On September 6, Remai Modern opens soliloquy for a horizon, a new exhibition and performance by artist taisha paggett.
paggett’s work addresses the formation of Black community, survival, and relations to land, revealing a network of historical ties that connect communities across Turtle Island (Canada and the US). Recent projects have engaged with Allensworth, the first town in California to be founded, financed, and governed by a Black community; Harlem, the centre of Black American political thought and artistic flourishing in New York; and Hogan’s Alley, a Black community in Vancouver displaced by the city in 1971. This exhibition makes a connection to the Shiloh People, a community who left Oklahoma and racist Jim Crow laws to forge Saskatchewan’s first Black settlement in 1910.
Developed in collaboration with meital yaniv and Christopher Kuhl, soliloquy for a horizon contemplates Black becoming across the prairies. Through a choreography of performance, video, and objects, the artist layers personal and historical references such as the 20th-century dancer and model Maudelle Bass Weston, burial sites and drowned archives to consider the possibilities of landing as resistance.
To get to know the artist before seeing the exhibition at Remai Modern, here are three key projects from paggett’s career.
counts orchestrate, a meadow (or weekly practices with breath)
“For “Made in L.A. 2018,” I expanded upon an ongoing piece with WXPT collaborator Meena Murugesan, called counts orchestrate, a meadow (or weekly practice with breath). Drawing on the notion of breathing as a fundamental activator of the body, the installation is filled with audio of breathing that i solicited from artists and friends. An ensemble of dancers generated and executed embodied practices, rituals and actions built from the installation’s sonic breathscapes. The dancers’ collective actions were documented in rehearsal spaces outside of the dance studio and materialized in the gallery through video. The installation is an activated meadow—a term the artist uses as a metaphor for how a portion of land, not unlike a dance studio, can be understood and imagined as political and a site of potential.”
- taisha paggett
Mountain, Fire, Holding Still.
From Yann Novak’s Vimeo page:
“Mountain, Fire, Holding Still. is a durational performance/installation by dance artist taisha paggett and sound artist Yann Novak created in collaboration with visual artist Gregory Barnett and movement artist Marbles Jumbo Radio. Presented in the Outer Peristyle of the Getty Villa, it is a meditation on death, labor and blackness in antiquity as it relates to the contemporary body, and a performance- as-vigil for past and future lives.
Filmed on location at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, California.”
evereachmore
From Clockshop’s Vimeo:
“taisha paggett’s work evereachmore is a choreographed action between the river and the railroad, built from the weekly practices of dance company WXPT. In the wake and continued unfolding of violent acts against bodies on the margins, this dance attempts to enact new economies of resistance and new sensations of time, space and togetherness.
WXPT is a temporary dance company founded by paggett to expand upon the language and methods of modern and contemporary dance practices, as well as to explore questions of queer desire, responsibility, migration and our capacity to stand inside of historical materials.”
About taisha paggett
Born and raised in Fresno, California, taisha paggett’s individual and collaborative works re-articulate and collide specific western choreographic practices with the politics of daily life. Recent works include the dance company project, WXPT (we are the paper, we are the trees) and the collaborative School for the Movement of the Technicolo(u)r People, both of which also draw upon inquiries inside of social practice; critical pedagogy; somatic and contemplative investigation; queer, feminist and Black studies; performance and visual art studies; as well as the political and philosophical meshes of personal history.
As a dancer, paggett has performed, toured with, and made significant creative contributions to many choreographers, artists, and performance projects. Her work has been presented at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), DiverseWorks (Houston), the Whitney Museum (New York), Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), Danspace at St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery (New York), Defibrillator (Chicago), Gallery TPW (Toronto), and the Audain Gallery (Vancouver), among other venues. paggett has received several awards and career support, including the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Merce Cunningham Award in 2019 and a 2024 Herb Alpert/MacDowell residency fellowship .
Learn more:
- Questions of Practice: Choreographer and Dancer taisha paggett on the Relationship Between Art and Politics
- Inverted Virtuosity and Radical Curiosity: A Conversation with taisha paggett