We shall not miss it considers the life and work of Shulamith Firestone, whose The Dialectic of Sex (1970) proffered revolutionary demands for gender abolition, artificial reproduction, child liberation, and “cybernetic communism.”

Exiled from the women’s liberation movement before the book was even published, Firestone’s only other published text, Airless Spaces (1998), fictionalizes her experiences living in and out of mental institutions in NewYork via involuntary hospitalizations.Through an immersive exhibition that culminates in a live performance, Ruhl’s six-week engagement at KAJE explores both the timely promise and problems with Firestone’s anarcho-communist manifesto, relating her own experiences of mental illness and hospitalization with Firestone’s extraordinary second book.

Once deemed the “demon text of radical feminism,” The Dialectic of Sex has been excoriated by feminists and anti-feminists alike, most notably by Angela Davis and Hortense Spillers for its lack of consideration of people of color, as well as her use of racist stereotypes when addressing the Black Liberation Movement. We shall not miss it uses the text as a means of reckoning with the noxious legacy of white supremacy in feminism, in this case within a Marxist feminist genealogy, wondering what kind of “undetonated energy from the past”—to borrow a term from Elizabeth Freeman—one might find in Firestone’s proposals for radical alternatives to familial and loving relations under capitalism.

In “The Vanishing Dialectic: Shulamith Firestone and the Future of the Feminist 1970s,” Kathi Weeks suggests that the artificial womb concept in Firestone’s earlier text acts like a novum—a scientifically plausible technological innovation that drives science fiction narratives and their corresponding cognitive estrangement. Ruhl’s installation environment evokes the basis of Firestone’s reproductive utopia with inflatable sculptures that serve both as projection screens and, in the context of performance, as noise-generating instruments.

On the evening of Thursday, March 27th, curator Rachel Vera Steinberg will lead a discussion titled Wild Archive: Firestone Cited, highlighting the speculative and science fiction elements in The Dialectic of Sex. Wild Archive will be a public reading and discussion, using the form of the citation to move through, around, and past the work and polarizing legacy of Shulamith Firestone. Looking at her seminal work The Dialectic of Sex through the lens of science and speculative fiction, this event will create a rhizomatic web of thought, commentary, and adjacency.

The exhibition ends with a performance on April 12th, where Ruhl will be joined by collaborators, Mel Elberg and Kite. The performance expands upon Ruhl’s piece “Triple Monolog” in performance ensemble Flowers in the Basement’s engagement at Participant Inc. in January 2024. Alternating different voices that channel 1970s Firestone, a contemporary essayist and stand-up comedian, Ruhl will perform the slippage between utopian longing and “cracking up.”

AMY RUHL is an interdisciplinary artist working across fields of performance, new media, moving image, installation, and experimental theater. Her practice spawns long-term projects that flesh out complex narrative and conceptual worlds, create embodied fictions, and continually branch off into correlative work and collaborations. In 2021, she organized the rotating feminist performance ensemble “Flowers in the Basement,” which has thus far included Kite, Alisha B. Wormsley, Mel Elberg, Frances Ines Rodriguez, and Tsedaye Makonnen. She has exhibited her visual art and films at galleries and venues such as Participant Inc, Lubov, Essex Flowers, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives (New York), Kansas City Art Institute Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice (KC, Missouri) Vitrine Gallery (London), Public Fiction (Los Angeles), and Pleasure Dome (Toronto, Ontario). Ruhl has performed at NYU Skirball Center, Roulette Intermedium and Irondale Theater (Brooklyn, NY), The Broad Museum and REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) and the Live Arts Biennial at Bard Fisher Center (Red Hook, NY).

KITE aka SUZANNE KITE, is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in Music Composition, an MFA from Bard College, and a PhD from Concordia University. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies which include nonhuman beings and the development of protocols and relations for stones, metals, and Artificial Intelligence, through art-making, research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Her artwork and performance have been featured at numerous venues, including the Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, PS122, Anthology Film Archives, Chronus Art Center, and Toronto Biennial of Art. Honors include the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, United States Artists Fellowship, and a Creative Time Award with Alisha B. Wormsley.

MEL ELBERG is a genderqueer poet and artist interested in speculative feminisms and the effect of writing on our experience of time. Inspired by constant, cathartic slippage between legible and abstract forms, Mel writes through an array of mediums including paint, video, found-sound, and in cross-disciplinary collaboration. They have been published by and/or performed for the Poetry Project (NY), The Brooklyn Rail, Bathhouse Journal, Crush Reading Series, Montez Press Radio, The Long Road Society, CANADA Gallery NY, U.S. Blues Gallery NY, and The Highline. Mel has staged poetry readings and workshops in airports, trains, gay nightclubs and psych wards, and is in a life-long artistic relationship with the dancer Blakeney Bullock.

RACHEL VERA STEINBERG is a curator based in New York City. Her work explores cultural mythmaking, science fiction, as well the development of technology from a historiographic perspective. Since the beginning of her career she has worked closely with artists to support experimental practices, focused time-based media. Through her work in New York nonprofit institutions, she is committed to examining the role of alternative art spaces and artistic agency. She is the Curator & Director of Exhibitions at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY, where she oversees the production of ambitiously-scaled exhibitions. Previously, she was the 2019-2020 fellow at the Curatorial & Research Residency Program at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Düsseldorf, Germany, the Director of SOHO20 Artists Inc (2015-2018), and the Assistant Director of NURTUREart Non-Profit Inc (2010-2015). She has curated exhibitions locally and internationally, and she has held teaching positions at FIT, The New School, and RISD. Exhibitions that she has curated have been written about in The New York Times, ArtReview, BOMB, e-flux Journal, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. She has a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College.

Special Thanks:

JAMIE FUNK: Latex inflatable fabrication

MATTHEW GRANDIN: Flower wall fabrication

MORGANA BIRCH: 3D video scenes (bathhouse and greenhouse)