Imaginary Explosions
(Episodic)

A cosmology that draws upon geology to investigate how deep time and interspecies communication might assist us in radical planetary transformation. Comprised of video, sculpture and communication instruments, Imaginary Explosions explores what other presents and futures become possible once we begin to think beyond the framework of the human. The pseudo-science fictions work across episodic videos, sculptures, costumes and drawings that forge into affective geologies and the idea of becoming mineral.

Solo exhibition at Art in General
September 4 - November 14, 2019

70. Berlinale Forum Expanded Exhibition, Berlin

Reviewed in Artforum

Produced with the support of Centre for Geohumanities Royal Holloway University, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Henry Art Gallery, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Imaginary Explosions
(Episodic)

The videos follow an affiliation of transfeminist scientists operating in communication with the desires of the mineral earth to simultaneously erupt all volcanoes. As they traverse geological sites across place and time, they attempt to divest technoscientific instruments of their military and corporate power, in order to re-embody them towards alternative cosmologies. Co-conspiring with the videos’ characters—who are artists and scholars whose real-life work pushes the very limits of science and culture. Imaginary Explosions points towards mutual alliance, climate reparation and cosmology creation. (Ongoing)

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Imaginary Explosions

Imaginary Explosions is an artist book of images, poetry, and topographical delineations. Its pages explore geological ruptures, the immense scale and deep time of sexual violence, and the ways traumas reverberate through bodies across multiple generations of relationships and families. It is an experiment in sequential, narrative poetry. Sparse, material language combines with synthetic landscapes based on the computational radar topography of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. Berrigan takes on the book as a time-based medium, creating a walk through the landscape of the volcano across the pages. It draws from storytelling and geological time and space through episodes of volcanology. Can we begin to grasp the scope and scales of both geological change and the deep time of patriarchy, by becoming mineral ourselves?

March 2018, Broken Dimanche Press
Available also via Printed Matter // Small Press Distribution // Vise Versa Books

Imaginary Explosions

A series of 14 editioned pigment prints from Imaginary Explosions.

Editions of 3 + 1 AP (2018)
24 x 17 in /61 x 43 cm

Imaginary Explosions

Charcoal & ink silkscreen on black cotton rag paper, diptych edition.

Edition of 30 + 3 AP (2016)
Each 16 x 26 in /41 x 66 cm
Produced with a Wassaic Project Editions Fellowship

Unfinished State

Unfinished State starts from a novel with holes bored through its plot. Narratives of city-branding and surges of global capital have caused waves of speculative real estate development in Berlin and Beirut, two cities that were spatially divided by conflict and have been under reconstruction for decades.

This book of images and conversations stray from these narratives into a shadow landscape of unfinished and vacant structures that remain suspended in a state of incompletion—fixed on the brink of a possible future.

Read more on Art21 Magazine

Forthcoming Archive Books with support from the Graham Foundation, Humboldt Foundation, and NYU Humanities

Vacant Address

This essay video moves between an unfinished hotel perched on the ledge of the Mediterranean in Lebanon, and empty condominiums in Berlin that are still seeking affluent occupants years after completion. Textures of the architecture itself are deployed as a spatial evocation of financial power and imagination. Space becomes an empty vessel for capital— but holds as well a desire for possible futures. (2016)

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Lessons in Capitalism

Lessons in Capitalism uses the realm of play to question the language and structures of finance. Without expecting young people to provide answers to our most pressing economic problems, Lessons in Capitalism taps into the imaginative capacity of children to encounter with fresh eyes how we learn about money.

Free financial advice. Creative Time ‘Living as Form,’ Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts. Working with Harvard Business School students, facilitators, children and the public. (2014)

Spectrum of Inevitable Violence

An installation and public performance invited participants to survey and analyze their class background in four categories: Socioeconomic Status, Cultural Capital, Class Status, and Social Mobility.

The resulting scores were mapped onto four quadrants that served as territory to defend in a dynamic confrontation—with food as ammunition. This public battle invited open dialogue about subjects we mostly keep to ourselves: how class and social mobility permeate our culture, interpersonal relationships and careers.

deCordova Museum & Cyclorama, Boston. (2012)

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Class Anxieties

A series of personal narratives from multiple people reveal moments of uncanny tension related to issues of social class. Two-channel installation loops. (2012)

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Victory Gardening

A site-specific commission created for Governors Island, a former military fortress that has changed hands among nations over the centuries. I circled the perimeter of the island for 3 days endlessly declaring ‘Victory’ in an evaporating medium. (2011)

Marshmallow Crash

4-min looping video. A character violently confronts an oversized marshmallow amidst an idyllic pastoral landscape. The light, fluffy buoyancy promised by the giant marshmallow is never quite delivered as the character repeatedly impacts the marshmallow and is left marked, exhausted and unfulfilled. (2008)

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Marshmallow Suicide

12-min video. A desperately nostalgic character slowly gluttonizes a giant marshmallow while repeating the chorus of Don McLean’s “Bye Bye, Miss American Pie.” The cathartic repetition impels the figure to float away on the lake atop the marshmallow, and subsequently drown herself in an act of despair. (2008)

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Transfers

30-min looping video. Two people transfer one full pitcher of milk through the interface of their mouths, to fill an empty pitcher. The action repeats when the first pitcher is emptied and the other is full. A simple choreography evokes tender embraces and the nurture of milk. Yet the transfer of fluids from mouth to mouth and back again adds a layer of repugnance, gently pushing the boundaries of bodily permeability. (2009)

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Traces

A renewable sculpture of the artist’s own disembodied kidney, cast in the frozen spit of gallery attendants. Every two hours a new frozen organ is put on display, only to melt and drip away. The artist traced the topography of her internal organ from a 3D MRI in order to materialize its form outside of her body. (2009)

Hepatophagy

A multiple commissioned by the Whitney Museum & offered to the public for free. The Delftware-style coupe plate depicts a portrait of the artist engaging in self-cannibalism. A small chocolate truffle, cast from a 3D MRI of the artist’s liver, can be eaten. The work refers to the depictions of Brazilian Tupi rituals of cannibalism, sensationalized by Hans Staden, a 16th c. Dutch explorer. It also makes homage to the 20th century Brazilian concept of antropofagia in which colonialism and Western hegemony are devoured, digested and excreted into new forms of art and abjection. (2008)

Viral Confections

A model of the hepatitis C viral protein structure was 3D printed printed from a cryo-electron micrograph. The form of the virus was then cast into an edible form. Desire is mixed with repulsion. The chocolates served in exchange for dialogue, acting as agents of information rather than infection. (2006)