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Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality

New Red Order

2020 00:09:08 United States, CanadaEnglishB&W and ColorStereoVideo
Tags:
History, Indigenous, Post-colonialism, Sculpture

Description

Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality extends NRO’s Culture Capture series towards examining desires for monumentality and its dissolution, pursuing fantasies of removal by morphing monuments into metastasizing flesh via ritualized photogrammetric capture and virtual manipulation, performing a sort of sympathetic magic to clear space for Indigenous futures.

The piece literalizes the violence of settler-colonial propaganda and features prominent monuments such as the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt which stood in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City until its removal in 2022, and “End of the Trail”, both created by American sculptor James Earle Fraser. The video mines the archive of Fraser, going beyond simple iconoclasm to probe deeper, investigating desires for indigeneity that motivated the artist, desires which continue to pervade the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called Americas.

Animation by Driftnote.

This work is originally a 2-channel video installation. The work may be screened as a single-channel film theatrically, but it is only to be exhibited as a two-channel video. Please contact VDB regarding exhibition installations.

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.