The Emo Show: Jasmine Wahi, "Curating as a Stream of Consciousness"

As a curator I have always had a semi-secret aversion to ‘formal critical theory,’ which I view as a narrow construct that has been developed to explore art of the Western world. So I was, understandably, thrilled when Jaishri Abichandani invited me to participate in an experimental exhibition that not only allowed, but actually demanded, that the curatorial development be prompted by emotional response rather than academic or critical analysis. It has been not only refreshing to select works based on basic human instinct, but also eye-opening. I have realized through this process of working in an instinctive (versus academic or conceptual) manner that often our industry/academic/formal understanding of art comes second to our shared instinctual or emotional understanding of it. 

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The Emo Show: Edwin Ramoran

Delving into emotions has been an important and fundamental task for me as a curator. With the personal as political approach that I have taken in most, if not all, of the exhibitions I have organized in the past, I have consistently been interested in some of the most emotive subjects including love, identity politics, sexuality, gender identity, religion, family, war, colonialism, and history. For instance, I always bring into my practice the fact of being raised as the “first American born” (that’s how my Filipino migrant farm-working mom and dad used to introduce me to others). Being a queer has also been an essential part of my cultural production, but not the end-all. Furthermore, as a product of the 1980s in California, I was, and still am, an avid fan of post-punk music and dance music until now. I still cry to The Smiths’ “I Know It’s Over” or find elation in Inner City’s “Follow Your Heart”. With this incomplete profile and a focused modus operandi combined with the introduction to the rasas (emotional states) for The Emo Show, I intentionally selected works for this group exhibition based on a variety of emotional responses as a curator.

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The Emo Show: Maymanah Farhat

Annabel Daou’s “You Say I Want a Revolution” (pieces of the wall 2) (2012) transliterates the classic Beatle’s refrain into phonetic Arabic while also altering the directive nature of its lyrics. At once ambiguous and assertive, Daou’s transcription appears on a worn, pockmarked surface, a wall consisting of loosely adhered pieces in the early stages of its formation, or perhaps in its final state of disintegration.

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The Emo Show: Rocío Aranda-Alvarado

Approaching works of art from an emotional perspective, though usually frowned upon, is always rewarding. The artists that I have selected for inclusion in the emo show—Firelei Báez, Dahlia Elsayed, Antonia Pérez, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, and Edgar Serrano—all make works that explore a wealth of connections between viewer and idea, subject and interpretation, logic and emotion. Following the impulse of Rasa Theory, these works can all be thought of as ascribing to the basic tenets of humanism, and to suggesting a mental state related to the range of human emotions.

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The Emo Show: Raúl Zamudio, "Mi Rasa es Tu Rasa"

The artworks selected for The Emo Show are meant to produce catharsis in the viewer via the emotions of horror and disgust that are part of ancient Indian aesthetics known as Rasa. Rasa qualifies a work of art regardless whether it’s visual, literary, musical, or performative in powerfully embodying a particular emotion. The emotional purview of Rasa is broad and encompasses fear, joy, love and so forth, which, in turn, have their associated colors including black for horror.

As a framework formed from a different cultural location, Rasa reveals the limitations of traditional Western aesthetics that privileged mimesis, ethnocentric notions of beauty, and standards of artistic production that can be characterized as academic.  Whereas Western aesthetics is vertical, hierarchical, and singular, Rasa implies a kind of horizontality and is more inclusive and pluralistic.

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