Talya Feldman

Cut from Blue Sky

Asta von Mandelsloh in conversation with Talya Feldman

(As published in the exhibition catalog, Cut from Blue Sky, Nick & Vera Munro Foundation)

2022

AvM What guided you in the work for the exhibition Cut from Blue Sky?

TF For a while, I have been thinking about how survivors and victims of violence are so often reduced to statistics and if there are other ways to speak about gun violence and the grief that comes with it. We have all of these statistics on gun violence, to the point that we become numb to them. How do we ensure that we are seeing the people behind those numbers too?

AvM This question of how to talk about experiences of violence has been on your mind before. In your previous works, your main concern was to focus on survivors, victims and their families. It was about listening to them rather than reporting on them. How do your paintings tie in with these previous works?

TF Following the mass shooting in Halle, Germany on the 9th of October 2019 that targeted a local synagogue and kebab shop and killed two people, I began developing an installation in sound called After Halle. As you stand in front of the speakers, voices of survivors hum the melodies that were sung that day in the synagogue specifically. Humming is a self-soothing act for victims of trauma – not only for the people humming, but also for those who are listening. How do we find healing, not only for ourselves, but also for those around us – for our communities and our society after experiencing such tremendous violence? This has been a common thread running throughout my work. The first time I presented this 10-channel sound installation was in Colorado, where I grew up. It was important for me to exhibit it there due to Colorado’s own painful history of mass shootings. Colorado is a state that understands the scars that a mass shooting leaves behind. 

Similarly with Elegy (2020), a film where I engage with movement and the body through choreography, there was this question: how do we reach one another when these acts of violence that we experience are beyond language? From there it was a natural arc to The Violence We Have Witnessed Carries a Weight on Our Hearts, an 18-channel sound installation that I presented for the first time at the Jewish Museum in Berlin in 2021. In this work I examine the continuities of racist and antisemitic violence over the last 40 years in Germany, through the voices and the language of people affected by that violence: survivors, families of victims, initiatives who are continuously fighting against that violence. I’m not saying that all these experiences are the same, that these people are the same. But through finding a common ground, especially through art and sound, we can explore the possibility of imagining an alternative to that violence and a better future – together. 

AvM The paintings that are being displayed in Hamburg incorporate data points from the open source datasets on mass shootings in the United States made available through the Gun Violence Archive. In your previous works the medium of sound offered you ways to deal with the questions of how one can speak about violence. What new possibilities does painting open up for you to address these questions?

TF I come from a background in painting and with everything I approach, even sound, it is still coming from that place. At the same time while there is no sound in my new paintings, there is still a presence of sound for me, in the silence. As someone who grew up in Colorado, in the shadow of so many devastating shootings, and also being a survivor of the shooting in Halle myself, there is a lot of weight that is carried. On an individual level, but also on a societal level and on the level of a country. How do we feel that weight, when there are four or five shootings every day? How do we even speak about those numbers?

On the one hand, I value the work that the Gun Violence Archive is doing. We need to know these numbers. But then again, it is so hard to comprehend the hundreds of mass shootings that happen every year, which are only rising in number. The process of painting is so important for me in dealing with this topic. In particular because of the time that it takes for me to first paint and then remove each letter and number from these data tables, one at a time, from the blue paint. This symbol of the sky and the act of cutting and removing these data points from it seem to me a way of creating a space where I and we can sit and feel and have the time to really grieve. The brush strokes, the mixing of the colors, the removal of the letters individually from the aluminum plates is a way for me to provide that time. 

AvM The exhibition is an expansion of a work that you titled Grief is Data: Cut from Blue Sky. It refers to a passage in Obit (2020), a poem collection by Victoria Chang. She states "If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky [...] That is grief." Data in its etymological origin means "the givens". What does the title of your work imply?

TF At this point, due to the frequency of gun violence incidents there are per year, the grief around mass shootings has become a given. And our numbness towards them has also become a devastating given. I am trying to find a way to deal with that. In her series of poems, Victoria Chang reflects on the loss of her mother. This particular passage really struck me because of the visuality of it, this rectangle that is cut from a perfectly blue sky. It makes me think about those of us affected by gun violence put into data tables. And how data tables look like rectangles. The sky is a metaphor for so many things. Cutting something from it is devastating. It is a weight that we carry on our hearts. 

AvM What was your approach to the Gun Violence Archive and how did you choose the data for your paintings?

TF For this work in particular and this series in general, I focus specifically on mass shootings. According to the Gun Violence Archive, their definition of a mass shooting is when four or more people are killed or injured, excluding the perpetrators. It is very interesting to come across an archive like this because you have so many numbers and so many incidents and it is speaking about people but you don't have the people. You might have their names presented in the archives but nothing else. You have their status as killed, the coordinates of the location, the name of a school, a shop or a street corner. You have the number and the type of guns used. What you do not have is the space for grief. Yet, the grief is there. In approaching the data from the archive, I raise the question: how do we look at these numbers and still give room for that space to grieve and to feel beyond the coldness of that information and raw data?

AvM The author and computer programer Alexander Galloway writes: Information exists when worldly things are "put into form". When you try to find an aesthetic form for that data, is the reading of data changing? 

TF Yes, that is what I'm trying to do. I'm taking this data that is presented by the Gun Violence Archive and I keep it in its form. However, by presenting it in a poetic way I am placing that data with new information. Information that I hope can help us feel for one another again and respect those who are grieving and those that we have lost. 

AvM In order to mourn a loss, this loss needs a body or a ritual that establishes mourning. Does an artistic representation of these cold data points give loss a body, and with that room for grief?

TF I would say yes, absolutely. I also think a lot about different painters who created spaces of silence. One painter who comes to mind is Mark Rothko and his Chapel. It is a walk-in sculpture with 14 murals. I remember listening to an interview with someone who visited the Rothko Chapel for the first time. She was describing how the paintings made her feel and how the silence made her cry. How she was given this space to cry. This made me really think how powerful painting or art can be. Art can give this space for individuals and for communities to grieve and to feel something again in order to come together and fight for change. This is what I'm attempting. There is always the question, am I successful or not? I don't know. But I feel this urgency to try. If I can offer a space, even for one person to grieve, then that is enough. 

AvM In the context of art and memory, mourning or remembrance the term representation comes up a lot. What is representation for you in connection to your work?

TF Honestly, I would be very curious to hear what you think what representation is for me in my work!

AvM The way I understand it, art that is concerned with a past event and its associated memories can reflect on the dynamics of memory, mourning and remembrance through the use of material and technique. I can see that in your work. To critically reflect on the dynamics of individual and collective memories seems to be as important to me, in memory art, as the representation of a past that stakes a claim to remembrance.

TF I agree and I definitely have a lot of thoughts on that. First, I would say, remembrance is different for every person and it changes with time. Remembrance is not static and it is not linear. We often create monuments of remembrance, but they are not acts of remembrance. It's not enough to build a monument and walk away. It has to be active and it has to be collaborative. In this sense, too, I don't think it's enough to have a space for mourning. I’m thinking about the title of a book by Douglas Crimp called Mourning and Militancy. You need this space to grieve, of course, but you also need space to fight. It's not enough to feel something. We also have to move, we have to act on that feeling in order to enforce change. What I am trying to do in presenting these paintings and these voices is to say: it's time to listen. It's time to imagine an alternative to this violence. But it's going to take a lot of work and we need everyone to be involved in that work.

AvM There is a danger of repeating or reproducing a violence when representing it. What possibilities do we have in poetic or artistic approaches to violence to visualize it without repeating it?

TF A lot of it comes down to how we live in a perpetrator society. The shock generated in the media is more important than giving space to the people affected. Often we know the names of the perpetrators, but we don't know the names of the victims. It is about changing how we talk about violence, changing how we see violence. It's quite common in the United States that when there is a shooting, and if it gets to the news, you see the police cars, the yellow tape, and maybe some blood. Those images are so violent and numbing that you can't feel anything anymore when you see them because they're constant and they're continuous. Only recently have I noticed certain news pieces where they publish the names of victims and short stories about their lives. It's important to focus on the people behind the statistics. I feel, both professionally and personally, this tremendous responsibility in creating and offering an alternative to the images that we're so saturated by every day. Finding new ways of visualizing, of speaking, of acknowledging this violence in a way that not only gives us the space to feel and to grieve and to find strength, but also to act and to move forward and to find ways of coming together to end that violence. There are so many elements that need to be part of the visualization of violence that are not yet there. There is a lot of urgency and a lot of potential in creating these alternative narratives.