Tamara Khasanova

is a curator, researcher and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (ISP) for 2024-25. She holds an MA degree in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts. She has worked at such institutions as e-flux, White Columns, Queens Museum, TransitoryWhite, FOR-SITE Foundation, Art Matters Ukraine.

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1/ Parable of the Planes, Protocinema Emerging Curator Series at NADA Exhibition Space

2/ Saodat Ismailova: To Share a Dream with a River at the e-flux screening room.

3/ A Shapeshifter with a Heavenly Secret

Bix Archer, Noémie Jennifer Bonnet, Greg Brown, Takming ChuangMorgan KingShane SmithDenisse Griselda Reyes

White Columns Online

I

In 2014, upon awakening from the deepest sleep of my life, it seemed as if part of my memory was lost to time forever. Months or years later, I realized it wasn’t lost but transfigured into a new set of memories that hardly bore any resemblance to the past ones. As I slept, my memories rebelled and established their own governing body while already equally inhabiting mine; they desired to take up as much space as possible without negotiating the existence of the present. And occasionally, only if it served their own needs, they would also return to their abandoned, shapeless semblance of the past.

II

For the last few months, my mind has been preoccupied with the question of whether our memories have the capacity to shapeshift; whether memory can, in and of itself, be a catalyst for shapeshifting beyond the body and materiality assigned to it. Oftentimes we assume that shapeshifting as a process must take the form of bodily transformation. The being’s external constitution transfigures while its internal form remains unchanged. For centuries, human imagination has contemplated the nature and potential of shapeshifting through mythology, folklore, speculative fiction, and various forms of popular culture. Shapeshifting has become representative of the human desire to alter oneself in order to be something else, something that would help one acquire a more desirable form of existence in comparison to what one already is or has. On the other hand, stories like Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando exemplify involuntary change, forcing a character to grapple with and adapt to the obstacles that follow. In her work Ontology of the Accident, French philosopher Catherine Malabou muses that regardless of the extent of the metamorphoses at play, “it is only the external form of the being that changes, never its nature.” Malabou challenges the separation and differentiation between the physical and the psyche, noting that the transformations of the latter have been regarded considerably less in the philosophical, psychoanalytic and neurological fields.

III

In the same work, Malabou introduces us to the concept of destructive plasticity, a transformation arising out of darkness, which could offer a way to comprehend the psychological shifts that venture into our lives without warning. Such changes, often startling and unwelcome, result in a kind of “distancing of the individual who becomes a stranger to herself.” We try to look back and recognize ourselves in relation to what our memories turned into, but the channel between then and now is hardly mendable. Throughout our lives, our memories morph into something unrecognizable and unfamiliar. For all I know, even if memory is a single unit of remembering, perhaps once recalled it becomes less and less an attempt at reliving or recollecting but engenders a novel way of evolving, unfolding and becoming. Perhaps it is in the transfiguration of our memories that we become shapeshifted into a new existence, a new nature of sorts?

IV

A Shapeshifter with a Heavenly Secret, which borrows its title from Denisse Griselda Reyes’s video piece, is a selection of works from the Curated Artist Registry that offers to take you on a journey of shapeshifting, metamorphoses, alterations and changes to the passage(s) of time, memory, mind and the body. The exhibition’s poetics gesture toward different stages of one’s transformation as they move in dialogue with one another. To awaken from the deep dream with pieces such as Sleeper (2022) and Timekeepers (2022) by Noémie Jennifer Bonnet and dare to follow the whimsical dragon-like creature in Greg Brown’s painting Voyager (2021). To reckon with the ephemeral record of one’s household or a memory of a place with Bix Archer’s Shifting House (2021) and Takming Chuang’s Palace Palace (2021). To conceive of the undetectable or distorted in Being seen (without being seen) (2022) by Morgan King and Faun in Spring time (2021) by Shane Smith. To render one life into multitudes of moments with Denisse Griselda Reyes’s A Shapeshifter with a Heavenly Secret (2021). To confront the change when “you decide to leave the person you were.”


February 3 - March 18, 2023