THE LETTERS OF MINA HARKER

JANUARY 21 – MARCH 12, 2023

Dena Al-Adeeb, Sholeh Asgary, Kerri Conlon, Red Culebra (Guillermo Galindo and Cristóbal Martínez), Madeleine Fitzpatrick, Behnaz and Baharak Khaleghi, Heesoo Kwon, Tracy Ren, Chelsea Ryoko Wong, Rupy C Tut. Curated by Naz Cuguoglu.

Public Programs

Saturday, January 28th, 2-5pm: Opening Reception
Saturday, February 11th, 2:30-4PM: Epic of Gilgamesh, performed by DENA AL-ADEEB & SHOLEH ASGARY
Saturday, March 5th: Closing Reception and 4 Cycles + 1 performed by RED CULEBRA

All photographs by Carla Hernandez unless otherwise noted.

CURATOR’S STATEMENT

Drawing its title from the 1998 eponymous debut novel by Dodie Bellamy, a vital contributor to the Bay Area's avant-garde literary scene, The Letters of Mina Harker investigates speculative fiction’s potential for alternative world-building. The exhibition celebrates Mina, the central woman character from Bram Stoker's Dracula, who demands her own agency and voice in Bellamy’s narrative. Individual works by Bay Area artists come together in the space to form a chosen family and to suggest a speculative narration. Via diasporic artistic practices, the exhibition looks at the definition of “monster” as a symbol for the outsider and constructs an alternative universe with a new and otherworldly language.   

Rupy C Tut’s paintings, Tracy Ren’s multimedia work, and Madeleine Fitzpatrick’s works on paper, dissect historical and contemporary displacement narratives around identity, belonging, and gender while Heesoo Kwon’s video work, focuses on an autobiographical feminist religion “Leymusoom” as an ever-evolving exploration of her family histories and feminist liberation. These works cohere together to highlight stories and symbols of diffuse diasporic identities. 

Echoing the struggle of the vampire Mina, who possesses Bellamy’s body, three new works commissioned for the exhibition illustrates the tension in the diasporic experience for finding the right language for desires and fears without confining to one identity.  Chelsea Ryoko Wong’s painting celebrates racial and cultural diversity, Behnaz and Baharak Khaleghi’s new series of otherworldly and monstrous sculptural work questions women’s relation to patriarchal structures, and Kerri Conlon’s site-specific ceiling piece uses fabric to create a universe for these unearthly creatures to live in. 

In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be two special performances by artist duos, Red Culebra (Guillermo Galindo and Cristóbal Martínez), and Dena Al-Adeeb, and Sholeh Asgary. Red Culebra will perform 4 Cycles + 1, a post-Mexican ceremony that responds to new age fetishes, magical realism, and the parochial moralities of American politics. Al-Adeeb and Asgary will perform At the Edge of the Sea, a collaborative transdisciplinary performance that uses the Epic of Gilgamesh as a departure point to excavate the elusive body across time and space.

Taking its conceptual shape during Iran's present feminist revolution — the bottom-up movement demanding an end to gender apartheid which followed the brutal killing of Mahsa Amini — this exhibition is an invitation to collectively imagine alternative world-buildings and history-makings. It is an invitation to speak up, make noise, and to remember.

–Naz Cuguoglu

DENA Al-ADEEB

DENA AL-ADEEB is an Iraqi born artist and writer whose work investigates the relationship between collective memory, architecture, and embodied experiences of dispossession, militarization and war. Her work is rooted in experimental forms of performance, video, installation, digital art, photography, sculpture, and text. She creates performative, relational works, dedicated to participatory art, socially/politically engaged projects, and collaborative engagement. The experience of being rooted within a community is critical to her art practice, activism, scholarship, and pedagogical praxes. In this vein she has collaborated with HEKLER, Pro Arts Gallery & Commons, Utopia School and Flux Factory. She has presented her work at Light Work Gallery, Mana Contemporary, Center for Architecture, Art 13: London: Modern and Contemporary Art Fair, Arab American National Museum, National Veterans Art Museum, Darb 1718, Falaki Gallery, Mashrabia Gallery, Soundwave and Grey Art Foundation. Her work appears in a diversity of publications including: Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War Anthology, Amerasia Journal special issue of Critical Refugee Studies, among others.

SHOLEH ASGARY

SHOLEH ASGARY is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose works implicate the viewer-participant in future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary is heavily influenced by her early somatic experiences in constant movement across borders. From this positionality lies an inherent tension throughout her work: between visibility and opacity, history and myth, worldmaking and death--with none in opposition to the other. This complexity drives the core of her work.

KERRI CONLON

KERRI CONLON is an artist living and working in San Francisco and received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale School of Art (2019) and her BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design (2009). She has exhibited in San Francisco, CA, New York, NY, Providence, RI, and Ferguson, MO. She manages the Sculpture, Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, and Honors studios at Stanford University. She has worked in academic shop spaces since 2007, teaching students the valuable conceptual and technical skills necessary to see their ideas developed and realized. She believes making is a way of knowing, and seeks to empower students with these skills, eliciting agency through art practice.

RED CULEBRA (Guillermo galindo and cristobal martinez)

RED CULEBRA is an electronic synthesizer duet and collaboration of bay area electronic musicians and performance artists led by gal*in_dog aka Guillermo Galindo and Cristóbal Martínez. Red Culebra’s performance art includes sound invocations, moving images, and movement by performers. Inspired by their complicated Post-Mexican backgrounds, Galindo and Martinez create and perform rituals based on cycles of repetition and uniformity. The sonic, graphic, and repetitive nature of their work requires both endurance and determination from their audiences, while denying participating publics the opportunity to fetishize ceremony.

MADELEINE fitzpatrick

MADELEINE FITZPATRICK is an Irish American artist whose paintings and monoprints teeter on the edge between figuration and abstraction to reapproach the human body from a radical perspective, one that is cosmic and fluid in nature. Challenging the patriarchal normativity, Fitzpatrick’s ghostly figures celebrate monstrosity and in-between states, queering taken-for-granted conceptions of bodies and selves. Developing her style in the early 1980s, the artist can be perceived as a rebel of her time, due to the dominantly male point of view toward nude female figures and the double standard between male and female nudity in art history. Fitzpatrick lives and works in Marshall, California. Major recent museum solo shows include Recent Work at Bolinas Museum (2009).

behnaz and baharak khaleghi

BEHNAZ AND BAHARAK KHALEGHI are multidisciplinary artists and collaborators originating from Iran currently living in the Bay Area, California where Behnaz pursued her MFA at the University of California Berkeley and Baharak pursued hers at San Jose State University. In their practice, deploying an array of mediums, they seek alternative ways of making feminist art in a Middle Eastern context, usually paying attention to the potentials of humor and pleasure while simultaneously embracing the aesthetics of disgust and horror, pushing against taste to develop new categories for beauty; what is pleasurable and libidinous for women as defined by women, offensive to male taste and its ownership. Behnaz's work has been acclaimed and chosen among Bay Area emerging artists as part of the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards program and has been exhibited in spaces such as the De Young Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum. Baharak's work has been exhibited in spaces such as the De Young Museum and Root Division Gallery in San Francisco.

Heesoo kwon

HEESOO KWON is a visual artist and anthropologist based in Berkeley, California. Kwon was born in 1990 in South Korea and received her Bachelor’s in Business Administration from Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul, South Korea in 2015. She has solo exhibitions at CICA Museum, South Korea, and Visual Space Gunmulsai, South Korea. She has had group exhibitions at CICA Museum; the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, UC Berkeley; Root Division, San Francisco; SOMArts, San Francisco; and Embark Gallery, San Francisco, among others. She received the Female Inventor of the Year Award from the Korean Intellectual Property Office & Korean Woman Inventors Association in 2012; the young Korean Artist Award from CICA Museum; is a recipient of the Cadogan Scholarship; and an awardee of Eisner Prize for Photos and Art Practice.

tracy ren

TRACY REN is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and curator based in Oakland, CA. Ren works primarily with an architectural and object-oriented visual language while moving through the world as an intuitive, process-oriented, queer, second-generation, Chinese-American person. Drawing inspiration from cultural / domestic symbols, rituals, spaces, and things, Ren make sculptures, photographs, installations, and craft objects with the intent to highlight the ways in which we simultaneously and reciprocally create, activate, and are held by one another both within and across space and time. Within Ren’s most recent work, Ren pairs these inclinations with an engagement in a variety of research methods to navigate the loss and reclamation of their family’s history while confronting their own spectrality (to break bread with ghosts).

chelsea ryoko wong

CHELSEA RYOKO WONG is a painter and muralist whose vibrant figure compositions reflect the diversity and style of her home in San Francisco. Through the use of watercolor, gouache and acrylic techniques, Wong creates busy scenes of co-mingling people drawing from real-life events and her imagination. Her work is known for celebrating racial and cultural diversity, promoting working class communities and evoking a sense of curiosity and wonder. Through heavily stylized and idyllic imagery, Wong creates an encouraging visual statement promoting joy, acceptance and openness to one another. Wong began her studies at Parsons School of Design (New York, NY), and finished at California College of the Arts (Oakland, CA)  with a B.F.A. in Printmaking in 2010. She is the first recipient of the Hamaguchi Emerging Artists Fellowship award at Kala (Berkeley, CA, 2010) and has recently completed murals for Asana (San Francisco, CA, 2021), La Cocina (San Francisco, CA, 2021) and the FB AIR Program (San Francisco, CA, 2019). She has exhibited across the United States, Europe and Asia.

Rupy c. tut

RUPY C. TUT is a painter dissecting historical and contemporary displacement narratives around identity, belonging, and gender. As a descendant of refugees and a first-generation immigrant, Rupy’s family narrative of movement, loss, and resilience is foundational to her creative inquiries. Her work engages in strict practice of traditional materials and methodology associated with traditional Indian painting as she continues to add contemporary images and characters to a centuries old visual language. Rupy lives in Oakland with her husband, daughter and twin boys.

about the curator

NAZ CUGUOGLU is a curator and art writer, based in San Francisco and Istanbul. Currently, she works as a Curatorial Fellow at Asian Art Museum. She held positions at KADIST, Wattis Institute, de Young Museum, SFMOMA, among others. She was an artist advisor for Joan Mitchell Foundation and a juror for Sondheim Artscape Prize 2021. Her writings were featured in SFMOMA Open Space, Art Asia Pacific, Hyperallergic, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and elsewhere. She co-founded Collective Çukurcuma, a curatorial collective experimenting with collaborative thinking practices through reading group meetings and international multi-venue exhibitions. She received her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and holds degrees in Psychology (BA) and Social Psychology (MA) from Koç University, Istanbul. 

She curated exhibitions and programs internationally at documenta fifteen, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Walters Art Museum, The Wattis Institute, 15th Istanbul Biennial Public Program, Framer Framed, D21 Kunstraum Leipzig, Red Bull Art Around Istanbul, among others. She co-edited four books: Proximities: Folded Readings on the Archival (Haus der Kulturen der Welt: 2022), The Word for World is Forest (The Wattis Institute: 2020), Between Places (Verkstad Konsthall: 2016), After Alexandria, the Flood (Umur: 2015), and presented at institutions including Tate Modern, Fotogalleriet Oslo, Rhode Island School of Design, SALT, Norköpping Art Museum, San Francisco Art Institute, and The University of California, Berkeley.