Iceberg projects is proud to present a solo exhibition by acclaimed South African artist

Athi-Patra Ruga. Following an initial research trip to the United States earlier this year, Ruga is returning to Chicago with reflections on private archives encountered in the collections of Carl van Vechten’s scrapbooks.

In this exhibition, Ruga uses the archive of 20th century photographer and writer Carl Van Vechten as a starting point to continue his decade-long interest in unpacking the response of black modernists to European and American negrophilia of the early 20th century. Through a series of oil pastel portraits, hand embroidered tapestry, and stained glass, Ruga probes the continued influence of these historical tropes on performativity, agency and representations and of the queer, male, black body.

By creating a series of speculative portraits and studies of Van Vechten’s anonymous muse, Ruga seeks to reimagine an alternative for one nameless model exotically/erotically depicted in Van Vechten’s photographs. In this process, Ruga embodies a type of double consciousness by becoming both the artist and the muse, as he notes:

“Portraiture” is performance and cannot be viewed without considering the historical, artistic, and political conditions in which the body is commodified for contemplation and by whom the image is consumed.

My intention is to expand on the artist’s studio performance in relation to the autonomy of the studio model whilst taking into account the historical power dynamics of Van Vechten’s images.

By looking back from a contemporary viewpoint, I can intervene in these images as a form of liberation of the young man photographed by Van Vechten.The problematics I am working through are that of realizing that the act of looking can be intimidating for the artist and the model.  It is through me welcoming young male models into my studio for sittings that I then perform and react to Van Vechten and the problematics of image making.

In my artistic practice, the forgotten, erased, and problematised characters I depict in my work come from art history, my imagination, from life drawing, and serve as a continuation of my deep look at the complicit body, the eroticised body, and the queer body.

I am focussing on the black male body throughout industrialized history. I do this as a form of beatification and use it as a mechanism to free it from constraints in artistic style , genders, and subjective histories.”

Athi-Patra Ruga - Eastern Cape - Aug 2023

Reckless Rolodex highlights the lasting, though largely overlooked, influence of Lawrence Steger, described by the Chicago Tribune as “one of the most important, and most influential, performance artists in Chicago during the late 1980s and 90s.” Lawrence Steger explored desire and sexuality in performance until his early death in 1999 due to AIDS-related complications. Rather than eulogize the artist’s life, Reckless Rolodex underlines Steger’s legacy through works by contemporary artists responding to his work and research practice. A skilled director, writer and performer, Steger relied on the disciplines of theater and a community of collaborative artists to realize his intricately constructed performances, reflecting his deep knowledge of a wide range of sources, from pop culture and film to the writing of Jean Genet and the Fluxus-style works of Yoko Ono. Mercurial, mordant, stylish, and comical, he presented himself refracted through historical figures such as Ludwig II, the nineteenth-century “Mad King” of Bavaria, or imaginary personas like nocturnal figures that populate cabaret dreams and nightmares.

Reckless Rolodex is the first concentrated examination of Steger’s work to date, providing a landmark opportunity to unearth an artistic predecessor too-easily marginalized by his early death. Central to the exhibition is a stage, created by Edie Fake, where commissioned performances will premiere alongside writing by artist and co-curator Matthew Goulish. Over the past eighteen years, Goulish has written a series of lectures and essays in response to Steger’s archive. Some of that writing will appear in printed form or as newly presented lectures in the context of this exhibition. Additional works on view respond to different facets of Steger’s public persona including an exploding, fragmentary cast of a mirror ball by Young Joon Kwak; a set of masks by Max Guy; a site-specific installation by Devin T. Mays; a set of kitchen knives fabricated from graphite by Betsy Odom; and more. As befits Steger’s oeuvre, works on view wield a theatrical quality, crossing mediums and emotional registers to undermine the notion of a static self.

Exhibition material can be found in plain text and in audio recordings here.

SUPPORT

Support for Reckless Rolodex is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency; and the School of Art & Art History, College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, University of Illinois Chicago.

Neff, John. 2022. “Sketch for a Movie.” Portable Gray 5 (2): 201–20. https://doi.org/10.1086/722786.

The bathhouse is safe. The bathhouse is not secure.

The bathhouse is a space to be seen. The bathhouse is not a place to be watched.

The bathhouse is sensual. The bathhouse is not unspiritual.

The bathhouse is a space for meaningful work. The bathhouse is not a workplace.

The bathhouse is a technology. The bathhouse is not a machine.

The bathhouse is immersive. The bathhouse is not without a body.

The bathhouse is sweating. The bathhouse is not drained.

The bathhouse is gone. The bathhouse is not over.


These eight thought exercises, [conceived] with Bao Nguyen, together create the space that I want to see and want to be in. They are a bridge between my expansive interests in underground spaces for queer being togetherness, and my practical interest in having spaces for people—queer, trans, Black, brown, Asian people—that just feel good. Spaces where you are able to exercise your agency feel good, feel free. That has been a lifelong concern, and I think will be a lifelong concern.

I am interested in queer bathhouses as a site for coming together, for cultural production, even organizing and relationship building broadly. In my practice, the best way to speak about something broad is by finding something very specific, which is why I chose Man’s Country, [a former bathhouse in Chicago.] I'm interested in Man’s Country as part of a larger family of spaces that literally held space for music and sex, being together and close proximity—a proximity that's pretty impossible right now.

I started with Man's Country because it was closest to me—I lived up the block for about two and a half years. It was near where I waited for the bus, and I always walked by, but had never gone in. I was under the impression at the time that, because of my embodiment, I would not be allowed in. And so it was this great source of mystery for me; I would wonder a lot about that space and had a lot of curiosity about it. At the same time, with respect to its place in history, too much of an attachment to the narrative of a space becomes like a project of nostalgia or resurrecting history, which I feel unequipped and also uninterested in doing.

I'm not imagined as being able to be an active participant or member of specifically assigned-male at-birth gay space—in a way that feels invisibilizing of my nuanced understanding of my gender, and also  my history, and my desire, and those who have desired me. It’s just more complicated than that. That curiosity is also a longing—not for access or entry into a Boy’s Club—but a longing to be viewed and considered as an active participant with fluid embodiment and desire. I think that's what most people want, honestly.

[For the Iceberg Projects exhibition], I have been working over the past year on a model, with the program that I use, Maya—basically building out the basement dance floor areas to imagine Man's Country. I didn't have a floor plan; I used found footage from Google and Youtube of a 3D walkthrough of the space, and articles about the closing of Man’s Country. The space is like the main character of the animation; there are no figures. So much of this process has been me imagining and placing my body in the space to feel out the room, and I'm really curious about the relationship between passive viewing and active embodied vision, where images can be felt and can trigger imagination.

At Iceberg, there will be video and sculpture, as things to see. I’m working together with Avery Youngblood on designs of the thought exercises as printed posters. I'm pairing each thought exercise with a meditation or visualization—something to read and do—as a way to embody the principle. There will also be audio playing from a script of an exchange between two lovers, and some sort of coming undone.

As part of the research for this project, Bao Nguyen and I looked at underground architecture and queer bathhouses, and then we would have weekly conversations. From there, underground architecture turned into other points of interest, like looking at underground shrines and caves. They are spaces for releasing, relinquishing, across time periods, societies, and cultures. Underground architecture is used within my spiritual tradition, Lucumí; temple houses would hold ceremonies and still do, in basements. I'm interested in the lack of visibility from the street level as a practical function of underground happenings as protective mechanisms. And then there's another idea too, more connected to my imagining, of being inside of the earth, held there, cradled—that feels special.

Connected to my personal life, [I now live in my grandmother’s basement in Brooklyn.] When people checked in on me about the flooding from Hurricane Ida, my friend [poet Ladan Osman] said “This is such a changeful and revealing time. So many spaces purging their secrets or seams showing/coming undone” It's happening quite literally—the effects of global warming, the storms, are exposing the weak spots in our infrastructure, overturning power lines in New Orleans and flooding basements in New York. It’s often affecting those already in the most precarious financial and living conditions.

The flood is an instigator of change. I think a benevolent reading is that it’s the catalyst for change—maybe that's not even benevolent: something's going to change. I don't know that my work conjectures to know what that is, but something's happening, something's changing.


~As told to Alex Fialho

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A publication featuring text generated by Ross and Bao Nguyen, and a poster designed with Avery Youngblood, will extend the exhibition beyond Iceberg’s physical gallery.

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Amina Ross is an artist, educator and life-long learner based in Brooklyn, New York. Amina makes videos, sculptures, sounds, and situations that consider feeling, body-knowledge, and intimacy as technologies of survival for black, queer, trans and femme people. Amina has presented work in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, London, Havana, Rotterdam, andThe Hague. Amina learned about facilitation, world-building and ritual through their familial practice of Lucumí tradition (Santeria), their work in queer art collectives 3rd Language and F4F and through their time with the black solidarity economics working group Cooperation for Liberation. Amina worked as an educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and was a lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Amina received their BFA from SAIC and their MFA from the Yale School of Art.