HAND TO MOUTH:DE-SUICIDE
PS122 GALLERY NYC
October 21–November 21, 2021

PS122 Gallery presents DE-SUICIDE, a new multichannel video installation and sculptural environment by Hand to Mouth, a dance company of sentient and inanimate collaborators founded by visual artist Deville Cohen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Integrating Cohen’s studio and performance practices through a process of collaboration (remotely and in-person), the video and objects in the installation are the result of a yearlong process of workshops with other artists and institutions, including dancers Laura K. Nicoll (NY), Margaux Marielle-Trehoüart (Berlin), Tushrik Fredericks (Johannesburg/NY), and Effie Bowen (NY); guest dramaturgs Patricia Hernandez (NY) and Bronwyn Lace (Johannesburg/Vienna); musician JD Samson (NY); and partnerships with Summer Guthery of JOAN Los Angeles and Ian Cofre of PS122 Gallery.

Working interdisciplinarily between sculpture, moving images, and dance, the company is an attempt to find a more egalitarian system for balancing the hierarchy between humans and nonhumans. Physical objects, materials, and gadgets are not just instruments or props but equal partners, inanimate collaborators forming a coalition with human performers and encountering the risks, damages, and potentials of their environment. To DE-SUICIDE is to become WITH rather than to follow our settler-colonial histories and claim ownership of resources, people, and land. Being WITH, rather than owning and dominating, is to follow the sculptural sensibility of crafting materials into objects. Whether in the studio, backstage, or in a dance video, bodies and objects hybridize in the act of cohabiting the scene.

The symbolic meaning of the phrase “hand to mouth” and its reflection on materialistic hardship sheds light on the distance between one’s mouth and hand, establishing limits of perspective. Anything beyond these physical and metaphorical ranges is considered unrealistic or fantastical. When accessibility becomes the measure of availability, Hand to Mouth asks: how does this rehearsed, limited engagement with a world of deficiency and self-deprivation restrict our non-materialistic experiences? Can we meditate on our artistic responsibilities and possibilities outside of the pre-existing disciplines, formats, and structures of distribution and consumption of materials and resources? Can our aspirations, motivations, desires, and hopes transcend what is physically and spiritually available to us?