imagines an infant—rendered exquisitely real through stereoscopic video—submerged in a well, set within the historic crypt of the Great Church in Deventer.  Unlike traditional images of Mary meeting her son on the way to his death, or cradling his limp body after the deposition, Weevers’ work allows us to look through a mother’s eyes, remembering her son as she first beheld him, as an infant.

Jon Henry, Untitled #55 Little Rock, Arkansas, 2020.

Little Rock Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas, US

In his series Stranger Fruit, Jon Henry crisscrosses the country, photographing Black mothers with their adult sons.  There is something apotropaic about these images, a hope that by envisioning the worst, mothers might somehow protect their children from the all-too-common fate of young Black men in America, especially at the hands of law enforcement.  In 1957, nine Black students bravely faced an angry white mob, gathered at the school to prevent its desegregation.  By setting this pieta in front of Little Rock Central High, Henry reminds us how long the journey to racial equality has taken so far in the United States, and how far it still has to go.  Who, we might ask, will help bear the weight of this cross, as Simon did for Jesus?

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, Veiled, 2017

Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China

According to Christian legend, Veronica offered Jesus a simple, profound act of kindness as he stumbled past her on the way to execution.  She wiped the blood and sweat from his brow, and when he returned the cloth it contained the miraculous imprint of his face.  This act has an uncanny resonance during the pandemic, when we wear face masks in public, and the thought of passing a kerchief to someone in need—let alone whilst sweating and bleeding—feels unthinkably risky.  Moreover, as Lee reflects, not all faces are perceived equally.  In the wake of rising Sinophobia, and public attacks on Asian-Americans, it must not take a miracle, or a saint, to intervene.  (Note:  The Memling painting mentioned by Lee was included in Stations 2017 in Washington, D.C.).

S. Billie Mandle, Manzanita, 2020

Glass Mountain, Napa County, California

Of America’s more than one hundred designated “national monuments,” the majority are sites of natural wonder.  S. Billie Mandle invites us to expand our understanding of monuments and memorials in this year’s exhibition to include the environment, our ultimate common heritage.  This fragile inheritance is being toppled—quite literally in the case of California’s grand old growth forests—at an alarming rate as human-induced climate change spurs ever more frequent and devastating wildfires.  The degradation of the natural world is now inextricable from human suffering, our falls and fates entwined.

Leni Dothan, Dead End, 2017 (video still)

Via Dolorosa Street, Jerusalem, Israel

In this intensely vulnerable piece, the Israeli artist Leni Dothan walks barefoot along the ancient cobblestones of the via dolorosa in the Old City of Jerusalem.  The camera trained on the ground, our perspective resembles that of Jesus, eyes downcast, seeing only one step at a time as he trudged forward, buckling under the weight of the cross.  The video runs in a loop, and the Way of Suffering may seem interminable.  Yet this penitential trance may be broken by a simple act.  If we can but summon the power to look up, this Station seems to suggest, the Women of Jerusalem may return our gaze.

Antonio McAfee, Roger’s Station (Ninth Station), 2021

Roger’s Ave Metro Station, 4300 Hayward Avenue, Baltimore, Maryland, US

While our sites of national grief are marked by massive monuments, festooned with flags and flowers, many memorials are legible only to an intimate circle, who know the tragedy which transpired there.  As W. H. Auden put it, even the most excruciating suffering takes place “While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”  Antonio McAfee reminds us of such hidden pain in a piece that honors his cousin Kevin Herndon, murdered at a Baltimore metro stop.  (Note:  McAfee refers to Barnett Newman’s Ninth Station, which was included in Stations 2017 in Washington, DC).

Arabella Dorman, Suspended, 2018

Canterbury Cathedral, United Kingdom

To be a refugee—whether fleeing conflict, economic insecurity, or a starkly changing climate—is to traverse a Way of Suffering. In recent years, Arabella Dorman has been haunted by the plight of refugees, from Iraq and Afghanistan—where she served as an official War Artist—to the mass migration from the Middle East caused by the decade-long civil war in Syria. She saw the scale of this humanitarian crisis firsthand when she visited the Greek island of Lesvos, where thousands of refugees have arrived by boat. Suspended evokes the image of Jesus as a refugee, stripped of everything he had. The garments in the piece were discarded by refugees after their arduous voyages by sea. They encircle a central orb, which represents the light of hope by which a refugee travels. As the light periodically dims it serves to remind us of the darkness in which we leave our fellow human beings should we ignore their plight.

Jared Thorne, Laquan McDonald from the series In the Wake

4100 South Pulaski Road, Chicago, Illinois, US

Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager, was walking away from Chicago police in 2014 when he was shot sixteen times by an officer, who was later convicted of murder on the basis of video footage suppressed by authorities.  Jared Thorne’s photogram, produced from the autopsy report released by McDonald’s family, demands that we confront the palpable brutality of the young man’s execution.  Seen within the context of the Stations of the Cross, it asks us to attend to each bullet hole like the stigmata of the crucified Christ.  As the late theologian Dr. James Cone writes in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our midst, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross.”

Todd Forsgren, Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right Black White White Black Select Start; or Four Sides of the Washington Monument; or Divided America, 2016

Washington Monument, Washington, D.C

In 2016, Todd Forsgren lived in Washington, DC and often found himself walking by the Washington Monument.  When Donald Trump was elected president, without the popular vote and after a nakedly xenophobic campaign, the world suddenly seemed to be turned upside down.  Forsgren found himself looking at the Washington Monument—a sort of axis mundi anchoring America’s national mythology—in a new way, seeing fragmentation and disorientation instead of solidity and reassurance.  That feeling only deepened over the past four years, and especially after the recent insurrection at the nation’s capital.  Is this obelisk a relic of a nation and a moral discourse in decline, or does it point towards the way towards a reawakened, resurrected sense of purpose?

G. Roland Biermann, London Eye, 2021

London Eye, London, United Kingdom

The London Eye, or Millennium Wheel, was built to signal a new era, with London, and thus Britain,  leading the world.  Now it seems this wheel of fortune has spun in the wrong direction, as the country reels from the tragedy of the pandemic and a profound uncertainty about its post-Brexit future.  G. Roland Biermann captures the wheel sitting sedentary as a stone or an unwound clock, lit by an eerie blue light in honor of National Health Service workers.  When the wheel begins to turn once more, filled with tourists looking out across the city, will they behold a city and country truly returned to life, or a shell of its former self, uncertain and anxious?

Shan Hur, Walking into the Place of the 19th Century - Seosomun Shrine History Museum, 2021

Seosomun Shrine History Museum, Seoul, South Korea

Shan Hur conjures unexpected revelations for viewers.  A roll of duct tape stuck to the wall or a stack of disposable cups can turn out to be bronze sculptures.  A broken pillar can reveal a violin miraculously sealed within.  Here, he turns his attention to a hidden history, pried loose from a seemingly innocuous photograph of a 19th century marketplace through digital intervention.  The crossroads on the outskirts of Seosomun were an execution ground for the Joseon Dynasty, where hundreds of Catholics were martyred in the 19th century.  Despite the early attempts to suppress the spread of the religion, today roughly 30% of South Korea’s population identifies as Christian.

Scott Hocking, The Egg and Michigan Central Train Station, 2007-2013.

Michigan Central Train Station, Detroit, Michigan, US.

Scott Hocking is equal parts scavenger, spelunker, and archaeologist.  At the nadir of Detroit’s lean years, the artist began scrambling over walls and scuttling under security fences into abandoned factories and other buildings in order to create mysterious, primal shapes out of refuse, from concrete to polystyrene to cracked marble.  In some instances, these forms remain in place, like ancient rune stones; others have gradually collapsed, or been bulldozed by developers, leaving little trace.  Rather than fighting entropy or destruction, Hocking sees his works as part of a continuum of creation, transformation, and decay.  Entombed in an abandoned train station, Hocking’s Egg may also be a harbinger of rebirth.