From Fotofest:

"FotoFest announces the upcoming exhibition In Place of an Index a group exhibition featuring 12 artists native to or currently living and working in Texas, produced and presented in conjunction with the 2021 Texas Biennial exhibition, A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon. The exhibition is a curatorial collaboration between Max Fields and Texas Biennial curators Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza.

In Place of an Index addresses historical narratives from a position of potentiality, rather than construct or add to a timeline, archive, or index of history and experience. Featured artists situate personal and political narratives outside of fixed contexts, and their work suggests that historical narratives are fluid, and can be revisited, rewritten, and reimagined. Featured artists’ respective practices address historical documentation and narrativization from the perspective of what Ariella Azoulay calls potential history, “[the] effort to make history impossible and to engage with the world from a non-progressive approach, to engage with the outcome of imperial violence as if it is taking place here and now.”[1] The exhibition title, In Place of an Index, refers to Azoulay’s notion of potentiality, suggesting an alternative to an index of time, space, and experience that exists in opposition to a dominant ideology and forms of hegemonic narrativization. Through various photographic means, each of the featured artists use or make references to archives or archival images and histories, and in doing so invite or create new meaning, potentiality, and relations to contemporary media and culture.

Concerned with language, history, and representation, Houston native Regina Agu’s featured work questions forms of technological translation and representation through the manipulation of images and their readings by algorithms designed to describe representative images. Fort Worth native and Brooklyn-based artist Travis Boyer explores the material and cultural legacy of slain Tejano megastar Selena Quintanilla-Pérez through the display of images and Boyer’s archive of garments from Selena, Etc., the late star’s South Texas fashion boutique. Houston’s Tay Butler will present sculptural work which combines photographic and collaged references to Black culture, advertisements, and pop culture archives. Dallas-based artist Ja’Tovia Gary’s experimental film THE GIVERNY SUITE (2019) combines celluloid animations, drone and archival footage, filmed interviews with Black women, and images of the artist exploring Monet’s famous garden to frame and ask the question: "Do you feel safe in your body?" Ryan Hawk’s interdisciplinary practice imagines and realizes unexpected forms of embodiment, and his recent works explore the rhetorical semantics in meme and tattoo culture to imagine alternative contexts and corporealities.

Houston native and New York-based artist Autumn Knight, whose performance-based practice often centers her body and questions of agency, operates as both director and subject in her recent photographic work which explores the role of the archival image. The featured work of Dallas-born interdisciplinary artist Baseera Khan centers images of their native Texas family and the stored belongings of a deported family friend and scholar, examining the scale and meaning of what we leave behind. Artist and educator Annette Lawrence will present a site-specific installation of billboard-scale photographic images of journals culled from her personal archives, creating a new physical environment from which to examine our relationship to the printed image. Adam Marnie and Aura Rosenberg and artist Kara Springer each examine the routine of marking time from the perspective of the personal narrative: revealing the fragmentary nature of historical time through meditations on fluid forms of recollection such as memory and personal experience. Pearland-based Salvadoran-American artist Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez combines photography, site-specific installation, and text to explore notions of memory, filtered history, and fantasy. Together, these artists refuse the notion of a dead past; they insist that the past is present and evolving. Featured artists highlight the ways historical potentiality requires reimagining the past as an ever-evolving subjective document that relies on the agency of the recorded subjects.

In Place of an Index features several new artworks and commissioned projects by select artists, including new works by Regina Agu, Travis Boyer, Baseera Khan, Autumn Knight and commissioned projects by Tay Butler, Ryan Hawk, Adam Marnie and Aura Rosenberg. Artists Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez and Annette Lawrence will each produce adaptations of their works as site-specific installations at FotoFest. The exhibition also marks the Texas premiere of Ja’Tovia Gary’s experimental film installation, THE GIVERNY SUITE (2019).

In Place of an Index is co-curated by Max Fields, Ryan N. Dennis and Evan Garza. The exhibition is the eighth and latest in a series of FotoFest exhibitions focused on Texas artists and photographers. "

Exhibition hours are Wednesday–Saturday | 11AM-5PM