HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of From a state of sleep, a site-specific installation by New York-based artist Mekko Harjo, marking his first solo presentation with the gallery.
Languages are living things. They swallow foreign terms, invent new ones, and appropriate familiar expressions to novel ends. Collectively tended, they flourish through everyday use, words shifting by minute degrees or eroding to abbreviated stubs. When a community is erased, its language lapses from the field of auditory perception. Indigenous resurgent scholarship asks us to reconceptualize the life and death of languages as a spectrum of endangerment, unspoken vernaculars subsisting in a slumber from which they might yet wake.
The last person fluent in Quapaw, a Siouan dialect spoken by the Indigenous people of the Arkansas and Mississippi River deltas, passed away in 2022. The same year, Harjo—a member of the Quapaw Nation, though neither he nor his father were raised in its dictions and lilts— began to incorporate Quapaw words into his practice. In doing so, he considered the continuum on which individuals engage their inherited cultures; how identity is charged with a responsibility to excavate, claim, and enact.
Harjo spent the decade prior working as a DJ in New York’s infinite nightlife. He sometimes wondered what prompted him and those nocturnal others to come together on the dance floor, why they chose to push sleepless and postlingual through the early hours into dawn. On the turntable, grooved vinyl turned on its axis. He spun the record back counterclockwise a half- rotation, thinking while he did, that it was a way of getting back time. Fingers poised over a circular knob, he turned the volume up.
From a state of sleep begins at its end; at the back of the gallery, on a low stage behind a tinsel veil, a flatscreen sits on a folding chair. Television set to mute, Harjo reads Quapaw words aloud, lips moving soundlessly around unfamiliar syllables. Suspended from the ceiling before the screen, a microphone prompts us to strain our ears for audible registers. The microphone’s cable runs along the ceiling and drops into a doorless room enclosed by unfinished drywall at the gallery’s fore. Through peepholes drilled into the architectural armature, we see the cable twine around a clay vessel that sweats under plastic wrap, suspended in stasis between malleable and bone-dry. The cable continues over the room’s far wall, reaching a radio that sits near the gallery’s mouth and emits a dialogue between Harjo and his father. Nearby, a cluster of fans spin soundlessly on a spiraling base, casting off gentle currents of air that touch the viewer’s skin like gusts of breath. On their blades, LED lights flicker, spelling out Quapaw words left deliberately untranslated. Together, these visual and textual inputs resonate soundlessly around the potential energy of linguistic return. -- Nicole Kaack
