Cold Medium: A Funeral for Nancy Holt

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Date: November 23, 2014 01:00pm — December 04, 2014 06:00pm
Categories: Exhibitions & Presentations
Location: Incline Gallery, 766 Valencia, San Francisco, CA, United States
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Performance: Sunday November 23, 1pm

In The Project Room: November 19 – December 4

This extended photo and video project by Minoosh Zomorodinia explores Nancy Holt’s work Sun Tunnels in the Utah desert within an apocalyptic framework. Sun Tunnels, which was created in 1976, sits in the middle of the Great Basin Desert in Utah. Many cities near the work have now become ghost towns; most are slowly losing resources and infrastructure due to the California drought. This project uses water as a medium to explore the draining of one resource– water– against the enduring quality of Sun Tunnels. The photo and video raise questions about the management of land art: who is ultimately responsible for the work and the people who live near it? How has water become a site of social and economic inequality? And how can we find new ways to talk about land art in a moment when “land” is in a constant state of emergency?

To accompany the exhibition, Minoosh Zomorodinia will stage a performance inside The Project Room of Incline Gallery at 1pm on Sunday, November 23. Zomorodinia froze a sample of the Bay water near her apartment and will be installing it as a funerary site in the space. Resting on a wooden platform and covered with sand, the frozen slab will stand in as a grave, marking the displacement of water in California as a result of climate change. The ice will melt over the gallery floor, creating a small state of emergency for viewers to reckon with. The ice melting, which takes approximately three hours, creates different forms as though they are small creeks and tributaries.

-Minoosh Zomorodinia & consulting curator Katie Anania

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