Johannes Kuzmich
(United States of America)

ARCHEOLOGY OF AN IMPOSSIBLE SITE
Abandoned consulate building prompts meditation on vision and speech between subjects and the state.

Hans Kuzmich (b. 1983, Bobruisk, Belarus) is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar completing a hybrid doctoral dissertation in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His practice moves across photography, film, video, sound, and transmission arts to consider the construction of otherness—how physical and cultural differences are used to create and maintain social hierarchies. As a trans person and Russian immigrant, he attends to gender as an interface between subjects and the state, working from a desire to unsettle their regulatory logics. Extending trans and abolitionist critiques of visuality as a means of managing populations, Kuzmich foregrounds recording and presentation techniques on the edges of visibility and audibility, such as infrared photography and electromagnetic field recording. The work’s installation form seeks to activate the audience on an embodied, affective level, while its use of genre conventions like film noir and science fiction works to disrupt normative scripts to imagine life otherwise. Kuzmich received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has been awarded artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Studios at MASS MoCA, and SOMA Summer. Recent exhibitions of his work include the Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), the Light Lab (Santa Cruz, CA), the 8th Floor (New York, NY), and SOMA (Mexico City).