Exhibition Opening: Inheriting the Void

Please join us for Inheriting the Void, a performance-installation and video essay.

Come witness a speculative interaction between a bear and a ventriloquist that asks: On whose behalf do we speak? What is the relationship between memory and knowledge? And who or what speaks through our actions?

Loosely based on my experience caring for my mother during her rapid onset of dementia, as well as larger themes of the climate crisis and mental health, Inheriting the Void invites audiences to scan a QR code and listen on their phones (with headphones) to an audiovisual story while standing at the base of Tumamoc Hill.

The video essay is approximately 15 minutes. Arrive any time between 7:30–8:15pm. Please bring a charged smartphone and headphones to access the video essay.

Created by artist and educator Geneva Foster Gluck.

As a place-based art/research project, Inheriting the Void explores the connections between mental health and contemporaneous events of the climate crisis, the rapid rise of energy and water-hungry AI data centers in the American West, and global violence.

The project draws from the writing of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable to consider the intersection of supremacist and colonial perceptions of the environment and aggressive extraction in the borderlands; Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, in which Hao writes that the delusion of AI as a tool for humanity “simply equates to educated people becoming ventriloquists for chatbots”.These texts, alongside the use of bear dolls in dementia treatment—as memory tools and comforting childhood symbols—form a kind of constellation of the inverted logics that seem to drive these times of dementia, derangement, and delusion.

This work was made possible by a MOCA Tucson Night Bloom Award and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. More information can be found at www.genevafostergluck.com