Features Published 14 November 2024

Feature: A Conversation with the Curators of UNDOXX at JACK

Loren Noveck interviews zavé martohardjono, Maya Simone Z., and Jamie Chan, the curators of UNDOXX.

Loren Noveck
Collective Reading and Conversation with sister sylvester. Photo: Cinthia Chen

Collective Reading and Conversation with sister sylvester. Photo: Cinthia Chen

On November 6, 2024, the day after the U.S. presidential election, the UNDOXX festival opened at the Brooklyn independent theater JACK. The festival’s curators, zavé martohardjono, Maya Simone Z., and Jamie Chan—three queer diasporic Black or Asian artists—were spurred by “an impulse to take action” beginning in October 2023, as artists and cultural workers, predominantly those identifying as BIPOC, began to see their work decommissioned and defunded. The overall mission of the series is twofold: to create space to present the work of artists directly affected by censorship, and to provide a space for artists, audience, activists, and community members to talk about “the shifting landscape of censorship in the arts in the U.S.” The present festival focuses on the work of Palestinian and Palestinian-supporting artists, but as anyone who reads the news knows, the topic of censorship is popping up all over in our current climate, from book bans to plays and musicals being banned in schools to the recent shutdown of the East Village’s Connelly Theater as the Catholic Church instituted new content guidelines. Loren Noveck interviewed UNDOXX’s curators on November 9. (The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)

Loren Noveck: I confess that this interview is looking a little different than the one I planned before the festival kicked off on Wednesday [November 6, the day after Election Day]. Before we get into the new questions that I now have, let’s do a round of introductions: introduce yourselves, talk a little bit about how you came to this work and how you came to do this project together.

zavé martohardjono: My name is zavé, my pronouns are they/them. I’m an artist. I’m also an organizer, and this work of organizing actually started a little before October 7, [2023], when this newest wave of genocide of Palestinans began. I was working with Maya Simone Z on a project called three finger salute. I’m of Indonesian descent and one of my great-aunts is Burmese, and she passed away in the spring of 2021, as the Myanmar Spring uprisings were happening. And I was thinking about her life, and, over the course of her lifetime, Myanmar’s political history. I made a dance piece, a trio that took nonverbal gesture from different protest movements. So my collaborators and I researched the umbrella movement in Hong Kong, the white paper protests in China, and the three-finger salute gesture in Myanmar. I was thinking about nonverbal resilience and ways that activist movements are dealing with censorship in very heavily militarized conditions. And thinking in the U.S. about how diasporic folks, Asian folks, can learn from movements from around the globe, because in Hong Kong, a lot of the umbrella movement protests [were] sparked off, inspired by, the resilience of Black Lives Matter in the U.S.

I was thinking, as a dance artist, how can we use these gestures and think about these resilient technologies of movement in a time where we’re seeing surveillance amp up in ways that we may not have imagined would happen in the U.S. That performance happened in July 2023 and then in the fall of 2023, I was teaching at Cooper Union, teaching at the New School, and my colleagues were getting fired for pro-Palestinian solidarity. We saw at the 92nd Street Y, that that first event was canceled [ed note: the author was Viet Thanh Nguyen], and then writers [Writers Against the War on Gaza] started organizing together and I was watching Hyperallergic report on all of this censorship. That’s when I approached Maya Simone, my creative producer for many years. I was like, I think we should do something around producing and presenting artists who are being censored and making space for artists to come together to talk about this emergent situation.

Maya Simone Z: I’m Maya Simone, they/them pronouns, and I’m an artist and freelancer/producer, multihyphenate, like I think all of us are. I worked as a dancer for the first few years I was in New York City and I sort of metamorphed into doing more work as a producer and on both sides of the production or creative process, which is what led me to working with zavé. zavé was talking about this festival when it was still a seed that they wanted to grow somehow. It was a response to things that they were already thinking about that we’ve been working on together and I think it’s also very much in connection with cycles that have been happening since I was a kid, really. I can pinpoint specific moments that are flashpoints of public response to protest movements abroad or here, these cycles that I think are coming to the fore again right now—after October 7 of last year—with Black men being murdered and then this large public response and then institutions respond with a statement or a black box on their Instagram and then artists are sort of left to make sense of what is being said by institutions that don’t actually follow through on these big statements they’re making. So the series was exciting to be part of from the very beginning, but then bringing the proposal on a cold call to JACK and then sort of seeing if this seed would grow into anything and it really, really has.

Jamie Chan: Hi, I’m Jamie, my pronouns are she and they, and I am new friends with zavé and Maya Simone. I met zavé at an Asianish event, an affinity group [for contemporary Asian artists] in [February 2024]. I’m a painter, and I have yet to find many spaces in the art world where I feel like I can be in solidarity with community. I also am a member of an artist-run gallery called Essex Flowers, in Chinatown in Manhattan. I also have a little bit of a background with community organizing in Chinatown, specifically around getting Christopher Marte elected in Council District One and fighting the towers that were being planned on the waterfront. When [zavé and I] met, I was like, what are you working on? And they shared [the] idea for the series, that it was going to be a performance series, centering Palestinian performing artists. And I just said, well, that sounds awesome.

My family is from Hong Kong. I have family still there, and we haven’t spoken that much, actually, about the protests and what’s going on there. But that is something I really want to connect to. It’s complicated for me and my family in terms of how people speak about this, or don’t. My parents came to the States in the ‘70s as college students and I was taught to assimilate. That has mapped out a lot of my ways of relating to the world. So I’m in a process of unlearning that and I think I’m here doing theory and practice together.

LN: Are there participants or projects in the festival that you want to highlight specifically, either the ones that have already happened or stuff that’s coming up over the next couple of weeks that you want to shout out?

zm: We are going to present Mette Loulou von Kohl and Nora Alami in a double bill from November 15 to 17, including a talkback on November 15 with the artists. Amazing, queer Arab artists, really fantastic work. We also have three events in the last week with Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre. Samaa Wakim is coming from Palestine, and Samar Haddad King, the artistic director of Yaa Samar!, will also be there on November 22 for the screening of 3 x 13 and Losing It, and we’ll have a conversation with them [after the films]. They also will have two dance workshops, including a community dabke workshop [taught by another Palestinian company member, Barges] that is open to the community. Bringing folks into Palestinian dance as kind of a cultural exchange feels like a really exciting offering.

MSZ: That one is free, or donation based. We had two community donation-based events. Last night was the first of those with NCAC and the dabke workshop feels like a nice almost bookending in a way, the first and the last week of the festival, we have our free events.

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee's art installation FIREWALL Internet Cafe

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee’s art installation FIREWALL Internet Cafe

zm: Another thing to mention is that Joyce Yu-Jean Lee’s installation Firewall Internet Cafe is up [throughout the festival], and on November 17 from 5 to 7, there’s going to be a reception, so folks can meet Joyce and experience the work. There will be gallery hours in advance of the reception.

JC: Brooklyn Public Library and Joyce ended up collaborating in a really beautiful way in the lobby. JACK often has Brooklyn Public Library installations in the window, but for the festival, we connected them with Joyce and they have been having an ongoing conversation about authors who are political prisoners and this is giving Joyce fodder for her piece, which is about looking at censorship across the Chinese Google—which is called Baidu—and Google, and doing a comparison [of levels of censorship]. So that has been really generative, and the library also dropped off little zines that they made.

Brooklyn Public Library's display at UNDOXXED. Photo: Cinthia Chen

Brooklyn Public Library’s display at UNDOXXED. Photo: Cinthia Chen

LN: This all has come together quite quickly, which I imagine is partly due to the way that JACK works. In terms of putting together a slate of projects, it seems like it’s a pretty capacious festival to pull together in about ten weeks. Could you talk a little bit about how the curation process worked, how you came to put the artists on this program together on this accelerated timeline?

zm: I was [tracking reports of censorship on] Hyperallergic, and I started writing down names of artists who were getting their shows taken down, decommissioned. I was also [seeing] on Instagram Black artists—including Anaïs Duplan, who we reached out to, but couldn’t be part of the festival—responding as they were getting their works taken out of exhibits. An was taken out of an exhibit in Germany. I think people my age are kind of like, whoa, what is going on, right? The list is growing, and honestly, I think that we could curate hundreds of artists based on how many people are being decommissioned or defunded.

Also, my friend Loulou [Mette Loulou von Kohl], who has a show November 15, 16, and 17, has expressed to me what censorship looks like from the perspective of Palestinian artists. Her work, which is super powerful and really unique, so queer and radical and revolutionary—there’s [censorship] when a show gets taken down, but there’s [also] knowing that you’re not going to get support and opportunities.] There’s an unspoken understanding. And this relates to something that Elizabeth Larison [from the National Coalition Against Censorship] was talking about last night [at the festival’s Teach-In on Censorship in the Arts in the United States]: censorship is defined as when there is a commitment made [to present a work] and then a change is made from the institution, which is different from curating.

[Note: After this interview was conducted, Kohl provided the additional context that Palestinian artists are underrepresented and often lack institutional support because Zionist funding shapes what gets produced and what work gets attention.]

We know that we’re not going to get funding for this, so we shopped it around to a couple of different places, [trusted] artist-run spaces. And then we came to JACK with the proposal and Skye Kowaleski [JACK’s interim director] was so wholeheartedly like, yes, let’s make this happen. We were like, we want to try one event or two events and see how it goes, and Skye was like, I would like to see three weeks of committed artists. So we scrambled and pulled together a proposal [of artists in our communities].

UNDOXX’s intervention into censorship is that not only are we presenting these artists, we want to make space for learning. The teach-in that we had last night with NCAC was the big offering for the community, and we recorded that. So we want to share it by video link to anybody who might need it.

MSZ: I think what was exciting about the process was that it very much felt like a response was unfolding anew, but it was not necessarily a new phenomenon. Censorship is not a new thing that artists have had to deal with, but I think that [there’s a new] understanding of what censorship is and how it functions and even just asking, am I giving some level of self-censorship in the wake of what’s going on in the world right now? These are questions that are being asked in, I think, more public ways and this festival is offering space for us to have those intentional conversations.

Last night, the talk with Elizabeth Larison ended in a great conversation with institutions in the room, people who are in leadership positions in institutions, and artists who are organizing. We had a group, Dancers for Palestine, who have been organizing for much of the past year and supporting the dance community to galvanize around understanding what boycotting is and how to navigate the existing landscape of institutions and other artists, and making sure that we’re actually talking to each other. They had so much perspective that they were offering. The intention is not to have an artist disseminate information and everyone goes home. The intention is to have dialogue that goes more than just two ways. It sort of became a round table; folks were offering their perspective after a question was asked to Elizabeth that she couldn’t actually answer. But there was so much knowledge in the room among the artists.

Elizabeth Larison at the NCAC Teach-in on Censorship in the Arts in the U.S. Photo: Cinthia Chen

Elizabeth Larison at the NCAC Teach-in on Censorship in the Arts in the U.S. Photo: Cinthia Chen

That was the intention with the initial proposal to JACK, offering a range of possibilities for how we might engage each other over performance, through teach-ins. The collective reading with Sister Sylvester on our first night was a really generative space to start having these conversations about the relationships between artists and institutions. We were already expanding our understanding of what censorship even is, but also how we might engage with it through different perspectives, with different amounts of power and influence within the same container. I’m feeling very grateful that we asked people to be a part of this, and they said yes. And that they’re showing up with all the resources that we knew that they had, but also drawing people’s attention so that they can also offer their resources and their understandings. Those are people we couldn’t have programmed. That’s just what it means to have community members gathered in the same space.

zm: We also knew that in inviting somebody to this, we had to be sensitive to what they may or may not want to disclose. So from the beginning to the end of this process, we’ve been asking for consent in very explicit ways. We said to every artist, do you want to be part of this and do you want to remain anonymous in any way in the publicity? Do you want to talk to press? Do you want us to list you on the events or do you want us to not list you on the events but have your works shown? We’ve been in a very careful process, understanding that there’s a lot of risk for artists who are already experiencing censorship and we don’t want to exacerbate that. It’s such a different way of curating.

JC: Yeah, that’s something I was going to underline, about how we set up so many supportive emails and conversations and questions; we sent out many forms asking for input, just to make sure that the work was going to be presented in a way that they felt good about and that that we were inviting people into the room that they wanted to be in the room. I feel like that’s allowing us to be in the space together and have difficult conversations and talk about this stuff.

LN: So, the elephant of the week question is, does the election immediately change the climate, the tenor, or the focus of what you’re doing? I mean, you planned this in the [current] administration, where all of these dynamics existed. Is it just the same amount of bad in this very particular sphere of discussion?

zm: The piece that I did in 2023, three finger salute, prompted thinking about how artists in the U.S., especially artists of color who grew up here, were born in North America, are assimilated—some of us don’t even know about the dictatorships that our grandparents lived through or that our parents came to Canada and the U.S. trying to escape—how does this generation connect with present-day iterations of these anti-dictatorship movements in other parts of the globe? It’s a very personal question for me. I think that we have to talk about censorship. We also have to talk about fascism and authoritarianism and dictatorship. And I know those are very big words for Americans because we have a long history of denying our role in setting up authoritarian governments in other countries, including in Indonesia, which is where my family is from. I’m seeing language about imperialism coming out of an American awakening around Palestinian genocide. We need to understand how authoritarianism is structured and how it takes root, and the elections in 2016 and in 2024 are tangible signals that authoritarianism is happening in the U.S.

Last night we were talking not only about federal policy, but also about NYSCA contracts and about institutional bindings that artists have to navigate to figure out how to hold on to our politics and also our lived experiences and the work that we’re trying to do. I’m glad that [UNDOXX] is happening right now because we can come together in a room and talk about how are we going to prepare for the next couple of years.

MSZ: I think about the different concentric circles of thought around all this. It’s all so connected, but you can think about this from a much smaller [perspective], like me and my partner talking about this in our living room. Fun fact, my partner and I got together the year that Trump got elected—the first date we went on was the day he got elected. So eight years later, he’s getting elected for a second time and we just had our anniversary dinner, this week. And it was us just sitting and being like, Here we go again. The position I’m in now as a person and as a practicing artist versus where I was eight years ago—a lot of the same realities were unfolding, but they didn’t feel the same. I feel more grounded. I’m more capable of sitting with the same hard information, and it feels more intense in that there’s larger collective attention to what’s surely to come. I think that’s what feels different.

That’s why it felt charged when we were in the room together on the sixth, the day after, on our first event. I was very grateful for that. I was very much like, we don’t know how people are going to show up, we don’t know if people will just come and cry, we don’t know if people will come and be ready to have any kind of conversation. We don’t know if the artists will come and feel differently about how we structure the evening. We have no idea what will happen. We also talked about the possibility of there being enough unrest for us to adjust the structure of the event altogether, preparing to be virtual.

We need to be capable of evolving with this ever-changing but ever-present reality of Trump, who represents things that existed before Trump and also represents things that we will continue to deal with after he’s gone, you know? It’s assessing how we can organize ourselves for the coming four years, but we also needed a lot of these tools under Democratic leadership. So how are we going to be considerate of the fact that the undergirding, the underbelly of this beast is kind of the same in the sense that we’re going to be dealing with the same problems, regardless of who is in office? Having these conversations really earnestly together right after Trump got reelected, when folks’ emotions are heightened, we can have very clear conversations naming things for what they are. It felt extremely grounding and I think that people would not feel the same level of urgency [if the election outcome had been different]. I think that it would have landed very differently. I don’t know if it would have been as impactful. I just think that there is so much more attention in a way that’s unique to this moment. So my hope is that we can be super honest about that, even if it is quite painful.

JC: The emotions that were shared in the room—some people were like, I’m just dissociated and doing everything I can to keep moving forward. And that felt to me very comforting to hear. Being able to name it and be together, in that space, was amazing, and then also, last night, there was palpable fear in the room when it came to talking about the NYSCA funding and that “Zionist” became a category that you cannot in your applications use that word or be critical of a protected class.

MSZ: This actually was something put into effect in 2016, under Cuomo. But it’s getting attention now. We ended up having a conversation about it and some of the folks in the room—not Elizabeth, who was like, I would like to research this further, I don’t have a lot of information—were able to cross dialogue with one another , about the fact that this is scary, but it’s also something that people have actually coexisted with for some time. It’s just coming back to light.

This applies to NYSCA, but I think it’s basically New York government funding. There’s a clause that you can be denied funding or funding can be taken away from you if it’s determined that the work is anti-Zionist and that Zionism is now a protected class. It is basically lumped as part of diversity, but essentially it’s saying that your funding can be rescinded, or future opportunities to apply for the same funding you may have gotten for years might no longer be available to you, if you violate this portion of the agreement that is supposed to be about diversity of all protected classes, including but not limited to minorities, and Zionism is one of those categories.

zm: This is not being enforced necessarily, but one of the big takeaways from our teach-in last night is to look at your contracts and understand the terms. Elizabeth works with institutions and artists and curators to negotiate these terms, but not all of us know walking into a contract that anything can be negotiated or that NCAC exists to help you with that kind of advocacy. I really appreciated that she gave positive examples where she has worked with institutions and curators and veered them away from censorship. And that is a possibility. This is something that we want people to know: censorship is not unstoppable. We can take steps together to change what’s happening or prevent more of what’s happening.

Elizabeth Larison at the NCAC Teach-in on Censorship in the Arts in the U.S. Photo: Cinthia Chen

Elizabeth Larison at the NCAC Teach-in on Censorship in the Arts in the U.S. Photo: Cinthia Chen

LN: It would never have occurred to me that the terms of a grant agreement were negotiable in that way. I would have assumed that you want the money, you sign on the dotted line, right? So that is really valuable insight.

zm: Maybe the funder is not willing to have the conversation, but we definitely want people to know that [we should] figure this out together. Some funders [are] never going to back down. Are there other institutions or art spaces? How do we find the right relationships within the arts ecosystem?

LN: And how do we intervene in the places that we can even if those terms aren’t negotiable—can I get a rider that specifically protects the project that I’m applying with, even if someone else determines that it falls afoul of that guideline? To sort of get out in front of that process.

zm: One thing [Elizabeth] said last night was that you should look at the mission and value statement of the venue, the funder, and you can hold them to task. If their mission statement is about justice, you can say, well, what are your guidelines in terms of delivering on your mission? Especially if they’re putting you in that position.

LN: Is there, from an activist perspective, things artists should be doing to protect themselves in their work? But also, what can supporters of the arts and audiences do, above showing up and using their ticket dollars to support and attend challenging work. What’s the ground game that we can all be participating in?

MSZ: My immediate thought is educating yourself and being invested in educating, not just watching the news—understanding that what artists are up against is not necessarily the thing that you’re seeing on a headline. I think that hopefully we’ve started to learn this lesson from the era of the first Trump presidency through now, that [we] can oftentimes be receiving extremely skewed information. Artists are cutting through that by offering different perspectives. So yes, coming to shows is great, but also understanding maybe that there is work that you aren’t going to. I think education is expanding your comfort zone to understand people who are different than you in a way that maybe wouldn’t lend themselves to the ways that you’re typically moving through the world. I invite people to look at what media they’re consuming, what art they’re looking at, what’s in their living room, what’s on the TV. I think that oftentimes we’re not prompting ourselves to move outside our comfort zones.

That also can inform the ways you’re showing up in your community. If you’re not present to what’s happening directly around you, it makes sense that you may have a hard time being present to what’s happening outside your immediate sphere of influence. I think that people are, myself included, very overwhelmed by all the things that we’re receiving. In this digital age or whatever you want to call it, there are so many ways to receive information. But that also means we get to kind of curate our own experiences of the world. We can easily live in a bubble if we choose to. We can easily only talk to people who have the same ideas as us and see the world the same ways that we do, and I think that if you’re not willing to go beyond that and go to who is directly around you and see… In the past couple of years, I was doing work around water infrastructure in New York City. I learned so much from people directly around me. I thought I needed to go read things that I could find only on the Internet or in the library, whatever, and actually, I was going to talk to people who lived in Red Hook about their experiences of what’s happening to the waterfront. I needed to be talking to people who live in public housing close to me to understand what was happening with water infrastructure in New York. It was actually very both simple and very challenging.  I think that in a city like New York it can be really daunting, but it’s also true regardless where you are.

JC: We are processing everything going on in the festival in real time. We haven’t had these conversations [yet]. The art that we are presenting and the art that has been censored is political education in and of itself, and that’s what’s being not brought to audiences. That was a conversation that we had on the first evening with Sister Sylvester, because that work was canceled by the Center for Book Arts. Also what Maya Simone is saying about making the connection between what’s going on in the world and then what’s going on in your immediate worlds. It is overwhelming to think about that, but I think this space that we’re creating is very focused on how to do that by just being, by showing up, by being in the room and not being afraid to ask questions when you don’t know something. I’m trying to do that as much as I can, too. I mean, that’s why I’m here.

zm: The things that stick out to me: Don’t stop making your art. Don’t give into self-censorship, right? There are resources like NCAC that can help artists. They want to hear from artists, they want to know what’s going on, they can’t track everything themselves so they want community to reach out to them. And the most basic organizing strategy of all time is don’t do anything alone, bring people with you into a process so that you are not isolated, so that you have support and resources around you. We can change any situation when we are in numbers. The most dangerous position is when one person is isolated, getting fired, getting decommissioned, self-censoring and thinking there’s no way through this or around this.

I’ve seen this in academia, that the strongest Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups are the biggest ones. The ways in which faculty and student groups are working together and combining efforts—slowly but surely and with a lot of labor on artists, the institutions will change their game. Institutions are looking at each other and realizing that they can’t necessarily get away with this. Even in the toughest situations, there is a change point. I’m not saying every institution, but this work is happening on so many different levels since October 7 within the arts and within academia, where artists gain their employment.

LN: The last big issue that I wanted to bring up, which Maya Simone kind of alluded to—I think one of the things that makes it hard to get outside of your bubble right now is that we’re consuming algorithmically driven news, in an online culture. So what role can art play in reaching people who are already shut off by their own algorithms from the content? And also—and this is the most despairing place that I am in—is how do you get live art to even register as a source of inspiration or comfort or activism, when the first place we’re turning for our information is a definitively non-live medium?

zm: That to me is really resonating. In performance and theater, which have been struggling so much since 2020, it’s so hard right now. The economics are stacked against us on multiple fronts. It was hard before and it’s even harder now to get back on our feet. I think something happens when you get together in a room—as an organizer and as a performing artist, I feel that way. When we are with each other, when we are making our values and our art understood through our bodies, something happens. There’s something about that connection, about the ways in which we can feel resonance as bodies in a room and especially in times where the political fear tactics are just being turned up all the way—the volume is so high right now. And psychologically, from all sides, we’re so vulnerable to that, right? Like feeling isolated, feeling stuck in a kind of digital isolation, not knowing who your community is, not knowing if community exists. I hear from a lot of young people, “I don’t know where to find a community.”

I’m thinking about in-person community, of course [gathering] , safely with COVID policies and procedures. It’s more important now than ever that we get together, in person, in terms of keeping culture going and getting out of our siloed perspectives. Maybe that’s even a bigger political strategy. Here we are with these fear tactics on a national, federal level as a kind of electoral strategy. So, okay, let’s start small. Let’s do community building from a really small place, from your neighborhood, the people in your field, the people you teach with or work with, your collaborators as artists.

JC: As a painter literally surrounded by other painters, we all face the wall when we go to a room together to see art. This is an amazing practice in learning how to take up space in a room in a different way. JACK, as a space, too, is a perfect size and space—you can’t come to JACK without having three conversations with people you don’t know. Starting small, organizing from your immediate relationships and making those connections—I think this is how change is happening for me. And I feel also very curious and excited and [it’s] giving me hope to think about my painting practice too, and how this will affect that form for me and how I do it, how I make community around it, what I don’t want to do with it, experiences I’ve had in the art world that I don’t need to return to, because I have found people that I want to share with.

MSZ: I grew up in the south in the suburbs, far enough from Atlanta to not actually experience being in a city. So I’m constantly blown away by the ways that community can be built here. It feels very different than other places, and that’s both the privilege and also a really daunting challenge. I’ve been in the city for almost six years now; I had to relearn everything I knew about this place in 2020 and I feel like I’m having to do it again. Things are coming full circle in a way for me—I was looking for places to be able to have conversations and now I’m in this honored and privileged position to be able to say, I would love for you to come to something that I worked really hard on where we can have that conversation, within the container that we built very carefully to have these kinds of hard conversations and not leave feeling heavier. And that’s really hard to do, honestly. So I just I’m feeling very grateful for these beautiful people here that we get to do it together and welcome our friends and people who we’ve never met, and institutions that we’ve heard of that maybe we haven’t spoken to, all kinds of different people, to be together in a space like this, to talk about these things.

LN: I think the next couple of years will present plenty of opportunities to engage with artistic censorship in this specific domain, but probably on all kinds of other fronts as well, right? I’m wondering if you have had a moment to think about the future—I hate to say UNDOXX as a brand, but let’s go with that language for the moment—how to keep presenting work by the artists you’re currently working with, or keep that container that you’ve built to continue conversations and discussions?

zm: The list is getting longer—we have two dozen other names of visual artists, writers, poets, all different kinds of cultural workers. I think when we originally sketched this out, there was something like seven weeks that we could have [produced] if we had the resources. I would say that what we’re looking for is another home. JACK has been an incredible partner [who] gave us funding for this, twenty-four-hour access to the space. I think the next step would be to find another partner [who] could help us do it again, and could move resources so that these artists can be paid for their work and produced. We’ve been so fortunate to have our presenter give us funding for this, and we know that this is not something that we can necessarily go to state funding sources for. It would be great to have a second home for another iteration.

MSZ: You asked a question earlier about the ways that artists can be better supported. There’s so many moving parts and pieces to developing work. I’d love to be able in the future to [offer] rehearsal space in advance of the time where [a] show will be produced. Some kind of support so that you can work with your collaborators more easily would be wonderful. There are so many ways that artists are not given wraparound support; it’s more, like, where is the finished product? We’re going to make sure that thing, whatever that is, gets supported; there’s a whole person and sometimes there’s a whole team. So I think that working with an organization or multiple [organizations] who are interested in investing and supporting so that it’s not just about the show, it’s actually about the artists themselves–that’s what we’re looking to platform. These are people with unique perspectives that they’re sharing through their art, but they are also people that have needs. So I think that being able to ask questions of the artists and then providing what they need would be really a dream that’s oftentimes very, very hard to realize.

zm: And certainly that approach is kind of the antithesis of censorship. So it feels like UNDOXX’s culture.

LN: Right, if you’re supporting the artists, committing to whatever work they may make in the future, then you’re preemptively not censoring them because you don’t even know what it is they’re going to do yet, and you’ve already committed to supporting it.

MSZ: And how amazing that art is, what can happen with that kind of permission and support? It feels so vital to cultural production right now as we’re all navigating gentrification and censorship and funding problems. The risk-taking required to make the work that we’re getting to experience in this festival is oftentimes the thing that’s not being supported. The risk-taking is scary and challenging and a lot of people want to be able to just look at a specific part of a work and not necessarily have to take in the fact that it was dangerous to develop in the cultural context that it came from, you know? So I think that drawing attention to that reality and then supporting in a way that oftentimes is just not there for artists that are being platformed in this series… I don’t have words for how important that feels to be able to do and speak to right now. A lot of institutions are excited when they get to make their little statements and they aren’t as excited when they get presented with an opportunity to do it. So I’m curious how we’ll think creatively as artists and producers and curators to arrive at that.

JC: There’s also ongoing learning that has been taking place that Maya Simone and I were talking about, like making a plan to touch base with everybody at the end—a month later, after they’d had time to  think and digest. I thought that was really exciting because often the relationship between the institution and the artists just ends. Show’s over. It’s done. There’s very little follow up. So, there is commitment to the relationships and continuing to develop them.

LN: Is there anything else that any of you wanted to talk about?

zm: I just wanted to point out—and this was pointed out as well by Elizabeth Larison—that queer artists of color are really a target of censorship and that trend was happening before October 7. Something that some artists in this festival have been talking about even before censorship is this reality of just knowing that our work is not necessarily going to be supported. Around October 7, I noticed that the writers and events who got canceled are artists of color, Black artists, queer artists, trans artists. Something we already know in society is that trans and queer artists of color are always at the fault lines of these political persecutions, and in the arts with regard to censorship, that reflects bigger things that are going on in the country.

MSZ: I think that the unique opportunity that we’ve been able to have with JACK as a partner is to really talk about how can we use art as political education? My experience with art, especially when I first came to New York—the goal was to get butts in seats and you measure success by how many butts are in seats, and you fail if you didn’t get many people to come, and you did great if you got a lot of people to come. And I would go and see shows that were sold out—and I don’t think it’s a bad thing to see a show that I don’t enjoy, but sometimes I would see work and be like, how is it that that this work is being funded and I don’t know what was being said at all? And work that I know I will have to work really hard to find sometimes is saying so much. A lot of what’s being said in the room here at JACK is not necessarily things that are never said—it’s things that are said, but who’s actually listening? Are we making space to hear perspectives that are oftentimes, like zavé just named, intentionally disenfranchised, intentionally put into a corner, like the lights are not on in the room? I think that that’s going to only become more important in the coming years. So, it feels like we’re doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing, and selfishly, it feels very good, but it also feels like we’re moving in the right direction.

zavé martohardjono (they/them) is a queer and trans artist of Indonesian descent living on unceded Lenape land aka Flatbush, Brooklyn. They have worked interdisciplinarily across performance, dance, film, social justice, and community organizing since 2009.

Maya Simone Z. (they/them) is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist and producer who creates performance-based work centering emotional and spiritual connections between ancestral memory, the body, and the Black diaspora’s collective capacity to dream.

Jamie Chan (she/they) is a painter whose work covers a range of subjects, from Post-it notes to figurative excerpts of renaissance paintings and early baseball cards. Also a writer and curator, they are a member of the artist-run gallery Essex Flowers.


Loren Noveck

Loren Noveck is a writer, editor, dramaturg, and recovering Off-Off-Broadway producer, who was for many years the literary manager of Six Figures Theatre Company. She has written for The Brooklyn Rail, The Brooklyn Paper nytheatre.com, and NYTheater now, and currently writes occasionally for HowlRound and WIT Online. In her non-theatrical life, she works in book publishing.


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