Retake, reply, review, respond, remember, resist, return, record, recycle…Re- as a Latin prefix means again, again and again, repetition, opposition, backward, withdrawal. Re: as a two-volume exhibition revisits history, material history, art history, collective memory, personal remembrance, moments of serendipity, fragments rediscovered…

Re: first opens with The Nor’easter Blows on October 19, and then Re-opens with Temporary Fields on November 9. Re: is curated in collaboration with Jacob Zhicheng Zhang and supported in part by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. This exhibition accompanies Reminiscing/Reinventing, a SAIC-sponsored graduate symposium on nostalgia and media scheduled to take place on October 26, 2018.

Tamer Hassan and Armand Yervant Tufenkian: Temporary Fields

In 2013, when Tamer Hassan and Armand Yervant Tufenkian began making the film Accession, they came across a small box of letters while visiting a seed company in Virginia, in which each letter accompanies a tiny envelope of seeds. This marked the beginning of their collecting family histories, stories of particular varieties and mundane details of everyday life. Not knowing where the next letter would take them, they used 16mm to film at unexpected addresses. The film Accession inquiries about the idea of loss central to the practices of ethnographic studies, documentary, preservation of specimens and the archive. Archives, like ethnographic projects, are premised on a view of the cultures and customs they document on the brink of disappearance. The knowledge of seed keeping manifests itself through the repetition of routine gesture that maintains the plant from season to season. This knowledge has not, and ultimately cannot, be preserved in an archive. It is maintained through practice.

Temporary Fields frames the film Accession in an exhibition installation, treating the gallery site as a temporary archive and point of confluence for exchanged seeds, letters and ephemera. In Temporary Fields, different historical, personal, and collective temporalities are brought together to make new relationships possible.

Tamer Hassan and Armand Yervant Tufenkian have collaborated since 2008 and have shown their work in festivals, galleries and cinemas internationally. Tamer studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently lives in Chicago. Armand studied philosophy, poetics, and filmmaking at Duke University and lives in Los Angeles where he is completing an MFA at CalArts.

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Jacob Zhicheng Zhang calls Nanjing, China home and lives in Chicago. He received a BA in Art History and Chemistry from Colby College. After working in art conservation, Zhang is pursuing a MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Zhang is interested in varied areas such as postcolonial, post-socialist studies, transnational histories/things/art/subjects, particularly those filtered through “Asia,” and queer performance and photography.

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Tags: Armand Yervant Tufenkian, Chicago, Lithium, Lower West Side, Re: Vol. 2 - Tamer Hassan & Armand Yervant Tufenkian: Temporary Fields, Tamer Hassan