Tag Archives: Exergue on documenta 14

In 1889, Congress openly seized land in Indian Territory for white settlement. The land runs thundered. Many of the settler towns created in the land runs are ghost towns now. Timber, railroads, and mining leaving a host of cavernous emptiness in their wake. What is a ghost town in a nation whose settlements, roads, and […]

But empire, its idiot families and colonialist invasions, land grabs and resource exploitations, goes further back. As does its exploitation of language, both visual and linguistic. Auder’s new video installation The Course of Empire (2017) is inspired by the eponymous series of paintings created by Thomas Cole from 1833 to 1836. A “text film,” constructed from iPhone […]

“The mimesis brought about by the Golden Potlatch was decidedly imperfect. From the outset its intent, I think, was not to create a perfect copy, but instead to borrow from the idea of the potlatch for different objectives. The festival was the public performance of a larger narrative about economic prosperity (always already from a prospector’s/settler’s perspective). […]