Light Shows
By Benjamin Krusling, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste & Asiya Wadud
The following video was originally screened on May 24, 2021, as part of Light Shows, a virtual reading organized with Wendy’s Subway. Light Shows features a reading by Benjamin Krusling and contributions from S*an D. Henry Smith, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptise, and Asiya Wadud.
Triple Canopy and Wendy’s Subway present a reading by Benjamin Krusling on the occasion of the publication of his debut book of poems, Glaring, and his digital series of poems, “i have too much to hide.” Jibade-Khalil Huffman, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, and Asiya Wadud will contribute audio and video, and Krusling will read from both projects and present new work.
Glaring, published by Wendy’s Subway, is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-Blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.
In “i have too much to hide,” published as a part of Triple Canopy’s twenty-sixth issue, Two Ears One Mouth, online streaming becomes a form of semantic delivery. In poems that are interwoven with unsolicited messages, as well as screenshots that track the speaker’s browsing history, Krusling explores how experience and phenomena are dominated by anti-Black imperial power. He attempts to trouble the anxious, polluted streams of corporate digital space, in which algorithms deliver content based on our prior activity, shaping how we experience ourselves and associate with others.
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This public program is made possible through generous support from Jane Hait, a founding member of Triple Canopy Director’s Circle; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Jacques Louis Vidal Charitable Fund; the Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts; and the Opaline Fund of the Jewish Community Endowment Federation and Endowment Fund.
- Benjamin Krusling is a writer and artist working in language, sound, and video, and the author of a book of poetry called Glaring (Wendy’s Subway, 2020).
- S*an D. Henry-Smith is an artist and writer working primarily in poetry, photography, and performance, engaging Black experimentalisms and collaborative practices. They have received awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project, Poets House, Antenna/Paper Machine, and have read, performed, and exhibited at Basilica Soundscape, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and elsewhere. S*an’s words and photographs have appeared in Aperture PhotoBook Review, Apogee Journal, FACT, FLASH ART, Canadian Art, the New York Times, them, Triple Canopy, and across several book projects. They are the author of two chapbooks, Body Text and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System; as mouthfeel, they coauthored Consider the Tongue alongside Imani Elizabeth Jackson, which explores histories of aquatic labor and Black food through cooking, poetry, and ephemeral practices. Wild Peach is S*an’s first full-length collection.
- Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer whose video and photo works use found, archival material and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. Lyrical strophes of text and densely-composed imagery produce objects of perpetual flux, indexed by accumulating layers which challenge normative symbolic and semiotic hierarchies. Through projection and repetition, Huffman’s work evokes the untranslatable, ruminating on the liminal qualities of singular experiences through narrative and graphic rhythms.
- Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste is a New York-based artist, composer, and performer. His work considers errant relations that thrive across subjectivities. He has recently had solo exhibitions at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and Berlin Atonal (Berlin). He is represented by Martos Gallery (New York City). He has presented visual and performance work at MoMA PS1 (New York City); Performance Space New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Kitchen (New York City); Issue Project Room (New York City); the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Toussaint-Baptiste is a founding member of the performance collective Wildcat!. He has been an artist in residence at Issue Project Room, the Bemis Center, the Jerome Foundation Airspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center, and the Rauschenberg Foundation, and has been named a Camargo Foundation Core Program Fellow and received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design.
- Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf (written with Okwui Okpokwasili), Syncope, and No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Her work has been supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Mount Tremper Arts, the New York Public Library, and others. Recent work appears in e-flux journal, Social Text journal, BOMB Magazine, and Makhzin. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School, Columbia University, and at Pacific Northwest College of Art.