how to peel an orange

My father used to cut oranges and gave me the wedges unpeeled, ready to eat. During that time, I was looking after him, and his care for me was limited to these oranges. Both of us sitting on the flowered sofa, the TV sound in the background, his worn-out slippers, we talked about something other than how long he would be around. Have you ever considered going to Japan? he asked me once. I learned to peel oranges by watching him, in a gesture of care and attention. This carcass peel doesn’t always represent conversation, but sometimes it’s instead silence and everything that this silence means. Language is more than the written and spoken word: it is a gesture, an accent, gaze, pace, and the lack of language. It is also silence, the loss of, lack of words, speechlessness, skin, texture, smell.

This show uses different tactics to explore the spaces in-between. Looking at everyday gestures and banal materials, this show thinks of a language that when spoken everyone understands—by the loss of language, the language of loss. Beyond what could be described
as presence and absence, “how to peel an orange” is an open and eerie process of what could happen in the space where it is not—where it misses. With an invisible thread, this works look provisional, but claims some kind of land in the instability, as if a boat was an island.

failed monument / 2023