addison
namnoum
BOOK DESIGN
"proof of concept"
I have been curating and organizing arts programming since 2018. My curatorial projects and my background in publishing eventually led me to a love of book design.
Catalogs and art books are wonderful curatorial objects, being both vessels and artworks in themselves. They can tell the story of an exhibition. They can celebrate a body of work and hold worlds of thought within.
RECENT WRITING
Unknowing Stone
Wayfinding into Relationship
. . . What might we need to experience place in this way? Stripped of the urge to know in the rationalist sense of the word, where knowing has sometimes amounted to extraction and domination, can we dream another way of being in relationship with place?
In lieu of what she sees as human exceptionalism and individualism, Donna Haraway has suggested the concept of kinship as a way to reorient our relationships with places and the nonhumans that inhabit them. Making kin is finding responsibility, care, and common cause in relationship; at a most basic level, Haraway points out, “earthlings are kin in the deepest sense,” in that we share the greater home-place of Earth.
But how to do it? How do we make “oddkin” with nonhumans, particularly when in the West we have been so thoroughly schooled in human exceptionalism? To a great extent, we have inherited a philosophy that fails to perceive or respect the animacy of the world. This deadened way of being is incredibly pervasive to Western thought. It is in the limited ways we measure animal intelligence, to the ways we have historically used land, resources, and waterways without accounting for systemic dependencies and consequences . . .
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How to Plan An Exhibition for An Artist-Run Space
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Sit with an idea for several years. If you are really good you might even write the idea down.
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Research artists who are making work related to the idea. Maybe at first you won’t realize the reason that you’re drawn to them is because they are making work related to the idea. Spend some time wondering about this, then eventually remember the idea that has been rattling around inside of you for the last x years. The artist(s) are giving you a chance to think about the idea visually and spatially. Become excited about this.
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Develop a relationship with the artist(s) and their work. Schedule studio visits. Do more research. Ask questions based on the research, but also compose new questions based on what they’re telling you and what’s there in the studio. Listen. Bring your language into alignment with theirs. If they are interested in working with you, trust them with what you envision.
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Make to-do lists . . .
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RECENT WRITING
Power in A Look
Oracles and Amulets
In new paintings, rugs, and works on paper, Isabelle Schipper and Basak Kilicbeyli complicate what it is to be perceived. Wittily exploring gender and how it is performed, embodied, and mythologized, their artworks prompt a breakdown between subject and object, active and passive, watcher and watched.
Both artists play in the archetypes that would not only mark a person as one thing or another but press them into an ideal form. Basak Kilicbeyli queers and deconstructs mythic archetypes, turning gods into objects and objects into gods in the process. Isabelle Schipper works with constructions of femininity: makeup, dolls, and arching mouths. Lipsticked girls peep out from high towers. Sometimes they melt into the architecture itself, barricading themselves in and shutting spectators out. Schipper’s paintings fix the viewer with a stare that sometimes weeps and sometimes tricks. Kilicbeyli’s invocation of the nazar or evil eye wards away the ill intent of an onlooker as much as it dazzles and adorns. This is a gaze that gazes back.
“Lookout” is a warning but also a faithful friend, a sentinel at her post, a battlement . . .
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