Human Resources is pleased to present Divine Violence, an exhibition featuring a workshop and week-long collaborative installation process culminating in an opening event on Friday, January 14, 2011. The opening event will feature a reading by Maggie Nelson from her soon to be released book, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, a performance titled Cordon Off the Contempt in a Word Compartment (and Other Whispering Moments) by Joshua Kit Clayton and video and photographic works by Sayler/Morris and an installation created by Sayler/Morris with the Divine Violence workshop collaborators: Sofia Arreguin, Arely Villegas, Sean Grattan, Sarah Wang, Nora Berman, Asher Hartman, Giles Miller, Malene Dam, Sandy Medina, Solomon Bothwell, Sille Storihle, Kate Wolf, Ko Kawashima.

During the week prior to the opening event Sayler/Morris will conduct a workshop titled Divine Violence (An Object Lesson) with a group of collaborators. The group will read and consider excerpts from seminal texts on violence and collect artifacts to incorporate into an installation at Human Resources Gallery. Questions addressed by the group and exhibition include:

Why are we attracted to violence? Why are we repulsed by it?
Can we find representations of the sort of invisible, systemic, “objective” violence that Zizek articulates in his book Violence? Does that help anything? Is the “dialectic of concealment and revelation,” as Maggie Nelson writes, crucial to our understanding (and mitigation) of violence?
Is some form of violence helpful or even necessary to achieve social or political change? In other words, can violence ever be justified (something Walter Benjamin does under the aegis of Divine Violence)?
From Saturday January 8th until the opening on January 14th, the gallery will be open and viewers are invited to witness the progress of the installation. Sayler/Morris will be “in residence” at the gallery, studying violence, working on the installation and engaging visitors. In the gallery there will be violence mediation terminals, as well as daily screening of films at 2 pm. Gallery times are Saturday, January 8, 12-2 pm (no screening); January 10 – January 18, 12-5 pm (closed Sunday).

Screenings will be announced on the blog for the program: divineviolence.wordpress.com.

The opening event on January 14th will be from 7:00 to 10:00 with performance by Joshua Kit Clayton at 7:30 and reading/Q&A with Maggie Nelson at 8:30.

Clayton’s video-directed group exercise/meditation/conversation, Cordon Off the Contempt in a Word Compartment (and Other Whispering Moments), investigates the uses and values of contempt, hygiene, language, and importantly, of whispering as a means of containment, paradoxically, through the process of propagation. The hour long video asks audience members to consider and/or discuss their own relationship to contempt and other topics within the space of the video itself.