NEW YORK, NY.- Fotografiska New York partnered with the artist-led organization For Freedoms to present Listen Until You Hear, For Freedoms’ first curated art exhibition in New York City. Featuring the work of six artists of diverse backgrounds, the show’s curation—which goes beyond Fotografiska’s primary focus of photography by prominently including sculpture and textile—furthers the museum’s practice of contextualizing film-based work in the overall visual arts landscape.

“Listen Until You Hear invites us to look beyond the surface and practice deeper forms of listening that can lead towards greater awareness and connection to ourselves and the world around us,” said the artist Michelle Woo, who co-founded For Freedoms alongside Eric Gottesman and Hank Willis Thomas. “The exhibition explores themes ranging from freedom, family, love, pain, survival, and the future. Each artist’s distinct visual language and use of representation highlights the connections between meaning and value; historical and cultural storytelling; and our capacity to listen and hear what is at once physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual.“

Accompanying the exhibition’s artworks (which span the museum’s third floor) is a “Banned Book Reading Room,” which furthers the show’s themes while transporting visitors outside of the traditional art-viewing setting and into Fotografiska’s sixth floor loft space, offering a welcoming array of plush seating beneath the building’s 130-year-old exposed beams. In this cozy reading environment, the public is invited to engage with a rotating selection of books that since 2021 are tracked by the ACLU and PEN America as having been banned in various American school districts – including some within just 40 miles of the museum. These titles include multiple works by Toni Morrison, as well as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and many books perceived as ‘radical’ or ‘dangerous’ but often simply speak to the everyday experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color. With more information in the artist blurbs below, the Banned Book Reading Room is presented in coordination with Eric Gottesman’s third-floor body of work on view, Oromaye Project, which focuses on an Ethiopian novel banned by an oppressive regime in the 1980. IMAGE: Fotografiska New York’s sixth-floor loft space in 2020.

The six artists’ works on view—most of which has never been shown in New York City, and some of which has never been exhibited in any context—includes the following.




Cannupa Hansker Luger (b. 1979, Standing Rock Reservation, New Mexico) speaks to Indigenous Futurism with his textile, sculpture, and digital media works. In Listen Until You Hear, Luger, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, presents two mannequin-exhibited regalia sets, as well as two video pieces of the artist performing in the regalia. Additionally on view are three ceramic works, two on plinths and one wall-mounted. Said Luger: “As a contemporary artist Indigenous to North America, I am motivated to reclaim and reframe a more accurate version of 21st century Native American culture and its powerful global relevance. Given the legacies of cultural appropriation and annihilation brought on by colonization, the endurance of our continuum is characterized by resilience, adaptability, and survivance. In recognition of this legacy, I place myself between the realms of contemporary art and Indigenous culture, moving amidst museums and the front lines, in order to enact a more complex understanding of contemporary Indigeneity. The materials that I use – such as clay, textiles, steel, and digital media – are emblematic of human civilization. Whether working with institutions, communities or with the land itself, my work is inherently social and requires engagement. I aim to lay the groundwork, establish connections, and mobilize action.”

Cassils (b. 1975, Toronto, Ontario), whose practice mediums include photography,
sculpture, performance, and installation, explores the history of LGBTQ+ violence, representation, struggle, and survival. Asks the artist: “How do we manifest empowerment, sensuality and self-actualization in a society that actively tries to erase us? In this era of anti-trans legalization, my work is an act of endurance and resistance against the hateful laws that continue to proliferate our society.” For Listen Until You Hear, Cassils debuts a film of a 14-hour performance, edited down to be synced in duration from sunrise to sunset in the time zone in which it is exhibited. Explains the artist: “As It Is documents a durational performance that I made on June 16, 2022, marking dissolution of my 14-year marriage. Performed on what would have been our wedding anniversary, this piece is a meditation on grief, loss, powerlessness, acceptance, and the clear-eyed and embodied practice of learning to see things as they really are—not as I wish them to be. I shoveled sand from 6:33 am to 8:35 pm working through a sunrise, a sunset, and two tides. Being in relation to such powerful forces of nature puts me in my place. I grounded myself in intense physicality while focusing on the repetitive action and commitment required to uphold presence and connection. The effort behind artistic labor and working towards a more just and equitable world is often unqualifiable and unseen. As It Is demonstrates that small gestures mount into extraordinary things, while reminding me, as the tide reclaims, that great moments are just that: moments.”

Eric Gottesman (b. 1976, Nashua, New Hampshire) – who has never created an artwork alone – teaches, organizes, writes, and makes art that aspires to be collaborative; questions accepted notions of power; and proposes models for repair. For Listen Until You Hear, Gottesman presents two collaborative pieces from an ongoing body of work that draws inspiration from a controversial 1983 Amharic novel (Oromaye by Baalu Girma) and asks a constellation of questions about the capacity of art and literature to address creative expression and dissent in oppressive and corrupt political regimes. While the project overall spans many media (photographs, a film-in-progress, video installations, literary translations, and collaborative pedagogy in Ethiopia and neighboring Eritrea), the two in-conversation works presented in the Fotografiska exhibition are a two-channel video piece (Colonel’s Mirror) and a photograph (The Encounter), both inspired by specific scenes from Oromaye. Working with American cinematographer Yoni Brook and an Ethiopian editor who wishes not to be named due to the controversial nature of the work, Gottesman produced these videos in Addis Ababa just after the political elections of May 2015, casting non-actors as characters from Oromaye based partly on their life stories. In addition to dramatizations of the Oromaye scenes, the video work features a two pronged interview with each actor: one in-character, and one as themselves. The result is a series of works that address the legacy of Oromaye and blur the lines between the fictional and the real, between the self and the others, between the masculine and the feminine, and between the past and the present.

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976, Plainfield, New Jersey), a conceptual artist who works primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture, exhibits six layered works in Listen Until You Hear—three of which have never been exhibited: . Each demonstrates Thomas’ unique ability to use contemporary mediums to explore complex themes of identity, representation, and social justice. One of the debut works, Magnifying Glass (Ruby Bridges) (2023), is a retro-reflective piece where guests are prompted to shift their position or use a flash on their phone to reveal another image, thereby stepping into the role of image maker. Multiple of Thomas’ works in the show use reflective and/or 3D lenticular materials to create a sense of depth and dimensionality in both form and content, encouraging viewers to engage with the images in a more active, participatory way. As the viewer moves around the pieces, the images shift and change, inviting a deeper, more immersive form of listening. Additional works include the debut retroreflective piece, “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.”(yellow spectrum) (2022), which depicts the eyes of James Baldwin, and a collaborative lenticular work, Hyperopia (2021), made by Thomas in collaboration with the Wide Awakes collective. Thomas will also present two neon sculptures that demand the viewer's attention: LOVE OVER RULES (Horizon Blue) (2020) and Awaken (2023), the latter of which was created in collaboration with Helen Banach. In addition to these five wall-mounted works is Nexus (2022), a towering chrome sculpture that embodies the central themes of the show. “By placing this sculpture at the heart of the exhibition, we are reminded of that our ability to hear and understand one another is the foundation of any just and equitable society,” said Thomas. Overall, the six works offer a powerful and thought-provoking reflection on the show’s themes, challenging viewers to engage with the world around them in a more active, empathetic, and compassionate way.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, California)‘s immersive texts, collaborative projects, and explorations in sound build on her interest in Blackness, language, and privacy. For the 2021 Spirit print series, of which 31 are on view in Listen Until You Hear, Rasheed paints directly onto the surface of film and then creates prints that capture the movement of her gestures enlarged and preserved by the photographic process. The work incorporates abstract shapes, markings, and gestures bordering on visual glossolalia—the religious phenomenon of ‘speaking in tongues.’ Focusing on covert spiritual and revolutionary practices of the South and the Caribbean, Rasheed engages with elements of spirit photography, translation, and dreams to create a constellation of images that consider the limits of legibility.

Maia Ruth Lee (b. 1983, Busan, South Korea)’s three-component multimedia installation The Stranger (2018) features a 24-minute film of the same name, as well as a text-based wall vinyl and nine sculptures of her Bondage Baggage series. Offered as functional seating to visitors, the sculptural works are inspired by luggage coming down the conveyor belt at the Kathmandu airport, in the city where the artist grew up. The luggage is bound and wrapped in specific household materials to prevent any tampering, but Lee’s sculptural interpretation is intended to evoke related narratives around privacy, security, migratory lives, and borders. Meanwhile, the installation’s film component features grainy archival footage shot by her father in late 1980s, from their intimate village life in rural Nepal, with a voice over of the artist’s father narrating the scene in Korean. Juxtaposing the scene are overlayed ‘subtitles’ that are in fact excerpts from the artist’s English-language journal entries. The synced text doesn’t offer translation but open the viewer up to the artists’ internal dialogues and questions concerning identity, family, memory, and self preservation. The Stranger has been exhibited at Hammer Museum and the Aspen Art Museum, with one of its editions acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019.