

In the text-based silkscreen works that decorate the scaffold, monochrome both obscures and makes meaning. In fact, monochrome - a staple of Pendleton’s oeuvre - structures the entire installation. Installation shots of Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen? (photos by the author for Hyperallergic) Lee Monument” diminishes its contemporaneity, inaugurating a blur between the two historical moments that Pendleton takes as his point of departure. Though grayscale is endemic to the footage in “Film Notes on Resurrection City ,” the lack of color in “Film Notes on the Robert E. Gaps between space and time that supposedly separate the two films are collapsed by their visual congruency: both films are shot in black and white, suggesting the nostalgia of an earlier time. The camera transitions seamlessly from archival footage of Resurrection city to contemporary footage of the Robert E. As they slip and slide together, the films reveal an honest picture of history and struggle that is jumbled and impure rather than neat or easy to follow. But rather than viewing this lack of firm distinction between the two films as a curatorial or artistic failure, I approached it as a generative osmosis. In fact, after going into the exhibition relatively unaware, it wasn’t until a close look at the museum’s wall text that I realized that I had been watching two distinct films. Meanwhile, “Film Notes on Resurrection City” (2021) turns to another site of protest, the titular Resurrection City, a grassroots tent city and anti-poverty demonstration erected at DC’s National Mall in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King.īut on the screen at MoMA, these two moments in history glide together into one picture of the longue durée of struggle.
#QUERN MOMA ARCHIVE#
Lee Monument Richmond, VA (figure)” (2021) studies one of today’s most recognizable icons of Confederate violence, which 2020 Black Lives Matter protests transformed into a visual archive of dissent. The installation’s thesis pivots on a collision between two sites of protest and resistance. Cast in a crisp, theatrical white light, Pendleton’s installation transforms the atrium into a stage for riotous unfolding of a total work of art a tempestuous assemblage of film, sculpture, and sound that immerses visitors in the unstable throes of protest and struggle. A third film, “So We Moved: A Portrait of Jack Halberstam” (2021), intermittently intervenes in the narrative, screening daily at 12:30 and 4:30pm. Lee Monument Richmond, VA (figure)” (2021) and “Film Notes on Resurrection City” (2021). The centerpiece of the installation is a dialogue between two films: “Notes on the Robert E.


Covering the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) central atrium, the installation’s towering presence is buttressed by a five-story black scaffold, a skeleton-like container that enshrines a bricolage of two-dimensional works on silkscreen as well as wooden sculptural works. Adam Pendleton’s Who Is Queen? bristles with colossal unrest.
