The looped work Culture Capture 001 takes place within the American Museum of Natural History. We come to recognize the masked figures observing Native American objects held inside the collection cases as accomplices of the public secret society. They diligently photograph, scan, and record these objects through smartphones, transferring the images and dimensional information of them into data to potentially be reconstituted and liberated from these settings. Though these objects are presented within the museum’s framings as static, historical, and fixed in the past, they are in fact lively and dynamic, entities within an embodied present.
Culture Capture 001
New Red Order
2017 00:13:45 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9HD videoDescription
About New Red Order
New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys. In our current period of existential and environmental catastrophe, desires for Indigenous epistemologies increase and enterprising settlers labor to extract this understanding as if it were a natural resource. New Red Order—emerging out of contradistinction from the Improved Order of Red Men, a secret society that 'plays Indian'—calls attraction toward indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire, and enjoins potential non-Indigenous accomplices to participate in the co-examination and expansion of Indigenous agency. Working with an interdisciplinary network of informants the NRO co-produces video, performance, and installation works that confront settler colonial tendencies and obstacles to Indigenous growth. They have presented their work at Artists Space, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Lincoln Center, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Biennial 2019, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Biennial 2019, among others, expanding the public secret society network across numerous institutional platforms.
See also The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, an early work by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys created before the formation of New Red Order.