Sunday, November 17th, 2.30–4.30pm at Soldes, Los Angeles
“David Muenzer: Twin Study” on view October 12 – December 14
I see kinship as paradoxical. On one hand, the circumstances of one’s birth are arbitrary–no one asks to be born. But lived experience, not to mention psychoanalysis, suggests that selfhood is social, and deeply rooted. Because identity is increasingly a locus of economic activity, treated as a natural resource to be extracted, practices which claim to map parts of that otherwise “uncharted territory” have particular power.
Francis Galton popularized regression to the mean–the basis of economics–while attempting to demonstrate his familial superiority. His other in- vention: eugenics. Galton’s drive to measure reflected racism. But trying to find one’s place has a different tenor if undertaken as an exercise in political imagination. See: “Another world is possible.” After all, events that have taken on the mantle of “history” often seem remote from individual agency.
This roundtable hopes to follow kinship to its underlying mechanism, heritability–the measure of how successfully a trait will be passed down from one generation to another. This process has a fraught history, but also offers powerful tools which allow, as panelist David Joselit has theorized, “adjudication among several different and often contradictory world epistemologies, histories, and even ontologies.”
The exhibition “Twin Study” is drawn from an accidental archive of my maternal grandparent’s wedding. These were not pictures of family for family, but images intended to be severed from their context and presented to an outside. Biyer Goyna, or gold wedding jewelry, is worn by the architecture of this exhibition, and ritually connects its bearer to temporally and spatially distant sets of circumstances.
A dialectic of identity and inheritance a (word etymologically linked to both economic and biological determinism) is the departure point for this discussion.
-David Muenzer
About Kelly Akashi
Kelly Akashi, based in Los Angeles, is recognized for her innovative work in sculpture. She has received notable accolades, including the MOCA Los Angeles Twelfth Distinguished Women in the Arts Award (2024), the LACMA Art + Technology Grant (2022) and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include a major showcase that traveled to the San Jose Museum of Art, Frye Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (2022 – 2024). Currently, her work is on view at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan, the Cantor Arts Center, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Other recent institutional group exhibitions include Moody Center for the Arts, Houston (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023). Kelly Akashi’s work can be found in prestigious permanent collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; MOCA Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum; Walker Art Center; CC Foundation, Shanghai; The Perimeter, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Sifang Museum, Nanjing, among others.
About David Joselit
David Joselit began his career as a curator at The ICA in Boston from 1983-1989. He has taught at the University of California, Irvine, Yale University where he was Chair of the History of Art Department from 2006 to 2009, and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard, and was department Chair between 2021 and 2024. Joselit is author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (MIT, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, 2003), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT, 2007), and After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012). He co-organized the exhibition, “Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age,” which opened at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in 2015. Joselit is an editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture. His book Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT Press 2020) won the 2021 Robert Motherwell Book Award. His most recent book is Art's Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023).
About David Muenzer
David Muenzer received a BA from Yale University in 2009 and an MFA from University of Southern California in 2014. Solo exhibitions include "Twin Study" at Soldes, Los Angeles (2024), “Henge” at Parapet Real Humans, St. Louis (2023), “Proxetics” at Dracula’s Revenge, New York (2022), “Sylvan Plug” at Jan Weenix, Los Angeles (2020) and “Scalar-Daemon” at Reserve Ames, Los Angeles (2016). Notable group shows include “D5” at Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2021), “Portable Documents Formatted for Home Use” at Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2020), “14 & 15” at The Lipstick Building, New York (2011), and “The Seeld Library” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018), curated by Lanka Tattersall. His work has appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Frieze, Flash Art, and 4Columns, among others.
About Jeffrey Stuker
Jeffrey Stuker lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Stuker received his MFA from Yale University, New Haven in 2005. Current and previous exhibitions include Digital Witness, LACMA, Pacic Standard Time (2024); Mantis Te Vidit, at Studioli, Roma (La Ripa) (2024); From a Defoliated Monograph at Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Feelings out of Season, at The Fulcrum Press, Los Angeles (2023); Next Year in Monte Carlo at Ben Hunter, London, UK (2023); Objects of Desire at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2022); The International Biennial of Contemporary Photography at MOMuS, Thessaloniki Greece (2021) and Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Most recently, works from Stuker’s installation at the Hammer and his solo show, Next Year in Monte Carlo at Ben Hunter were acquired by LACMA.