Open Casket IX
2018 - Installation (Installation)
55.88 x 106.68 x 106.68 cm
Indira Allegra
Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief. The work is a memorial for people who have lost loved ones to police violence. It is part of Allegra’s Open Casket series, which is concerned with the need to recognize grieving as a collective responsibility, rather than an individual misfortune to be shouldered by one affected person or family. At the center of the installation lies 2,500 pounds of broken stones arranged on the floor in a circle—a shape that embraces the cyclical nature of grief. A woven grid of square videos is projected along the top third of the wall around the perimeter of the room; each video depicts an interview with a person who has lost a loved one to police violence, which Allegra collected over the course of several months from news archives online. Its pattern represents what weavers call a drawdown—a method for visualizing which threads are visible on the front or back of a textile—and is made from crepe, a fabric commonly used to line caskets. A viscerally haunting audio composition features a remix of groans, wails, desperate pleas, and heated admonitions drawn from the interviews. These primal sounds of grief ring out from beneath the piles of rocks in erratic intervals, perhaps speaking to grief’s tendency to surface as a series of fits and starts. Open Casket IX builds a memorial from the physical and digital wreckages left in sorrow’s wake. But instead of creating a place for visitors to leave flowers and take nothing, the work asks one to consider sharing in the mourning—an act described by the artist as an innovation in grieving. The mourners seen and heard in this work include: Darnelle Bell, best friend of Gerald Javon Hall (1987 – 2016) Diamond Reynolds, partner of Philandro Castille (1984 – 2016) Jasmin Lloyd, girlfriend of Frank Clark (1984 – 2016) Margaret Johnson, mother of Norman Gary (1987 – 2016) Monique Douglas, cousin of Jamal Rollins (1995 – 2016) Monique Morgan, mother of Carnell Snell (1997 – 2016) Karonisha Ramsey, mother of Kajuan Raye (1997 – 2016) Michelle Raye, aunt of Kajuan Raye (1997 – 2016)
Indira Allegra uses text and textile production—a combined material they designate as a “text/ile”—to embody unseen forces like memory, haunting, grief, and emotions born from trauma. Toni Morrison has written that “invisible things are not necessarily not-there,” and it is in this space of not-thereness that Allegra’s work resides. Their practice explores how the ancient technology of weaving can offer contemporary insights into human patterns. They define weaving as the crossing of any two forces held under tension, which acts as a generative creative material. Informed by months of research and making, their weavings, photographs, installations, performances, videos, and writing are often site-responsive, incorporating the tensions of the spaces, materials, and objects they encounter. For Allegra, each of these things is alive with memory and functions as a collaborator in the art-making process. The artist’s projects reveal and center the histories and experiences, often violent or traumatic, of people and places that have been rendered invisible. Allegra’s practice expresses that which haunts us as a society, both locally and globally: the history of gay-bashings in San Francisco, police violence, suicide, public lynchings, exile, and physical ailments and disability. But their work also seeks to recuperate grief as a collective act, a shift that might relieve some of the burden suffered by the bodies and materials that act as containers for these histories.
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