Editors’ Selects: June 2025

You enter the conceptual architecture of Chloë Bass's Twice Seen through a kind of foyer. On one side, there are low-hung mirrors that superimpose koans over your reflected image; on the other, sheaves of paper sourced from Bass's mother's practice printed with mysterious fragments of language. Like contemporary fossils, these latter excerpts document a missing piece of media, an archival home movie from the 1960s. The entire introductory section functions as a thesis: a text-based framework that guides you-viewer, participant-to look first at yourself, then outside. 

Films are tyrannical; they hold you captive and demand your attention. We turn to time (2024), the four-channel installation at the heart of Twice Seen, is not a film in that typical sense. It is a true video work: frictionless, hyper-contemporary shortform drift hybridized with more archaic content (the broader genus outlined in the print works). Bass's surround-sound chimera is at once eternal and instantaneous.

Great curation is a PSYOP: the ambient whirr that goes unnoticed, priming and sanding the ground of experience. Though the footage was produced in and by four separate multicultural and intergenerational households, Bass choreographs the individual segments to mirror one another: food, dogs staring at food, overlapping conversations. These are domestic gestures and rituals that anyone can understand; they are universally legible, deliberately shown rather than told. The nature of the work inverts the pale, koanic platform at its center into a family room, a space within the space, a conversation pit. The background hum of other people's lives makes talking easy. It renders you a part of something. 

Lorraine O'Grady's influence colors Bass's meticulous attention to the canon as archive: the positionality and construction of the historical record. Bass's mother is an immigrant; so is mine; so are most of the people whose homes and lives you come to know on-screen; so were this country's founders. This is readily available information, but it bears repeating. Information doesn't automatically exist in perpetuity, and neither do our lives, ideas, and memories, unless they're actively encoded. 

Regardless of your feelings on the aesthetics and politics of representation, America is a nation of immigrants. There will be resistance so long as that fact remains visible. Regimes that deny or destroy their own historical realities invariably set themselves on fire. But history is not guaranteed; it does not emerge fully formed. It must be preserved, observed, recorded, curated into durable forms and informatic repositories. It depends on the quotidian work of archives and collections and collective accountability. It depends on what you choose to look at and remember and protect, where you direct your attention. It depends on you.

- Matilda Lin Berke