Aria Dean: Abattoir U.S.A.!

A companion to Aria Dean’s Abattoir, U.S.A.!

Aria Dean’s moving image work Abattoir, U.S.A.!, presented in the eponymous exhibition at the Renaissance Society between February and April 2023, surveys the interior of an empty slaughterhouse. This slaughterhouse was built and animated using Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics tool for creating virtual environments. The viewer follows a linear path through an impossible architecture--a seamless combination of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century design elements and non-Euclidean spaces. Dean was initially inspired by philosophers Georges Bataille and Frank Wilderson, each of whom address the slaughterhouse in their writings -whether as a metaphor or paradigm--as crucial to the construction of civil society. Abattoir, U.S.A.! also builds on Dean’s own research into the slaughterhouse and industrial architecture and the ways they reveal modernism’s intimacy with death on conceptual, political, and material levels.

This book documents the exhibition as well as selected material from Dean’s process and research. It includes essays by film scholar Erika Balsom, who writes on the history of abattoirs and their relation to modernism, Afropessimist theory, and the dehumanizing rationality of capitalism. Architect and writer Keller Easterling contributes a quasi-fictional text from her ongoing series of Draft Teenage Essays, which are part of her collection of experimental writings titled No One Thing. This volume also includes transcripts of two conversations: one between Dean and film historian Bruce Jenkins in which they discuss Dean’s work in relation to historical avant-garde films; and another with Dean and co-director of Rhizome Michael Connor, media artist Filip Kostik, and composer Evan Zierk, who created the soundtrack for Abattoir, U.S.A.! Together they discuss the technical process of using Unreal Engine and the nature of virtuality.

Aria Dean lives and works in New York. Her moving image work, Abattoir, U.S.A.!, which debuted at the Renaissance Society, has also been shown at the ICA London and the Power Plant in Toronto. Other recent solo and two-person exhibitions and performances include: Greene Naftali, CAPC, REDCAT, Artists Space, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Significant group shows include the Whitney Biennial: Quiet As It’s Kept, the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in L.A. 2020: a version, the Institute of Contemporary Art (University of Pennsylvania), The MAC, Tai Kwun, Schinkel Pavillon, Swiss Institute (New York), and the de Young Museum, among others. She is the author of Bad Infinity. Myriam Ben Salah is the director and chief curator of the Renaissance Society in Chicago. She was the co-curator of Made in L.A. 2020 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She served as the editor-in-chief of Kaleidoscope Magazine between 2016 and 2020 and as a curator of special projects and public programs at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris between 2009 and 2016. In 2018 she was the guest curator of the tenth edition of the Abraaj Group Art Prize, Dubai. Ben Salah’s projects encompass exhibitions and programs organized at institutions including the Kamel Lazaar Foundation in Tunis, the ICA in London, Beirut Art Center, Kunsthall Stavanger, Kadist Foundation in Paris and San Francisco, Pejman Foundation in Tehran, and DESTE Foundation in Athens. She is sits on the scientific committee of MUDAM (Luxembourg) and on the commissioning committee of Hartwig Art Production/Collection Fund (Amsterdam). Erika Balsom is a Reader in film studies at King’s College London. She is the author of TEN SKIES, An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video in Circulation, and Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. She is the co-editor of Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines, Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989, and Documentary Across Disciplines. In 2018, she was the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Before joining King’s in 2013, she was assistant professor of film studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Keller Easterling is a designer, writer, and professor of architecture at Yale University. Her books include Medium Design, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Subtraction, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades, and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America. Easterling is also coauthor of Call it Home, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934-1960. Easterling lectures and exhibits internationally.