Postcommodity: Time Holds All The Answers
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective, currently comprised of Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. They create works of art that personify a shared Indigenous lens and voice, examining aspects of 21st-century life to inspire a uniquely Indigenous futurism. Using provocation as a tool, they spark constructive conversations that challenge the social, political and economic processes that destabilize communities and geographies.
Event/Exhibition meta autogenerated block.
When
September 18, 2021 – January 23, 2022
Where
Remai Modern
Time Holds All the Answers is Postcommodity’s most significant museum presentation to date. In addition to two of Remai Modern’s largest gallery spaces, works will be sited throughout the building. Comprised almost entirely of new work, the exhibition includes architecturally-scaled sculpture, immersive multi-media installations, and sound and text-based pieces. The works touch on subjects including resource extraction and land use, toxicity and containment, intersections of the global market with human elders, translation across Indigenous and colonial languages, and the mythologies of modern art and architecture.
Postcommodity deploy a creative and invigorating methodology of hacking, intentionally breaking pre-determined products or structures in order to modify their original use and inspire alternative outcomes. In practice, hacking undoes, reimagines and resets. How can this be accomplished? Using art as a wedge, Postcommodity inject Indigenous Knowledge Systems into the museum space to expand common points of reference. The artists transform the museum into a site where their concept of re-imagined ceremony takes shape. While ceremony is generally associated with a religious or spiritual gathering that celebrates a particular event, Postcommodity’s approach creates an immersive narrative environment throughout the museum, welcoming visitors into a realm of symbolic exchange that enacts respect, responsibility and reciprocity.
Remai Modern is rooted in the Western intellectual tradition of collecting, studying and displaying objects, reflecting a colonial paradigm. Postcommodity deconstruct and reconfigure the museum to foreground the ancient Indigenous manifestations that pre-exist the settler presence. Their re-imagined ceremonial ground collapses time by unifying the past, present and future. In such a space, dialogues of co-existence are incited that do not privilege one worldview at the expense of another. Postcommodity regard this Indigenous presence as uncontainable in its powerful reverberations and in its playfulness.
Flooring provided by: Braid Flooring
Artists
Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective founded in the mid-2000s, currently comprised of Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist. The collective has exhibited internationally, including at documenta14, Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany; the 57th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, where they were awarded the Fine Prize; the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; and the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia. Recent commissions and solo exhibitions have been presented by Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and LAXART, Los Angeles. Postcommodity’s historic land art installation Repellent Fence (2015) was realized at the US/Mexico border near Douglas, Arizona and Agua Prieta, Sonora. The collective’s previous members and collaborators include Raven Chacon, Steven Yazzie, Nathan Young, Adam Ingram-Goble, Andrew McCord, Annabel Wong and Existence AD. Postcommodity is represented by Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis.
Cristóbal Martínez is a Mestizo artist, scholar and Chair of the Art and Technology Program at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2003 he co-founded the artist-hacker performance ensemble Radio Healer, and in 2009 he began working as a member of Postcommodity. In 2018 he co-created, with post-Mexican composer Guillermo Galindo, the experimental electronic music duet Red Culebra. Martínez has dedicated his life and career to interdisciplinary collaboration in contemporary art.
Kade L. Twist is a member of the Cherokee Nation and grew up in Bakersfield, California, home to one of the largest Cherokee communities in the U.S. Twist is a co-founding member of Postcommodity, and a professor in Art + Social Practice at Otis College of Art, Los Angeles. In addition to his art practice, Twist works as a public affairs consultant specializing in American Indian health care, technology and community development.
Curatorial Team
Curated by Dr. Gerald McMaster, Adjunct Curator for Remai Modern, and Director of Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at OCAD University.
Dr. Gerald McMaster is a leading voice nationally and internationally, with over 30 years of experience in contemporary art, critical theory, museology and Indigenous aesthetics. He is Plains Cree from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation and a member of the Siksika Nation. He served as the Canadian Commissioner for the 1995 Venice Biennale, Artistic Director of the 2012 Biennale of Sydney; and Curator for the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. McMaster has served as Adjunct Curator for Remai Modern since 2018. He is a Tier 1 Canadian Research Chair and Director of Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at OCAD University in Toronto.
Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge is a hub for facilitating the documentation, communication and interpretation of Indigenous ways of seeing at OCAD University. Drawing on the inseparable concepts of perception and knowing, Wapatah assists Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and researchers to collaborate on the engagement with and representation of artistic knowledge. Wapatah highlights the innumerable lenses through which Indigenous people envision the world – whether through artistic production, language or interaction with the land – using each of these as research tools to form new questions and concepts about the world. Wapatah’s contributing team members include: Dr. Michael Rattray, Panya Clark Espinal, Alessia Pignotti, and Natalja Chestopalova.
Time Holds All the Answers is coordinated at Remai Modern by Rose Bouthillier, Curator (Exhibitions) and supported by Donald Roach, Exhibitions Manager; Chad Redl, Exhibitions and Collections Supervisor; Emily Dunseith, Registrar (Exhibitions); Troy Mamer, Programs Assistant (Curatorial); and Jason Hosaluk, Darren McQuay, Cameron McKay, Paul Atkins, Ian Rawlinson, Caleb Dueck, Michelle Cates, Ian Forbes, Devon Hanofski, Spencer Martin and Jacob Semko, Preparators.