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Poster Designed by Sixuan Tong
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Join us on Thursday, July 11th, at 7:30 PM at Bungee Space for a conversation between artist Adam Golfer and writer Re’al Christian that considers the role of images in interpreting history. RSVP through this form is suggested.
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Looking at the inextricable links between material history and identity, Golfer and Christian discuss the complicated intersections of personal and collective memories, touching on themes of nonlinear grief, humor, and the entwined aesthetics of the endless scroll.
The conversation looks at two interrelated artist books by Golfer: Kaddish, published in the spring of 2024, and A House Without a Roof, from 2016. Each book employs varied streams of photography and texts to consider the ways in which histories repeat and reverberate across time. In each project, Golfer assumes the role of an unreliable narrator, misremembering and implicating himself within the contradictions of experiences that are deeply personal or just out of reach.
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Golfer’s books situate intimate experiences of mourning within broader narratives of family history in the Holocaust, its aftermath, and the ongoing violence, trauma, and mass displacement that continue to play out in present-day Israel and Palestine. A House Without a Roof focuses on three generations of men in Golfer’s family—his grandfather (a Jewish-Lithuanian survivor of Dachau), his dad (who briefly lived on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1970s), and himself—tracing lines between Germany, the US, and Israel. Pictures and texts within the book sift through and consider the historical representation of both the Shoah and the foundational mythology of Israel’s creation.
With his recent work Kaddish, hundreds of images collected and saved from the past twenty years form an amorphous, ambient scroll of information. A cascade of pictures from Golfer’s archive, text messages, emails, family albums, home movies, screen grabs, and iPhone photos, form an endless stream of experience, not unlike the image feeds on our phones. Through Kaddish, Golfer grapples with the death of his father, sifting through a pendulum of personal grief, the banality and dark humor of the everyday, and the anxieties of historical memory that bear indelible relationships to violence playing out in the present.
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Adam Golfer is a filmmaker, artist and cinematographer based in Queens, NY. His studio practice combines elements of personal essay film, photography, book making and installation. He holds an MFA from Hunter College in New York and was part of the 2022-2023 artist cohort of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. Golfer is a recipient of the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation Grant, a Puffin Foundation Grant, and the Snider Prize in Photography. His films and photography installations have been shown at Underdonk Gallery (2024-upcoming), the Jewish Museum of Maryland (2023), the MoCP at Columbia College in Chicago (2018), Nurture Art (2017), Hunter College (2016), the Goethe Institut (2011) and the 92nd Street Y (2010) in New York. His first photographic monograph, “A House Without a Roof” was shortlisted for the Aperture First Book Award and the Kraszna-Krausz Photobook Award in 2016-2017. (@adamgolfer)
Re'al Christian is a writer and editor based in Queens, NY. Her work explores issues related to identity, diasporas, ecology, media, and materiality. Her writing has appeared in ART PAPERS, where she is a Contributing Editor, as well as Art in America, Artforum, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze. She has written texts for multiple catalogues and anthologies, most recently Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism (Paper Monument 2023). Her curatorial projects include The earth leaked red ochre at Miriam Gallery, Steven Anthony Johnson II: Getting Blood from Stone at ISCP, and Repetition means a/void at Parent Company. Her editorial projects include Maria Hupfield’s Breaking Protocol (Inventory Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics 2023) and the digital publishing series Post/doc (2022–present). Christian received her MA in Art History from Hunter College. She holds a bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she double majored in Art History and Media, Culture, and Communication. (@r_christian__)
