Images Festival | Ferments, Family, Kinship, Home

Curated by Lauren Gabrielle Fournier

Fermentation is a slow process of transformation by microbes like bacteria and yeast that requires the factors of time, space, and care. As a biochemical process, it embodies preservation and change simultaneously, which makes it a ripe metaphor for a range of concepts. It was this tension that first had me approaching feminism through fermentation in the ongoing Fermenting Feminism (2017–present), with my asking what should be preserved from histories, and what needs to be transformed as we move toward more just and reparative futures?

Through queer kinship, multilingual and extra-rational archives, and trans-species becoming, the artists in this program reimagine what constitutes family, belonging, and home through the radically patient practices of fermentation and knowledge-sharing from their respective lives.

In How To Make Kimchi According to my Kun-Umma, we follow documentarian Samuel Kiehoon Lee’s Kun-Umma (“Big Mama”) or aunt Bong Ja Lee in the process of making kimchi, which she explains is central to every meal in Korea, while also getting a glimpse into the rapport between the artist and his aunt. Paul Wong’s Mother’s Cupboard records the artist’s mother and Chinese-Canadian elder, Suk-Fong, as she shows her son her collection of Chinese medicines, herbs, and ingredients while detailing their uses.

What is lost in translation? E Edreva’s Cooking with Grandma emerges from the artist’s experience trying to read family recipes. While she can read Bulgarian as printed text, she cannot discern it in handwriting, and so she must use Google Translate as a technological aid. With Google translation on “pause,” she moves for a period outside of the register of legibility and into the haptic.

“I am looking for a new form,” reads the text in TJ Shin’s M is for Memoir. If language itself ferments, it also has to find vessels within, to take shape over time. As language and grammar ferment, material bubbles. Shin’s intimate observations of the land on which they’re working come through in their art, made in residence at Wave Hill in the Bronx, at a time during the pandemic when they were also volunteering with local composting initiatives.

This residency of Shin’s closely followed their Gut Feelings residency/exhibition at Recess Session in Brooklyn, where Shin practiced Korean Natural Farming (JADAM) to ferment lactic acid and inject it into the soil of a greenhouse in the gallery, to respond to the loss of native intestinal gut bacteria that Asian immigrants to the US experience within the first year of arrival.

A slow circularity of movement orients the viewer in Kimberly Ho’s and Diana Bang’s In fermentation. Ferment can refer to being worked up, which is what Ho and Bang explore here. Disorderliness comes in when a drinking vessel falls, smashing to the ground.

Jamie Ross’s work is part of his ongoing project on the 606 Club in California, a secret drinking spot for LGBTQ+ that was breached by police in a very public raid in 1914. Ross’s process includes ongoing conversations with queer elders, land-based “psychic sensing” at the site in California, and placing the spit of queer elders into vessels from the 606 to try and revivify the historical yeasts as a way of making visible the embodied histories of queer life and death.

New Mexico-based artist collaborators and partners E Edreva and Leo Williams’ Family Jewels brings a queer and trans approach to who or what can constitute one’s children—including worms of vermicompost, and the living cultures in yogurt and kefir. After all, these are the living beings that the artists tenderly care for each day—the future in which they’ve invested.

In Bread Symphony: Sonified Sourdough, collaborators Max Horwich, Ashley Jane Lewis, Katya Rozanova, and Emily Saltz create a speculative sourdough choir—a transspecies composition that makes audible the distinct lifecycles of the microbes that exist in a sourdough starter. Performed at Slow Movement Computing and the NYC Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit, the work asks audiences to listen deeply and attune to a gradually unfolding song.

— Lauren Gabrielle Fournier

Content note: This program contains mentions of alcohol and intoxication, and discussion of family-making.

Images Festival operates on land stolen from the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron-Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Tkáron:to is currently home to diverse Indigenous and Métis peoples as well as people who settle on this land. As part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant, we acknowledge that we all eat from the same bowl and spoon, and must take only what we need, ensuring resources are available for all.

As art workers, artists, and curators, we see the process of untangling ourselves from settler complicity as internal, structural, and ongoing. It is not something to be taken lightly. The inclusion of Indigenous artists and curators into our program is just the first step of necessary and deeper change. Extending from our organizational accountability work, we strive to not only undo forms of complicity, but also actively create an environment and infrastructure that can support Indigenous peoples who work with us.

Images expresses our solidarity with Indigenous people on Turtle Island and globally. We are committed to continuing to learn, critique, and challenge the settler colonial structures we are complicit in.