Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago is pleased to present Traversing Temporalities, a solo exhibition of work by Kristin Anahit Cass. The show explores ideas of SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) futurism through a body of work including photography, video, sculpture, and installation. For viewers, her work offers meditations on time, memory, and futurity. The altar offers an opportunity for visitors to express their own wishes for a better future in communion with the hopes of the subjects portrayed in Cass’s portraits, while experiencing the multiple temporalities of the divination ritual portrayed in the video. The practices of divination, use of amulets, and women’s hand works that are common across many cultures as spiritual practices offer visitors a portal through which to access their own ancestral cultural practices.

Cass began the project in 2012 in contemplation of the 2015 centennial remembrance of the Armenian Genocide. As a descendant of genocide survivors, her family faced the conflicts of living in diaspora and wondering what their lives would have been if indigenous Armenian and other minority populations had not been subjected to genocide and exile. Drawing on her experience as a queer, mixed-ethnicity, diasporan American, Cass’s work occupies multiple temporalities, disorienting time and space as the subjects take control of their own narratives, It embodies past, present, and future at once, much as SWANA ancestral divination practices harness a nonlinear understanding of time, and simultaneous occupation of spaces. 

The work in this exhibition uses historical motifs, objects, rituals and places to anchor visions of the future in SWANA ancestral cultures. The portraits featured are complex digital collages of the people, places, and objects that are part of both a shared culture and diversity. Her engagement with her subjects to create a shared vision shows that through art we create images that order our world, both reflecting and constructing our reality. So, through images we may also begin to imagine and construct different futures for ourselves.

Artist Biography: 

Kristin Anahit Cass is an artist working in photography, video, writing, sculpture and other media.  Cass’s work imagines the future, touches the past, and envisions a better world.  As Tamar Boyadjian noted in Hyperallergic, Cass’s work “recognizes the lived experience of trauma, yet owns the ability of humans to individually and collectively reframe that experience in their hearts to make way for reparations.” In addition to her arts education, Cass has worked with women and minority owned businesses, artists, and nonprofits in her  career as a lawyer.   She is one of the founders of the LGBTQ platform Entanik (Family) where she is active in supporting creatives in the global community.

Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including Reparations of the Heart at the Stamelos Gallery Center at the University of Michigan, Witness: The Artist’s Response at Elephant Room Gallery in Chicago, Chicago Neighborhoods at the Hairpin Gallery in Chicago and SLAYSIAN 2.0 at Co-Prosperity in Chicago. Her Borderlands Under Fire project was a finalist for the 2018 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. Cass is a graduate of the University of Chicago. 

Curator Bio:

Cydney M. Lewis, is a Chicago-based multimedia artist with a multi-disciplinary and distinguished background.Her work delves into material manipulation, drawing her viewers into a realm of visual archaeology. Lewis intricately weaves the natural, spiritual, and scientific, observing nature’s resilience and our potential for harmonious existence. Her art is held in private collections around the world, and has been exhibited widely, including most recently in the Satellite Art Fair at Art Basel in Miami, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, National Museum in Berlin and the Hyde Park Art Center.  Lewis’ foundation lies in architecture, holding a degree from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and studied at  L'ecole D'architecture des Versailles, France.  Recognitions encompass residencies at Chicago Public Schools, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Lyseloth Musikerwohnhaus in Basel, Switzerland.

You can find Kristin’s work at kristincass.com, on Instagram at KristinAnahitCassProjects, on Facebook at Kristin Cass Photography, and on LinkedIn at Anahit Cass