Wesleyan University's Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery presents "The Language in Common" through Sunday, December 12, 2021

Middletown, Conn.—"The Language in Common," a group exhibition curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts and Adjunct Instructor in Art Benjamin Chaffee, is now on view in the Main Gallery of Wesleyan University's Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, located at 283 Washington Terrace on the Wesleyan campus in Middletown, Connecticut, through Sunday, December 12, 2021. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday from Noon to 5pm. Admission to the gallery is free and open to the public. Please see below for more information about the exhibition, upcoming related events, both virtual and on campus, and COVID safety guidelines.

About the Exhibition

The group exhibition "The Language in Common" presents artistic practices that site language in the space between poetry, visual art, and their performance. Moving beyond the spectacle of the origination of poetry or art, this project seeks to allow memory as a creative act in the process of making experience common, of making space for a new imaginary. The exhibition brings together five artists whose work engages with politics on the periphery of hegemony, including Cecilia Vicuña (b.1948, Chile), Tanya Lukin Linklater (b.1976, Alutiiq), Julien Creuzet (b.1986, France), Jasper Marsalis (b.1995, U.S.), and Alice Notley (b.1945, U.S.).

​The exhibition takes its title from the eponymous essay written by Steve Lyons and Jason Jones, published by e-flux Journal in November 2020. Their essay lays out the possibilities for establishing commonalities on the political left and argues for the existence of a space, imagined or real, outside of the demands of capitalism. Locating that space as already existing within Indigeneity, the authors propose that through the "language in common" it is accessible to all. Poetry, as a counter-hegemonic force, grounds the material operations of the works in the exhibition, making space for a new imaginary amidst the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.

Featuring works encompassing installation, sculpture, video, drawing, poetry, and performance, as well as newly-commissioned works developed in response to the exhibition, "The Language in Common" aims towards activating what the poet Alice Notley has identified as the language that existed before we were born, “the language that holds all being together.”

Curator Benjamin Chaffee spoke at the opening reception for Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff on Tuesday, September 14, 2021. Read the "News at Wesleyan" article “The Language in Common” on Exhibit in Zilkha Gallery.

This exhibition and related events are supported by the Shapiro Center and Writing at Wesleyan, the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Thomas and Catherine McMahon Fund of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the History Department, the Latin American Studies Program, Connecticut Humanities, and the Center for the Arts. Additional support by Etant donnés Contemporary Art, a program developed by FACE Foundation, Villa Albertine and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, with lead funding from the French Ministry of Culture and Institut Français-Paris, Ford Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Chanel USA, and ADAGP.

Connecticut Humanities is an independent, non-profit affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Connecticut Humanities connects people to the humanities through grants, partnerships, and collaborative programs. Connecticut Humanities projects, administration, and program development are supported by state and federal matching funds, community foundations, and gifts from private sources. Learn more by visiting cthumanities.org.

Upcoming Related Events
FREE!

Poetry Reading by Tanya Lukin Linklater
Wednesday, October 6, 2021 at 4:30pm
Zoom
RSVP required for access to virtual event.

This online event features a poetry reading by Tanya Lukin Linklater. She will read from her first book, “Slow Scrape” (Anteism, 2020), which is, in the words of poet Layli Long Soldier, “an expansive and undulating meditation on time, relations, origin and colonization.”

Lukin Linklater draws upon documentary poetics, concrete-based installations, event scores, and other texts composed in relation to performances written between 2011 and 2018. Her book of poetry, “Slow Scrape,” cites memory, Cree and Alutiiq languages, and embodiment as modes of relational being and knowledge. The book unfolds a poetics of relation and action to counter the settler colonial violences of erasure, extraction, and dispossession. “Slow Scrape” can be read alongside her practice as a visual artist and choreographer. Her performances, videos, installations, and writings work through orality and embodiment – investigating histories of Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands, and structures of sustenance. She has studied at Stanford University, the University of Alberta, and, presently, at Queen’s University, where she is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies. While her Alutiiq homelands are in southern Alaska (Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions), she has lived and worked in Nbisiing Anishnabek territory in northern Ontario, Canada for more than a decade. “Slow Scrape” is her first collection of poetry.

Performance and Artist Talk by Cecilia Vicuña
Wednesday, October 13, 2021 at 6pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
For Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff.
Co-sponsored by the Shapiro Center and Writing at Wesleyan.

Artists in Conversation: Tanya Lukin Linklater and Raven Chacon
Tuesday, November 2, 2021 at 6pm
Zoom
RSVP required for access to virtual event.

This online event features artist Tanya Lukin Linklater in conversation with composer, performer, and installation artist Raven Chacon from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. The artists will discuss the concepts of the score as related to their work.

Lukin Linklater was previously in a live Zoom conversation with Okwui Okpokwasili as part of "Choreographies of the Archipelago: Artists in Conversation," a series of online exchanges between artists who work across a variety of geopolitical and disciplinary contexts. The event was presented on Friday, December 4, 2020 by the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University with generous support from the Ford Foundation.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at The Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project. He is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, the Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition.

Language as a Site of Struggle: A Conversation with Lou Cornum, Jeffers Lennox, and Steve Lyons
Thursday, November 11, 2021 at 4:30pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
For Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff.

The "language in common" can be understood as a call for the left to create signs, symbols, and traditions that can both unify the movement and withstand attempts at co-option by the state and capital. The precedent for such an undertaking can be found in Indigenous cultures of protest and resilience, which have served to unite a movement without essentializing its participants.

A live conversation in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery on this topic will feature Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American Studies Lou Cornum, Associate Professor of History Jeffers Lennox, and artist and art historian Steve Lyons, a core member of Not An Alternative / The Natural History Museum, and co-author of the November 2020 e-flux Journal article "The Language in Common."

Lou Cornum is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American Studies in the American Studies Department at Wesleyan University, where they are at work on their first book manuscript, Skin Worlds: Speculative Geographies Across Indigenous and Black Literatures. Their essays and art criticism can be found in Art in America, Frieze, Canadian Art, The New Inquiry, and Pinko: A Magazine of Gay Communism. They are an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, a two-spirit dyke, and an amateur mycologist.

Jeffers Lennox is an Associate Professor of History at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Homelands and Empires (University of Toronto Press, 2017) and North of America: Homelands, British Provinces, and Creating the United States (Yale University Press, 2022). His current book project explores the history of protest music in early America.

Steve Lyons is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. He is also a core member of art/activist collective Not An Alternative, where he contributes to the ongoing project The Natural History Museum (2014-), a mobile and pop-up museum that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature. Recent essays on art, left counter-power, and environmental justice have appeared in e-flux Journal, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Museum Activism (Routledge, 2019), and The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (Routledge, 2021).

This event is co-sponsored by the American Studies Department.

Artist Talk by Julien Creuzet
Monday, November 15, 2021 at Noon
Zoom
RSVP required for access to virtual event.

Artist Julien Creuzet will address his practice and focus on the new works included in "The Language in Common" that tie together American chemical production, French colonialism, and a contemporary health crisis in Martinique.

Born in 1986, Julien Creuzet is a French-Caribbean artist who lives and works in Paris. A visual artist and poet, he actively intertwines these two practices via amalgams of sculpture, installation and textual intervention that frequently address his own diasporic experience. Inspired by the poetic and philosophical reflections of Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant on creolization and migration, Creuzet’s work focuses on the troubled intersection of the history of Martinique and the events of European modernity. Creuzet has recently had solo exhibitions at Palais De Tokyo, Paris (2019), Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard (2018), Bétonsalon, Paris (2018), Sketch Gallery in Bogotá (2017), Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Basse Normandie in Caen (2015), the Juvisy-sur-Orge Contemporary Art Centre, Galerie Doyang Lee in Paris (2013), and the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin (2012). Recently, he participated in the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018), the 6th Rennes Biennale (2018), the 11th Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2017), the 14th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017), the Festival Hors Piste at the Centre Pompidou (2017), the Frac Pays de la Loire (2016), the 12th Biennale de l’Art Contemporain Africain de Dakar, Sénégal (2016), and the 2nd Kampala Art Biennale (2016), Uganda.

COVID Safety Guidelines

The general public will be welcomed back to Wesleyan this fall to enjoy Center for the Arts outdoor programming and exhibitions in both the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery and the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center. All patrons must adhere to and follow the University COVID-19 safety guidelines. Wesleyan requires all visitors to be fully vaccinated. All visitors will need to provide proof of having been fully vaccinated. Public health officials consider an individual to be fully vaccinated two weeks after their final dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Masks are required in all University buildings regardless of vaccination status. Indoor performances as well as special events, including opening receptions in the galleries, will be open to Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff. Vaccinated visitors may attend outdoor events and outdoor activities unmasked. Patrons under the age of 12 are required to wear a mask at outdoor events. Due to current CDC age limits on vaccinations, individuals under the age of 12 will not be permitted at indoor exhibitions.