Beneath Tongues / Real Madrid: Bloodsuckers / Megan Marrin: 340 E. 9th Street

Beneath Tongues
Curated by Sable Elyse Smith
SI Architecture and Design Series: 6th Edition
Including works by With Cudelice Brazelton IV, Abigail DeVille, Nikita Gale, Lauren Halsey, E. Jane, Steffani Jemison, Jennie C. Jones, Freddie June, Christine Sun Kim, Carolyn Lazard, Lydia Ourahmane, Sondra Perry, Patricia Satterwhite, Jessica Vaughn, Carrie Mae Weems

“Language is a circular shape around us,” writes New York–based artist and educator Sable Elyse Smith. “It has legs and sounds and blows and silence. Do you know this? It is a brick pulling out another brick and toppling down on top of itself only to be built back up again. Do you know this?”[1] Such propositions form the premise of Beneath Tongues, an exhibition curated by Smith that brings together 15 artists, seven writers and an ensemble of musicians to reveal the elemental role of language, sound and noisemaking in establishing new realities within an antagonistic present.

Words are worlds for Smith, whose own artwork integrates language mined from personal experience and culled from currents of culture. The use and understanding of sounds, noise and words is both self-determined and subject to systemic conditioning, thus creating tension between agency over language and surrender to it. In Beneath Tongues, Smith joins together her peers, collaborators and forebearers in chorus to explore the potential of these ambiguities to make and unmake knowledge. By forging such links, Smith suggests that verbal and sonic expressions may constitute their own immaterial architectures: scaffolding on which to build or frameworks to demolish. The exhibition is conceived in three parts consisting of an installation of artworks, a publication of new writing and a musical score.

[1] Sable Elyse Smith, FEAR TOUCH POLICE landing page, published October 2020.

Beneath Tongues is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. SI gratefully acknowledges additional support from Carlos/Ishikawa and the SI Architecture & Design Council.

Real Madrid: Bloodsuckers
Bloodsuckers is a restless nocturne by collective Real Madrid. The exhibition, their first in the United States, showcases a new body of work that expands on the tribulations of dealing with bed bugs. Founded in Geneva in 2015, Real Madrid stages exhibitions in which hand-crafted objects mingle with readymade commercial products to foreground intimate experiences within larger social networks. The collective, whose appropriated name is a knock-off of the ubiquitous Spanish soccer franchise, works through the ways in which sexuality, illness, fears and attachments are perceived and narrated across time by dominant culture, prompting opportunities for refreshed understandings and camaraderie. Bloodsuckers builds upon the artists’ sustained engagement with the uneasy processes of navigating disease, stigma and shame by shifting from considerations of interpersonal transmission to something more parasitic.

Bloodsuckers is made possible in part through the support of the Fonds Cantonal d’Art Contemporain, Genève and Martina Simeti. 

SI ONSITE—Megan Marrin: 340 E. 9th Street
Swiss Institute is honored to present 340 E. 9th Street by East Village-based artist Megan Marrin, the first in a series of mural commissions on the uptown-facing exterior of SI’s neighboring building at 128 2nd Avenue. 340 E. 9th Street is a painting of a photograph that accompanies an article published in the April 29, 1968 issue of New York Magazine about the spread of public art across New York City. In the image, the building located at the titular address is shown in profile, adorned on its windowless side with a mural by pop-surrealist Allan D’Arcangelo (1930–1998).

SI ONSITE is made possible in part through a leadership gift from Nicoletta Fiorucci and support from SI ONSITE Partner Swiss Re. 

Beneath Tongues, Real Madrid: Bloodsuckers and Megan Marrin: 340 E. 9th Street are organized by Daniel Merritt, Curator and Head of Residencies.