From Michael Armitage’s exhibition, The Promise of Change at Palazzo Grazzi
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, I've been thinking about what it means to construct the nation-state: to justify the imperial institutions that lay claim to resources never anyone's to own. What is it about our human psychology that has driven our desire to see nature as something to classify, divide, and extract from? To impose protocols onto land, waterways, and airspace, rather than to learn from them, or rather, let 道法自然？To distinguish between those who are citizens and those who are “aliens,” or “barbarians,” as James Scott describes in his seminal text Against the Grain. I’ve been thinking about how the boundaries come first, and the justifying stories follow.
In Scott's anthropological dive into the "deep history of the earliest states," he traces how early nation-builders sought rich, well-watered bottomlands: ecologies capable of sustaining a stationary agrarian life. Grain could be cultivated, stored, surveilled, and intentionally distributed to those who participated in a system of taxation. Livestock could be domesticated. Walls divided the "civilized" interior from the supposedly “barbaric” exterior: landscapes where undomesticated weeds, vermin, and peoples existed beyond the reach of the State, in the hinterlands of the unknown with their uncouth traditions. But, what was that wild power that the stationary state knew it could not win against?
Empires today have found their new “barbarians:” immigrants. Those who move, and therefore cannot be easily contained. Those who hold rich traditions and languages, dialogue with the natural world as exemplified by unique culinary flavors or medicinal practices. Those who are allergic to the empire’s assimilation story, and so are deemed dangerous. The Chinese called barbarians “raw,“ those who were allies “cooked,” and only those who fully participated, Han (of the ethnic majority group). Every empire must first invent the barbarian. In doing so, it invents the center, and simultaneously, the periphery.
Maps are drawn to distinguish what is "safe" from what is "dangerous." To separate interior from exterior, citizen from foreigner, civilization from wilderness, a centralized "West" from the Othered "East." As Edward Said argues in Orientalism, empires required not only controlled territory, but a story that justifies its expansion: the Orient was backward so the morally just West would help civilize Oriental peoples. "The Orient was Orientalized," he writes, "because it could be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental."
As our ever-aggrandizing deteriorating-union enters its next 250 years (let us remember that the average reign of China's major dynasties lasted roughly 280 years), I find myself increasingly interested in what it means to remain a barbarian.
To move with the tidal seasons of nature's abundance. To encounter lands, people, and cultures so vastly different from one's own, and to discover forms of communication that negotiate these borderlands, both physical and psychological. To see beyond the fictional permanence of territorial boundaries inscribed onto maps, separating self from other. To understand that weeds and vermin are perhaps essential to a healthy ecology, and that perhaps, biodiversity is itself a technology, without which every domesticated system becomes increasingly susceptible to disease.
This Saturday, West of Here and our collaborators, Ceremony for the Future, launch 母体 Mǔtǐ, a three-week on/offline summer school inspired by Takeuchi Yoshimi's idea of Asia as Method. Roughly translating as "mother's womb," "matrix," or "originating basis," 母体 Mǔtǐ asks a simple question: if technology is not merely a tool, but a way of relating, what forms of knowledge already exist within memory, ritual, migration, border communities and processes of care that we can see as strategies for rethinking what is technology? For reconsidering how we relate to nature?
Over the coming weeks, we'll gather artists, curators, scholars, and technologists to explore this question together. Not in search of another center, but in search of the ways of knowing that have always existed in the periphery.
We hope you'll join us.
Zandie Brockett 张桂才
Founder + Artistic Director, West of Here
West of Here Announcements
母体 Mǔtǐ: Working with Relational Technologies when Asia becomes Method
This three-week, nine-course, on/offline summer school between New York and the virtual desktops of Asia explores relational technologies – ancestral knowledge systems, living traditions, and social practices — from across Asia and beyond as research towards rethinking the very nature of technology.
Drawing inspiration from Takeuchi Yoshimi’s seminal 1960 lecture Asia as Method, the summer school approaches Asia not as a fixed geography, but as a vital methodological framework for moving beyond the rhetorical and technological paradigms of Western modernity and its subjectivity.
For Between Here and West of Here readers, artist and arts workers, we have a 50% discount with RELATIONALTECH.
WE WON TWO WEBBY AWARDS!
We’re thrilled to announce that ENCODED won not just one, but TWO Webby awards: Best Use of AR and Best Community Engagement!
Last year, the West of Here founder Zandie Brockett was the Executive Producer of an incredible guerrilla initiative that retold a story of American history. ENCODED invited 17 Indigenous artists from across Turtle Island to reinterpret and reclaim 25 paintings and sculptures in the Met Museum’s American Wing with augmented reality. It was a defining moment that presented a possibility that, through technology, ALL communities and voices can be included in the cannon as authors of history.
ENCODED was envisioned by Amplifier, supported by an anonymous Indigenous funder, and included works by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Bear Fox, BirdxBird, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Cass Gardiner, Demian DinéYazhi´(fabricated in collaboration with Lite Brite Neon), Flechas, Jarrette Werk, Jeremy Dennis, Josué Rivas, Katsitsionni Fox, Lokotah Sanborn, Mali Obomsawin, Mer Young, Nicholas Galanin, Priscilla Dobler Dzul, and Skawennati. The exhibition was co-curated by Amplifier and Tracey Rector.
SPIRITS Summer Solstice @ LACMA with john gerrard x Richie Hawtin
Photo: Lance Gerber
For the recent summer solstice, West of Here advised artist john gerrard on strategic engagement with partnership and communications on his new large-scale installation and live performance of SPIRITS.
Developed in the LACMA Art + Tech Lab, SPIRITS is a year-long, browser-based artwork in which john gerrard transformed 96 plastic sandals collected from beaches around the world into interactive gaussian splats, inviting viewers to contemplate humanity's entanglement with petroleum, plastic waste, and the enduring memories carried by discarded objects.
On June 21st, the work culminated with a dance under LACMA’s new Geffen gallery, with a DJ set by the pioneering Berlin techno DJ, Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman), and the debut of the track Peak Oil.
This quarter we start west of Asia, in the merchant city of Venice for the biennale, In Minor Keys:
EXHIBITION
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World’s Lands), Antwerp, 1595
A NECESSARY FICTION: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World
What if we lived in a world without maps? No territorial boundaries. No fixed lines determining who belongs where.
In A Necessary Fiction: Maps, Art, and Models of Our World, the Saudi Ministry of Culture's presentation at the Venice Biennale begins with a simple but destabilizing proposition: maps are not truth, but documents of changing ideas, cultures, and power. Bringing together historical maps from the Saudi Royal Collection, early network diagrams of the London Underground and the Internet, alongside contemporary artworks that unsettle conventional notions of place, the exhibition traces humanity's enduring impulse to orient the world by drawing lines between self and other, center and periphery, Occident and Orient.
Every map is a distortion. The impossibility of flattening a sphere without altering its proportions becomes a metaphor for the ideological biases embedded within every system of knowledge.
What emerges is a reminder that humanity's defining technology may not be conquest, but trade: the movement of people, goods, stories, and cosmologies that shaped regions such as Mesopotamia and the South China Sea long before the modern nation-state. By asking what maps erase as much as what they reveal, the exhibition leaves us with one final question: what if the center is not a place, but a perspective?
On view in Venice through November 22, 2026.
EXHIBITION
SCREEN MELANCHOLY
Li Yi-Fan 李亦凡 @ Taiwan Pavilion
Li Yifan's hour-long master animation, Screen Melancholy, presented at this year's Taiwan Pavilion, is a tactful, witty, and delightfully disturbing commentary on the technological matrix to which we are all beholden. The sadistic and academic film explores a long history of screens: "their genealogy extends from television to dark cinema theaters, through photography, and back to painting and Leon Battista Alberti's famous 1450 metaphor of 'painting as a window.'"
Staged as an absurd lecture delivered by digital puppets inside a virtual reconstruction of Venice's former prison, Li traces the evolution of image-making technologies from Renaissance perspective to deep fakes. Blending Internet vernacular, slapstick humor, first person shooter-game perspective, and rigorous cinematic history to reveal how software, film and gaming quietly condition our perceptions, behaviors, and even artistic production itself. Rather than offering a critique of technology from the outside, Screen Melancholy implicates us within its logic, asking not simply how images are made, but how images, in turn, make us.
On view at Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice until September 30, 2026.
EXHIBITION
THE PROMISE OF CHANGE
Michael Armitage @ Palazzo Grazzi
Documenting reality as though it were a fever dream, Kenyan-born British artist Michael Armitage's paintings depict the brutal realities of being an immigrant today. Drawing from contemporary events across East Africa while invoking the compositional grandeur of European painting and Greek mythological forms, his figures appear suspended between resistance and vulnerability. Throughout The Promise of Change, migration emerges not as a singular event but as a defining condition of modern life, shaped by political violence, economic necessity, and the perpetual search for belonging.
Painting on barkcloth, a traditional textile made by laboriously pounding the inner bark of trees until it becomes a supple fabric, Armitage replaces the conventional canvas with a material whose imperfections remain visible. The surface refuses the illusion of completeness, revealing instead the fractures, sutures, and ghosts that underpin the histories it carries.
Installed within the Pinault Collection's opulent Palazzo Grassi (the last great palace built in Venice), the exhibition creates a striking juxtaposition between architectural grandeur and the needs of human realities demanded in the paintings. Armitage asks not simply what migration looks like, but what forms of memory and hope remain stitched into those who are compelled to move.
On view at Palazzo Grassi through January 10, 2027.
And to the West of there, in New York City:
VIDEO
The Finesse
“Reality is a fiction that empires perpetuate by fixating on one idea as the truth.”
Artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas, in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann, present The Finesse (2022), a video installation that challenges our understanding of reality within today's algorithmic state. By collapsing the boundary between viewer and image, essentially folding the audience's reflected presence into the work through a carefully orchestrated choreography of light, projection, and mirrored surfaces, the installation implicates viewers in the very processes through which histories are (artificially) constructed, (politically) mediated, and (unknowingly) believed.
Braiding archival footage from the Sri Lankan liberation movement, interviews with contemporary Tamil artists, and AI-generated deepfakes featuring "political activists" like Kim Kardashian, The Finesse explores the conditions of the Sri Lankan Civil War, the histories that never came to be, as well as the dominant narratives produced by imperial ideologies and the technological infrastructures that sustain them.
Currently on view as part of New Humans: Memories of the Future in the New Museum's newly expanded building. An old story in a new building.
EXHIBITION
Tehching Hsieh @ DIA Beacon
In 1978, a man, who arrived in New York by way of abandoning ship on which he was a Taiwanese equivalent of a merchant marine, started a series of One-Year Performances. For the next eight years, artist Tehching Hsieh produced an architecture for living that was constructed around a proxied relationship with time and space. In the first One Year Performance circa 1978, Hsieh confined his body to a jail-like cell that he constructed in Tribeca, never leaving it once. During this year he didn’t read, write, or speak. He only photographed a portrait of his head standing in the same place in the cell, marking another hash on the total day count of time passed. In years two, he punched into a time clock on the hour every hour, photographing his face, which when stitched together, captures the passing of a year in six minutes; in year three, spent the whole year outside in the streets of New York; in year four, tied himself by rope to fellow artist (and not romantic partner) Linda Montano; and in year five, did not make art, or look at art for the entire year. Of his last works, the Thirteen Year Plan, was one where he made art but did not release it to the public.
In his new retrospective, Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 at Dia Beacon, the years are presented as an architecture of time. With rigorous precision, cerebral endurance, and ascetic attention to the present, these durational works reveal the latent structures we are all beholden to, revealing yet another way of relating that is possible. The exhibition was curated by Adrian Heathfield.
Lifeworks 1978 - 1999 is on view at Dia Beacon for the next two years.
INSTALLATION
Message from the Mud
If our land could paint, what story would our soil tell? What myths emerge from the microbial worlds beneath our feet? In Message from the Mud, Anicka Yi transforms a section of Storm King into something between an archaeological dig, a laboratory, and a landscape painting. Transparent columns filled with soil and water are seeded with carbon and calcium, cultivating living microbial communities that are deliberately brought into dialogue with sunlight rather than remaining hidden underground. Over the six-month duration of the installation, exposure to light incubates these organisms, gradually producing shifting constellations of greens, blacks, and mineral traces across the vitrines.
What emerges is less a painting than a living record of metabolism. The work proposes that image-making may not belong exclusively to humans, but is a process continually unfolding across biological systems. Yi invites us to consider the landscape not as a passive backdrop for culture but as an active author, capable of generating its own patterns and narratives that feel both ancient and futuristic.
Message from the Mud is on view until November 9, 2026.
A Final Thought
- Yoko Ono
(Work exhibited in A Necessary Fiction)
Until next time, warm wishes from somewhere
