How To Explain Power To The Living, 2025
In this durational performance, I return as Beuys' dead hare—a haunting, an elemental force of nature reclaiming space and narrative. Where Beuys once explained art to a dead hare through locked gallery doors, making spectacle of death behind glass, I arrive as that hare resurrected, moving freely through space, distributing rather than receiving knowledge.
Through this embodiment, I both honor and subvert his canonical 1965 performance, holding the paradox of its historical significance and its troubling implications of human dominance over nature: Why does a hare need pictures explained to it? Doesn't a hare already comprehend the world's natural beauty? What does it mean for a man to choose communion with death over life, to speak to the dead while keeping the living at bay?
As an indigenous person on occupied land and a queer person during intensifying fascist, homophobic, and transphobic times, this performance transforms the hare from a passive recipient of knowledge into an active agent of collective possibility. Where Beuys sought to demonstrate the "deadliness" of human rationality, I invoke the living wisdom of collective voice.
Carrying a basket of Easter eggs—themselves complex symbols charged with current urgency as avian flu devastates bird and cattle populations, threatening to cross species barriers to humans and other beings, while egg prices soar and vital public health infrastructures like the CDC face defunding and the U.S. withdraws from global health partnerships. These eggs, representing both renewal and commodification, life and manufacture, scarcity and uncertainty, become vessels for performative directives that invite participants to fill the void I represent. These prompts, accompanied by alpha brainwave-inducing soundscapes, create a liminal space where participants can step into what was once Beuys' role of speaker/performer, but with the invitation to make radically different choices.
The performance challenges prescribed behaviors within museum spaces, proposing that collective practices of taking up space can be transformational. Where Beuys positioned himself as a singular shamanic figure while proclaiming "everyone is an artist," this work actually disperses that power among all present, embodying rather than just declaring collective creative potential. By inviting participants to become the art, we temporarily dissolve the boundaries between viewer and viewed, institution and individual, past and present. The accessible, playful appearance of the Easter eggs belies their deeper purpose: to guide participants through experiences of confusion, disorientation, depth, care, and connection—all held within a container of archetypal, ancestral, and elemental presence.
This work operates at the intersection of "social sculpture", ritual, and institutional critique, inviting spirits and ancestors into a space typically reserved for specific cultural narratives. In this moment beyond time and space, participants are invited to contribute to a new mythology, one where the hare returns not to learn about art, but to teach us about the possibilities of collective voice and presence within spaces of power.
This performance was a part of Props for Memory, in conversation with themes in The Broad’s collection exhibition, Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature. Props for Memory is a platform for performance, ritual, and participatory experience. Featuring interventions by liberatory fitness project Pony Sweat, Grammy-nominated performer and producer Mads Falcone with poet and filmmaker Arianne Ayu Alizio, and multidisciplinary artist Edgar Fabián Frías. Oculus Hall on the second floor was home to dronebath, with three hours of uninterrupted live low-frequency sound artists with Jonathan Snipes, VoltageCtrlR, Ian Wellman, and .Grandfather.
Video documentation by Zevin Delaski.
Photo credit: The Broad / Salvador Ceja Garcia @salvador_ceja_garcia