We look at a woman sliced open a brilliant black porpoise baby on a screen recording of the Microsoft teams. The artist Patty Chang explains what we are witnessing in a voiceover: Aleksija Neimanis, a scientist, leads necropsies on these animals to determine the causes of death and help to prevent a new loss of species. Chang and the Astrida Neimanis writer are present in the virtual form of small video boxes on the screen – three mothers and a baby, notes the artist. The video installation “We are all mothers” (2022), which is part of the Chang exhibition Tactile At the bank, meditates on maternity and, more broadly, on empathy, connection and violence through space, species and time.
In the stomach of the porpoise baby, Aleksija finds breast milk. At this stage of the play, Chang plays extracts from his video series Milk debt (2018-2021), in which mothers tell their secret fears while pumping breast milk. His title comes from the idea of Chinese Buddhism that children owe the payment of their mother in the afterlife to feed them at a young age. A twisted version of this idea resurfaces in “We are all mothers” when we learn that a porpoise gets rid of toxins by transmitting them to her baby via breast milk, that Chang compares to generational trauma. But it is also an interspecific trauma, by bike from “the assembly of the human machine to the navigable track, to the ocean and atmospheric, plankton, whale, breastfeeding”, as she says, citing Astridida Body of water: posthumanian feminist phenomenology (2017).
During the discovery by Aleksija of breast milk in the baby's stomach, a horrible possibility occurs to change: and if the porpoise had not breastfed before being caught in the net, but after, his mother offering her milk to calm him again one last time? It is a deeply discontinuous proposition, the kind of thought that we immediately reject. Chang gets closer to the place. She thinks aloud of her own son, Leroy, and what she would do if a similar tragedy caught her – he is crushed by concrete, or cut in half by a metal blade, or pinned by a car, but always alive.
It is a clear act of empathy to make the jump of a porpoise to his own child. But this is made special, and perhaps deeper, because of all mediation factors. Chang is around the world, looking at this procedure from a perched laptop. She poses this distance via proxies, asking Aleksija to put his hand on the porpoise and take a moment with him before eliminating his remains. There is a distance even in this gesture – latex glove, plastic bag – but, as she says: “At the time of touch, he enters me. In these archives, his body becomes mine. ”
Chang reaches us the same way in time and space via proxies. At the beginning of the video, we see Chang hand turning a grid of photographs of four x six inch (~ 10 x 15 cm) of Aleksija touching these porpoises. Visitors to the banking exhibition are invited to touch a version of these photographs, to make them fall from the image so that everything we can see is the white back (“memory game”, 2022). This act takes another connotation when we remember that a large part of this video was made at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, while proximity could mean death. Arranged in a grid on a table, the photographs almost look like zoom video boxes; Return one, therefore, has the impression of closing in the world.
These meditations on the connection between people, time and species – and what we owe each other – take an additional charge compared to Chang works in view simultaneously in Monstrous beauty: a feminist revision of Chinoiserie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the video “Melons (at a loss)” (1998), she delivers an impassive monologue on the imaginary death of an aunt as she contrasts, spoon and eats a melon housed in her bra, symbolically cannibalizes the invigorating source in her female Asian body. “Abyssal” (2025), ordered for the exhibition, is a porcelain massage table riddled with holes, a reference to the six women killed in the Tirgus on the Atlanta spa in 2021 – A crime of hatred reflecting the rise of anti-Asian violence at the height of the pandemic. After the exhibition, it will be sunk into the Pacific Ocean to serve as a deposit for the cultivation of the coral, a form of burial and perhaps the Renaissance. Again, Chang makes the connections largely abstract in the cycles of violence and empathy between people, and between humans and the natural world.
Patty Chang: Touch Archive Continue to Bank (127 Elizabeth Street, Nolita, Manhattan) until April 26. The exhibition was organized by the gallery. Patty Chang's works are visual to Monstrous beauty: a feminist revision of Chinoiserie At the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) until August 17.
