Patty Chang: Touch Archive
New York–BANK NYC is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Patty Chang to inaugurate its New York pilot program. Opening concurrently with Chang’s newest commission by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition includes a selection of Chang’s more recent works, exemplifying her multidisciplinary practice across video, photography, and installation.
The exhibition centers on Chang’s video essay, We Are All Mothers (2022), comprising her reflections on Learning Endings, a larger collaborative research project between Chang, veterinary pathologist Aleksija Neimanis, and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis. The project layers scientific, artistic, and theoretical perspectives to investigate communal mourning, the passage of intergenerational trauma, and approaches to multispecies care and repair.
We Are All Mothers emerged from pandemic-era virtual meetings where the three researchers conducted and observed harbor porpoise necropsies—dissections performed to determine the animals’ cause of death. Aleksija’s reports on porpoise deaths caused by bycatch, environmental pollutants, or disease form a database to prevent further species loss. As a collective, the researchers asked Aleksija to perform a ritual of touch before the necropsies, placing a comforting hand on the animal and incorporating afterlife care into her scientific protocol. Chang considers the intimacy of this gesture, positing the possibility of a “touch archive” in the body, created by memories of touch from body to body—or, in this case, from gloved hand to animal skin.
Images of the scientist’s hand holding the heads, flippers, and remains of the porpoises compose a visual touch archive, an empathetic companion to the veterinary necropsy database. The images from the touch archive are reproduced in the gallery as photographic snapshots, laid out for visitors to flip over and interact with. The installation borrows the mechanics of a memory game, requiring a physical engagement with the cards and recollection of the images when hidden from sight. The exercise reproduces the rituals of the touch archive, which in turn prods the audience to form new networks of touch memories.
Alongside this tactile intimacy, We Are All Mothers meditates profoundly on fear, an emotion Chang often revisits throughout her practice. She expands on these troubling thoughts in an earlier work, Things I’m Scared of Right Now (2018), which features a list of fears prompted by her experience of heatwaves and wildfires in Los Angeles. From “public speaking” to “Leroy’s future death” to “Fire, dying in a fire,” the work cultivates an empathetic space to document and purge human, motherly, and environmental anxieties, even foreshadowing the artist’s displacement due to the 2025 Eaton Fire.
Patty Chang’s works divulge these fearful possibilities, from the paralyzing concerns that emerge from one’s transition into motherhood to the global ecological crisis and our human impact. Yet, her work also calls for new activations from unease, exploring new modes of environmental conservation, an expansive understanding of motherhood and care for other beings, and a consideration for those often unseen.
Acknowledgments
Learning Endings is supported by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Hong Kong.
*The images (photographs, film) in Learning Endings were taken in the context of a national disease surveillance program in which found dead animals are examined to determine cause of death and to contribute to the health of living populations. The views expressed in this artwork do not necessarily express the views of the SVA.
About the Collaborators
ALEKSIJA NEIMANIS
Aleksija Neimanis is a veterinary pathologist and researcher who works with wildlife health and disease surveillance at the National Veterinary Institute (SVA), Sweden. She frames wildlife health findings within a One Health context, in which human, animal, and ecosystem health are all connected, to help inform policy.
ASTRIDA NEIMANIS
Astrida Neimanis is a feminist cultural theorist. Her research focuses on human-water relationships and climate catastrophe as a symptom of corrupted social and cultural relations. She is currently an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan, on the unceded lands of the Syilx Okanagan people. Her most recent book is titled Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017).
