Patty Chang and David Kelley @ArtCenter Exhibitions & LACMA

BANK is pleased to announce that Patty Chang and David Kelley's new installation, Our Abyssal Kin, will be presented at ArtCenter Exhibitions in Los Angeles, CA. On November 6 at 7:00 p.m., their live musical performance and monumental four-screen film installation, Stray Dog Hydrophobia, will take place outdoors at LACMA in Los Angeles, CA.

ABOUT THE ARTWORKS

Our Abyssal Kin

Our Abyssal Kin, a new installation by artists Patty Chang & David Kelley. Through video, sound, and sculpture, Chang and Kelley challenge the rigid distinction between humans and nature established by Western science. Instead, the exhibition insists on the inseparability of human and ecological systems. In a time in which environmental justice and climate issues have become increasingly urgent, Our Abyssal Kin situates deep-sea ecology within historical struggles for agency and liberation.

The artist’s four-channel video Hydrophobia (2024) comes to life in the exhibition space, where a sprawling wooden network of ladders and beams scaffolds an array of manufactured and found objects. Variously resembling a sunken wreck, a whale carcass, or the human nervous system, the installation embodies the intersecting human and more-than-human structures that make up a deep-sea ecosystem.

In 2023, Chang and Kelley travelled to Kingston, Jamaica to observe a meeting of the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the United Nations global body that regulates deep sea mining. As production of green and digital technologies expands, states and corporations look to new sources of necessary raw materials, such as the ocean floor. The video captured by the artists reveals how international economic procedures reduce the natural world to a mere financial element, ignoring the rich and complex life that the ocean supports. Chang and Kelley’s work situates the ISA’s recent activities within historical patterns of colonialism and extraction—in particular British Jamaica’s trade in sugar and enslaved bodies as well as contributions to early oceanography and natural science. Past and present collide in the exhibition: the exploitation of human labor, trafficked across the sea and turned into profit, backgrounds the ongoing extraction of seaborne material for forces of capital and power.

Our Abyssal Kin also confronts us with the limitations of conventional knowledge by positioning the ocean to be in kinship with humanity. While the ISA positions dredged manganese nodules as simply a raw source of transition minerals, these minerals accumulated over millions of years; a time scale vastly exceeding the functional lifespan of a human body or technological artifact. Throughout the installation, the artists intersperse alternative ways of perceiving and knowing. Rather than seeing the ocean as a resource to be consumed, the exhibition offers up the idea of the ocean as an ancestor or even nearer relation. Featured in the video work is a chant by native Hawai’ian elder Solomon Pili Kaho’Ohalahala (“Uncle Sol”) asserts an Indigenous relation to aquatic environments that situates humans within a horizontal and cross-species network of kin. The artists also present drummers from a historic Maroon community in Jamaica who similarly remind us of the possibility of resisting exploitation. Ultimately, Chang and Kelley relate this genealogy of struggle to the persistence and preciousness of natural life, singular from yet entangled with the tides of human history.

Stray Dog Hydrophobia

LACMA presents Stray Dog Hydrophobia, a multimedia film installation and live musical performance by interdisciplinary artists and researchers Patty Chang and David Kelley. Stray Dog Hydrophobia unfolds across four monumental screens in the Smidt Welcome Plaza, foregrounded by the museum’s new David Geffen Galleries. This ambitious presentation, developed and performed in collaboration with composer Yasna Yamaoka Vismale, will take place exclusively on Thursday, November 6 at 7pm.

The film addresses the urgent ecological and political threats that deep-sea mining poses for already-fragile ocean ecosystems. Filmed between Jamaica and the UK, Stray Dog Hydrophobia traces historic precedents for the contemporary crisis. The video reveals how early colonial scientific expeditions and natural history collections emerged from and facilitated the transatlantic slave trade, the consequences of which persist across time and space. These acts of cataloguing and classification, often fueled by imperial ambition, laid the groundwork for not only future forms of extraction and exploitation across the globe, but Western scientific disciplines themselves. Chang and Kelley’s narrative assumes documentary, poetic, and speculative forms to demonstrate the ways in which the natural and political worlds have always intersected, often with lasting environmental and human consequences.

Immersed in a plaza surrounded by four projections, audiences will experience a rare fusion of live music, narration, and film. A chorus of musicians and dramatic narrators brings these elements of the film to life, inviting us to collectively advocate for an embodied and sympathetic kinship with the earth and its inhabitants. The performance—featuring composer Yasna Yamaoka Vismale’s score of ethereal vocals, Afro-Jamaican drum rhythms, free jazz, West African influences, and Maroon music—enact resistance, hope, and kinship that shift our relation to the natural world and its inhabitants.