CULTURE WEAPON
aegor ray
Deán Santo
Ava Tuitt
Curated by Sati Varghese Mac
Presented by Yearly Emerging Practices
Presented by Yearly Emerging Practices
Click here access the audio recording format
Realmwalker/Nightcrawler
14x17in Oil Pastel on Bristol
2023
Image audio description:
Accessibility to this online exhibition has been developed prioritizing blind and low vision communities. Audio descriptions of exhibited artworks are below each image, and a full audio recording format of the exhibition is available here.
Audio reading of this section:
The trans body is the weapon that will end modernity.
Our edges have been sharpened by the abrasion of hypervisibility, and trans people somehow have earned a place in everyone’s cultural calculations. Representation has transformed us into tools and implements to be used by a culture that is split all the way down to the root of being.
Where do we enter as the blade, dividing culture? As trans people of color, we make contact with culture in the time and space of the postcolony. As described by scholar Achille Mbembe, the postcolony refers to "societies recently emerging from the experience of colonisation” on the trajectory of violence essential to maintaining colonial relations. The creation of the colony has relied on collapsing myth, culture, and science to forge belief in a difference between humans and nature. The violence of maintaining this belief began by categorically determining that some people would not be considered human. In this way, culture was crafted as a weapon to enable the maximum violence of genocide and enslavement against Black and indigenous societies.
Trans bodies, especially in the arena of culture today, represent a failure at the gates between the colony and nature, and this is precisely why trans bodies are made into hypervisible fantasies and monsters. We are witnessing what happens when nature reaches the white body. White trans bodies have escalated the cisgender fear of contamination. Ideologically linked to miscegenation fears, the postcolony is contending with the trans body as a penetration into its now precarious purity. But how we got here is equally important. As Hortense Spillers and scholars of Afropessimism have observed, Black people being dehumanized by colonial power were subjected to a simultaneous process of ungendering. Sadiya Hartman reminds that human is not a category that can be “re-enchanted.” As a consequence of this disenchantment, Black and brown trans people existing in culture have been bound to an image of their inhumanity that is maintained by violence.
This exhibition is born, first, out of self-inquiry into my own relationship as a brown trans woman, to culture, to time, to living in “America,” to survival, to sovereignty, to power, to my peers, to isolation, to land, to philosophy, to art, to transition, to folklore, to curatorial practice, and to reality. To be a brown trans person today is to exist before culture, in the sense that we are connected to the source of a central transformation in culture, while it is still negotiating its internal relationship to us. While this text has focused on setting the scene for this exhibition’s approach to culture, the exhibited artworks give life to the embodied side of Black, brown, and indigenous trans existence.
What do trans embodiment, colonial anxiety, and mythic redemption really have to do with our relationship to nature? This exhibition text asks the question through research-based diary entries and close readings of the artists’ practices.
– Sati Varghese Mac
Installation view from exhibition Puppies Puppies at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, 2022
Atabey (Water) Note: Save Caguana Ceremonial Ball Courts Site
14x14x22in Etched stone 2022
Image audio description:
The Red Hand Over The Mouth (Right And Left Hand) • An Indigenous Sign Of Protest • This Piece Is Dedicated To My Chosen Indigenous Sister Alethia Rael • Cielo Oscuro’s Hands Were Outlined For This Work • The Selling Of This Work Will Benefit My Indigenous Sisters • Installed At The Height Of Her Mouth
8x7in Neon Hands (pair) 2022
Audio reading of this section:
A weapon is equally an object of reality and speculation.
Weapons can create threats and forge security. Weapons wielded can take away futures and create new ones. The debate around whose and which futures has often been staged in the arena of culture.
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies) is very aware of the ‘arena’ as a place where the cultural clash surrounding trans bodies takes up more space than trans people could ever fill. The clash is obsessively inflated by every one of us, we are spectators that fantasize for and fear the trans body. The trans body is a symbol and a spectacle that reflects and threatens to anyone watching that they are inseparable from nature. The trans body is unpredictable, and represents attunement to desire and self-knowledge that challenges the foundations of cultural norms.
The artworks from Jade exhibited here were created for her 2022 namesake installation, a tribute to her father’s lineage. Part of her incantation of a wall text detailed this connection, disconnection, and reconnection:
Jade commits to visibility in her artwork as a way to challenge perceptions, and reflect them back through the art world’s arena. She views the violent threats she received after her 2024 installation at the Venice Biennale as a calculated risk in comparison to the everyday violence and policing that Black, brown, and indigenous trans people experience in public and personal space. Jade’s sculptures and performances routinely invoke her silent, naked body, standing in the gallery space or outdoor space, in a still and neutral pose. While she works with the material of her body, a perhaps more consequential material she works with is others’ perception, and the cultural projections of defiance, sensationalism, objectification, denial, or whatever else viewers attach to her body in performance– she’s simply standing there.
Puppies Puppies
Documentation of performance
15 second single channel video
2022
Audio description:
15 second single channel video
2022
Audio description:
Pandemonium (What N*ggas found in the woods, What witches found in the fire)Digital illustration
2025
Audio reading of this section:
“TRANS PEOPLE ARE THE LAND RETURNING”
Nature is where we turn when we want to look beneath culture, to look for something somehow more innate, unadulterated. However, this turn has also been used to justify assumptions about how our bodies are meant to exist in the cultural realm. As scholar Lorraine Daston describes in her essay “Against Nature,” this use of nature as a reinforcement of assumptions sets up a “naturalistic fallacy,” which she describes as a “covert smuggling operation in which cultural values are transferred onto nature, and nature’s authority is then called upon to buttress those very same values.”
Ava Tuitt
Trans People Heal the Land
18x24in Oil and acrylic on canvas
2020
Image audio description:
Trans People Heal the Land
18x24in Oil and acrylic on canvas
2020
Image audio description:
Transphobia’s pinnacle argument is that trans people are unnatural expressions of some innate human understanding, however this is also transphobia’s biggest projection. It is a threat that points at the social production of trans life, and justifies calls for our annihilation because we are less natural than the existing social production of cisgender culture (but also in a sense, too natural). Neither of these cultural identities originate in nature; this is the nature of culture as a product of relationships, rather than biology.
Ecology has recently re-emerged as a field for people to examine and classify the holistic systems that connect culture, behaviour, and nature. Ecologists engage with the intention of understanding the interdependent relationships that nature is made of, and how these relationships shape our understanding of our own place in this ecosystem. Trans ecology has surged in popularity as an examination of ecosystems through a lens of gender variance and that sees transformation as the condition of possibility. This discipline romanticizes the idea that trans people are elementally connected to transformation and nature— that there is a universal way that trans people relate to nature and transition outside of race. These artists show that existence in the postcolony’s nature, and after the racialization of our bodies, defines our relationship to nature. Indigenous knowledge systems have held these connections for much longer than the western ecological field has existed. Mycelial networks as metaphors cannot properly historicize our bodies nor the land.
We may not need additional myths to explain our existence, especially not born out of ideological ‘discovery’ as a rearticulation of indigenous knowledge systems. And trans people may not be exceptionally connected to nature. It is more accurate to say that we confront cultural assumptions, and live as visible reminders of the variance that everyone carries as a gift from nature.
Morfeo e Iris24x28 Oil and acrylic on linen
2024
aegor ray: TRANS PEOPLE
Listen to the audio reading:
aegor ray
Reading of TRANS PEOPLE
5:09 minute adapted screenplay excerpt
2025
Click here to access a transcript of this reading
Audio reading of this section:
Before there were cis people, there were trans people.
Literally, the term ‘cis’ or ‘cisgender’ was brought into regular use by trans people in 2008, a term that was coined in 1994 by a biologist. As scholar Kadji Amin writes, today the term’s connotation has been shaped by early efforts from trans scholars to name “the unseen privilege and power of a set of common assumptions: that gender was visible and obvious, that sex was immutable and that gender was a natural, biological expression of sex.” In other words, cisgender as a category was given its name by trans scholars who were pointing out the power and the lack of violence that cisgender people experience through their identity. Cisgender identifying people reap the labor of trans people to name, create, and affirm their gender identity.
When I was getting to know aegor ray more deeply through supporting his theater work Dakshina, from which the above reading TRANS PEOPLE emerged as an excerpt, he was immersed in a worship of failure. Not the austere and poetic “queer art of failure,” but the messy and shamed failure of being what authority disapproves of, and loving every moment of it. Rejecting familial and societal expectations with grit and conviction. The ‘it was never a phase’ kind of stable rebellion. It’s an attitude that profoundly states that all of the teachings of virtue have brought us to a fucked up world, and being a failure is an exit hatch that allows one to see clearly.
In TRANS PEOPLE, aegor points out the contradictions in a romanticized narrative of redemption, and how it relies on a fantasy of labor that trans people contributed to societies of the mythic past to prove that we are worthy of basic respect. To aegor, trans people can also be new, and there can be time after trans people. Maybe someday we’ll all be swallowed up into some other totality and our own differences will become less and less significant.
Deán Santo
What radiates through our ribs (sun cemi)
20x24in Color film print
2024
Image audio description:
Deán Santo
Whispers emerging
11x14in Digital photograph
2024
Image audio description:
Audio reading of this section:
I’ve always known Deán Santo to move in spirals. Circles that are imperfectly circular but perfectly encompassing, adapting, and uncontrollable. His practice emerges from restoring an intuitive compulsion towards the land, initiated by his decision to be the first from his family to move from New York City back to Borikén (Puerto Rico). Our long facetimes over the years turned into a sibling bond through our shared inquiry as brown trans people seeking to understand our place in the world.
Visiting Deán early in his return to the island, I noticed his disciplined wandering as a search for attunement to the land in transition. The artworks exhibited here are a byproduct of this practice, building everyday relationships as a spiritual source which he honors through rituals of learning and creating. With care not to make these rituals into a spectacle, his sculptures create language that can express humility, devotion, and grief. In Deán’s words from our conversations about these artworks:
This is one way that the land can offer anybody a source of empathy and understanding. Our relationship with land will never escape our history and the deep wounds that humans inflict, however through Deán’s recovery of this relationship, paired with detailed repair, he shows us possibilities for return. For Deán living in occupied Borikén, truth is in change, death, birth, and flow, it is in the rocks carved by his mothers ancestors. Everything else is a temporary myth.
As scholar of Native philosophy Brian Burkhart recounts, locality as a practice reminds us that all knowledge comes from the land, all language comes from the land, all change comes from the land. Deán asserts that there is no distinction between the everyday and the holy, that our holiness does not require that we be exceptionally connected, all it asks is that we pay attention. And in our immersion, and as the days pass, the mundane becomes magical; a model for life that becomes charged through relationship.
una cama para la gallina negra (tormenta)
24x24in digital print, wood, cement, centipede, metal chain, reef rock, broken lock, drone, chicken feather, rubber snake, found toy car, broken tiles, ceramic hand
2025
Detail view: una cama para la gallina negra (tormenta)
2025
Image audio description:
Installation view:
I walked until the ground became alive again
16x20in Color film, wood, cement, rosaries, painted horseshoe crab shell
2023
Él Llorón
16x20in Color film, horseshoe crab mask, yucca, coconut, algae, wood, cement
2023
Detail view: Él Llorón
2023
Deán Santo
Three peaks as eyes, three eyes as passages (cemi)
40x44in Color film, wood, bamboo, cement, coconut/coconut branch, cemi carved bracelet, toy car, toy airplane, birds nest, rusted fence tops, conch shells from guanica, found monkey keychain, honey
2024
Image audio description:
Deán Santo
A feather as a sword
14x18 Digital image, iguana claw digital image, snail shells, crab shells, conch shells, pufferfish spikes, sand dollars, reef rock, rusted fence top, beaded bracelet, chicken feather, candles, figs, cement, wood, bronze paint, jagua fruit ink
2025
Image audio description:
Image audio description:
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, widely known by the moniker Puppies Puppies, expands ideas around the readymade by imbuing ubiquitous and everyday objects, signifiers, and actions with a personal and political charge. She has, for example, reconfigured antibacterial gel dispensers, toilet bowl liquid, the color green, as well as the acts of sleeping, peeing, and taking a pill in installations and performances that challenge ableist frameworks of artistic and capitalist production. Many of Puppies Puppies’s exhibitions have also included actionable components: a GoFundMe campaign to support a friend’s transition fund, free HIVtesting and counseling, and a working shower available for use by the public. Kuriki-Olivo thus asserts that life can be viewed as its own form of endurance practice, especially for those whose very survival is at stake, including trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people of color.
Image audio description:
Ava Tuitt, born and raised in New York City, is a visual artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate from Purchase College with her B.F.A in Painting + Drawing her work focuses on visual meditations on the body as it relates to the metaphysical, physical,social and technological. Through her art, she skillfully weaves together diverse elements, both material and digital to create thought-provoking narratives that challenge societal patterns and ignite conversations. Her practice is a rumination on the human machine, using the material and digital mediums of paint, pixels, clay and photography she weaves together diverse narrative images that investigate the human structures of race, gender, religion and sexuality.
Image audio description:
aegor ray is a writer, freak, and organizer for the decriminalization of sex work in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was a 2018 Loft Literary Center Mentor Series Fellow in poetry, a 2021 and 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop participant, and a 2022 Lambda Literary Scholar. aegor has received generous support from granters like the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Waterers, and the Jerome Foundation, and residency opportunities from Tofte Lake Center and the Anderson Center at Tower View. aegor was an arts writing fellow for MNArtists.com, a platform of the Walker Arts Museum, and wrote, co-directed, and performed in DAKSHINA, a multimedia performance, for Red Eye Theater’s New Works 4 Weeks Festival in June 2025. His writing interests span queer and trans desire and terror, empire and its long-arching shadows, and the experiences of consuming and being consumed. aegor is writing his first novel. He is a Sagittarius.
Image audio description:
Deán Santo is a photo based, multidisciplinary artist. He utilizes photography to gravitate with tangible memories of the land his family derives from. The results are images that harness a disappearing landscape which remains alive- history, ancestry, altars and still lifes that are awake. The intuitive aspect is referential directly to a deeply personal connection to passed down spiritual knowledge of his elders from the island, Puerto Rico. Each object breathes and cycles through notions of time, falling together like a system’s collapse. A new haven is built through found life and materials. Upon inspection and study, each detail narrates a space that invites the body; Boricua, trans, queer, neuroexpansive, and diasporic, to enter. He upheaves his grief and desires simultaneously; in forms of renewal, honoring, and fabricating structures that are embedded with broken parts.The summary of his prayers are told as skin, bones, petals, scales, and the inner workings of his embodied transition.
Deán received his BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018. He is Nuyorican born in Flushing, Queens, NY and based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He has been published in The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Aperture Magazine, Nueva Luz, and shown at Hidrante, El Museo del Barrio, and The Museum of New York.
Sati left the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in Sculpture and has worked with organizations such as Intermedia Arts, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and Public Functionary where she served as a curator from 2023-2025. Her sculpture and film work has been shown at the RISD Museum (Providence, RI), MoMa PS1 (Queens, NY), and 100% Silk Gallery (Toronto, ON).
Culture Weapon is part of Yearly Emerging Practice’s ReFrame series of ECI Fellows’ presentations, made possible in part by the voters of Minnesota through grants from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council and Minnesota State Arts Board thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
ECI Mentors:
Barak adé Soleil
Taylor Jasper
Erin Robideaux Gleeson
Consultants:
Barak adé Soleil
Practice of accesss and exhibition design
Donna Ray
User experience for blind and low vision community
Studio Arisaema
Audio production
Amalia Tenuta
Voice of image descriptions