The International Center of Photography Presents To Conjure: New Archives in Recent Photography

Koyoltzintli, Oficio Divino, 2022. © Koyolzintli

The International Center of Photography | 84 Ludlow Street, New York

On View January 23-May 5, 2025

Opening January 23, 5-8PM

The International Center of Photography (ICP) is pleased to announce To Conjure: New Archives in Recent Photography, an exhibition curated by Sara Ickow, Associate Director of Exhibitions, Keisha Scarville, Guest Curator and Elisabeth Sherman, Senior Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections.

Bringing together the work of seven artists primarily working in photography, including Widline Cadet, Koyoltzintli, Tarrah Krajnak, Shala Miller, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Keisha Scarville and Sasha Wortzel, the exhibition reimagines what an archive can be or might look like. More than just a means of recuperating the past, these artists utilize the archive as a form for imagining new futures.

To Conjure draws inspiration from Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, a 2008 exhibition at ICP curated by Okwui Enwezor, which surveyed the work of two dozen artists with special attention paid to how they incorporated archival documents and materials into their work as a means for investigating a range of themes, from history and memory, to identity and loss. Since then, the archival as a form within contemporary art and photography in particular has become increasingly popular, specifically, as Enwezor said, as “[…] a conceptual and physical space in which memories are preserved and history decided.”

Moving away from the centrality of the institutional archive, the artists in To Conjure: New Archives in Recent Photography expand its parameters by engaging with materials—clothing, instruments, the landscape and more—beyond photographs and documents alone. By working with a myriad of contemporary materials, these artists create new histories and material sensibilities. As artist and co curator Keisha Scarville stated, “The artists in this show are locating archives in the elsewhere, the otherwise, the elusive, the familial, the obscure, the speculative, the sonic and in death. They hold lived histories and manifest languages for how narratives get carried forward. The work in this show engages errant archives in the service of uncovering latent futures. Each artist challenges the established linear structures and expands our understanding of what the archive can be.”

In Widline Cadet’s photographs the past and present are taken from different visual registers and fused into single images that reflect upon her family’s immigration to the United States. Born in Haiti, Cadet’s work often foregrounds her and her family’s experience with migration as a way of exploring how identity and belonging can be split across time and space. Though archives have long been repositories of collective memory and instruction, in Koyoltzintli’s photographs it is the present that provides illumination into the past. The historical Indigenous instruments she recreates are situated within photographs that feature herself and even her young daughter, effectively uniting past and future generations together in a single image.

Tarrah Krajnak’s 1979: Contact Negatives transforms the fact of her birth in Lima, Peru in 1979, and her subsequent adoption from an orphanage there, into a site for continued revisiting and examination. Working in the exhibition space directly, Krajnak creates cyanotypes featuring her body that she then hangs from the gallery walls amidst the projections, effectively ‘returning’ her body to Lima and reminding viewers that, should no archive of record or memory exist, one can be created for the future. Krajnak will be performing in the gallery during opening week—exact dates and times to be announced. In place of the historical archive, Shala Miller’s Obsidian project creates a fictional one around a story called Obsidian, whose Black and femmemain character undermines the standard hero-antagonist binary. The Obsidian works themselves incorporate faux-archival materials such as newspapers, advertisements and typography to invoke a distant past while also being situated in the present and future-tense of Miller’s fictional world.

In Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s project Spirit the spiritual and revolutionary practices of the South and the Caribbean are channeled into aquatint lithographs that move between structure and spontaneity, between history and invention. In seeking to conjure up visual fragments from dreams and making them manifest in each work, Rasheed creates her own provisional archive of the subconscious. In her series Alma/Mama’s Clothes, Keisha Scarville takes her late mother’s clothes and recontextualizes them through photography and performance. Instead of probing the provenance and history of these garments, Scarville uses them as the foundation for images that explore what she has called the “materiality of absence.” Scarville will also include newly printed works on transparent fabric that will hang in the exhibition space, inviting viewers to experience them from multiple perspectives.

Sasha Wortzel’s multi-disciplinary project on the Florida Everglades looks at the land itself—the marshes, flatwoods and mangroves—as an archive, one that embodies the present while containing lineages of the past. In photographs and a short-form video, she constructs a portrait of the landscape that considers both its colonial history and the present-day environmental destruction being visited upon it.

For more information, visit icp.org.

About the Artists

Widline Cadet (b. 1992, Pétion-Ville, Ayiti; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) earned her BA in studio art from the City College of New York and an MFA from Syracuse University. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2021-22 visual arts fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; a 2020 NYFA / JGS fellowship in photography; the 2020 Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Snider Prize; a 2019 Lighthouse Works fellowship and a 2013 Mortimer-Hays Brandeis traveling fellowship. She has held residencies at the Studio Museum, Harlem (2020-21); Syracuse University School of Art (2019) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2018), . Recent solo exhibitions include Take This With You, Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions include Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Somerset House, London; Fotografiska Museum, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and Express Newark, Newark, NJ. Her work has been featured in Aperture Magazine, FOAM, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Financial Times and Wallpaper,among others. Her work is held in various public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Her work is featured in Flow States: La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, New York, which opened October 10, 2024.

Koyoltzintli (b. 1983, New York, NY; lives and works in Kingston, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Upstate New York. She was raised on the Pacific coast and in the Andean mountains of Ecuador. Her work revolves around sound, ancestral technologies, ritual and storytelling, blending collaborative processes with personal narratives. Nominated for the Prix Pictet in 2019 and 2023, her work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the United Nations, the Parrish Art Museum, Princeton University, the Aperture Foundation in NYC and Paris Photo. She has had two solo shows at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery and a solo show at Leila Greiche in 2023. Koyoltzintli has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships, including at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, NYFA, We Women, the Latinx Artist Fellowship by the US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) and most recently, the Anonymous Was a Woman award. Her first monograph, Other Stories, was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP. Her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240) and included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer, former chief curator at BRIC. She is part of Flow States: La Trienal 2024 at El Museo del Barrio. Koyoltzintli has performed at venues such as the Whitney Museum, Wave Hill, Socrates Park, Brooklyn Museum and Queens Museum. Most recently, she performed at Performance Space in NYC, curated by Guadalupe Maravilla, at Dia Chelsea for the closing event of Delcy Morelos’ El Abrazo and at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, NY.

Tarrah Krajnak (b. Lima, Peru 1979; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is an artist working across photography, performance and poetry. Krajnak is currently based in Los Angeles and is an Associate Professor of Art at UCLA. She is represented by Zander Galerie, Cologne/Paris. Krajnak is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and was recently awarded the Jury Prize of the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles, a Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies and the Hariban Grand Prize, from Benrido, Kyoto, Japan. Krajnak has published three books including El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan (DAIS 2021), Master Rituals II: Weston’s Nudes (TBW 2022) and RePose (FW Books 2023). Her work was featured in recent issues of Aperture, British Journal of Photography, The Eyes Journal and European Photography. This past year Krajnak’s work was exhibited in Corps á Corps, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Photography Now, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Aperture’s traveling exhibition You Belong Here: People, Place, & Purpose in Latinx Photography and in the solo exhibition Shadowings, Huis Marseille Museum of Photography, Amsterdam. Krajnak’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Pinault Collection, Paris; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, among others.

Shala Miller (b. 1993, Cleveland, OH; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) also known as Freddie June when they sing, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of 10 or 11, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where they should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find their way out, and find her way into an understanding of herself and her history, using photography, video, writing and singing as an aid in this process. Taking up skinas a site of history and intimacy with the self and across generations, they hold space for the body’s vulnerabilities and maladies. Miller works across photography, film, writing, music and performance as a means of meditating on the conjunction of desire, mourning, pain and pleasure. Miller holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her book, Tender Noted, was voted best photo book of 2022 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and her artwork is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum, Harlem; the Hessel Museum of Art, New York; the Akeroyd Collection and The Lumber Room, Portland, among others.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of seven artists’ books including, most recently rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Scratch Disks Full, 2024); and in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department and is an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences.

Keisha Scarville (b. 1975, Brooklyn, NY; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with loss, latencies and the elusive body. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the Studio Museum, Harlem; Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Contact Gallery, Toronto; the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, New York; Light Work, Syracuse, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York and Higher Pictures Gallery, New York. Recent group exhibitions include The Rose, Lumber Room, Portland, OR (curated by Justine Kurland); If I Had a Hammer, the 2022 Fotofest Biennial, Houston and All of Them Witches, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (curated by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons). Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; the Denver Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has participated in residencies at Light Work, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, WOPHA, Miami, Baxter Street CCNY and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has appeared in publications including Vice, Small Axe and The New York Times where her work has also received critical review. She is a recipient of the 2023 Creator Lab Photo Fund and awarded the inaugural 2024 Saltzman Prize in Photography. Her first book, lick of tongue rub of finger on soft wound, was published by MACK and shortlisted in the 2023Aperture/Paris Photobook Awards. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University and a faculty member at Parsons School of Design in New York.

Sasha Wortzel (b. 1983, Fort Myers, FL; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an artist and filmmaker exploring how past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Her work has been presented at the New Museum, New York; The Kitchen, New York; the Museum of Modern Art’s DocFortnight, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; True/False Film Festival, CPH:DOX, South London Gallery and Museum Brandhorst, Munich among others. Solo exhibitions include Dreams of Unknown Islands, Cooley Memorial Art Gallery with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art TBA Festival. Wortzel is a 2023 Guggenheim fellow and has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation and a MacDowell fellowship. Recent residencies include the Fine Arts Work Center, Silver Art Projects and ISCP’s Ground Floor Program. Wortzel’s work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Studio Museum, Harlem; the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. Her recent films include How to Carry Water (CPH:Dox, 2023), an IDA Awards nominee for best short documentary and currently streaming on the Criterion Channel; This is an Address (MoMA Doc Fortnight, 2020), distributed by Field of Vision; Happy Birthday Marsha! (2018; co-director Tourmaline), which won special mention at Outfest and is distributed by Frameline. Wortzel has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America and New York Magazine.

Exhibition Support

The exhibition is generously supported by ICP Exhibitions Committee members – Luana Alesio, Deborah Brown, Romy Cohen, Marguerite Gelfman, Vasant Nayak, Elizabeth Rea, Benita Sakin, Magali Smith, Helena Sokoloff, and Richard Stern.

Exhibitions at ICP are supported, in part, by Caryl Englander, Almudena Legorreta, ICP Board of Trustees, Shubert Foundation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

About The International Center of Photography

The International Center of Photography (ICP) is the world’s leading institution dedicated to photography and visual culture. Cornell Capa founded ICP in 1974 to champion “concerned photography”—socially and politically minded images that can educate and change the world. Through exhibitions, education programs, community outreach, and public programs, ICP offers an open forum for dialogue about the power of the image. Since its inception, ICP haspresented more than 700 exhibitions, provided thousands of classes, and hosted a wide variety of public programs. ICP launched its new integrated center at 84 Ludlow Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in January 2020. ICP pays respect to the original stewards of this land, the Lenape people, and other Indigenous communities. Visit icp.org to learn more about the museum and its programs.