Above: Petrit Halilaj, Very Volcanic over This Green Feather, 2021. UV-printed felt, spray painted ink, thread, metal pipe, and feathers: 50 hanging elements

Ways of KNowing

On view March 8 through September 7, 2025 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

It has taken time for the simultaneously dense and expansive experience of Ways of Knowing, curated by Rosario Güiraldes, to precipitate into a knowing of my own. This challenging and wide-reaching exhibition featuring the work of eleven geographically diverse artists is a categorically and elementally interlacing engagement that generates abundant cross-conversations around knowledge-generation, extending the boundaries of research. The exhibition’s 3 groupings, “The collectors,” “Time and Space,” and “Fiction and Fact,” serve as initial orientations for taking in the wide-ranging practices of knowledge production and creative study these artists employ, though the dialogue between them soon begins to buzz and hum with intricate resonances.  

The works – presented as “The Collectors” – usher the viewer into the first gallery with the familiar form of the framed object, an onslaught of printed research material, or re-presented institutional collections, but just below the crisply restrained surface lies a break from this order. In Chang Yuchen’s carefully contained “pages” of Coral Dictionary, a poetic collaboration of the sea, language, and culture effortlessly snares me into a co-creative world-building spell. Through the mechanics of translation and meticulous illustration this ongoing work of deconstructed sentences extends an invitation to consider what it is to “read” and “write” with the natural world. What stories can and should be told in partnership with the non-human? What languages are left undiscovered as we increasingly move through a human-made landscape? 

The tight and tidy archives of “The Collectors” gives way to the sensorially varied pieces in the second gallery (and second theme) of “Place and Time.” The visual relief of Hope Sandoval’s striking large-scale adobe drawings immediately releases the flow of the exhibition from strict institutional form. Sandoval’s architectures contrast and question with light, line, and shadow, exposing how the materiality of place, the very earth, is interwoven with colonial structure. What do the shadows hold within these geometrical and linear compositions? Do the rugose mud lines and shapes divide or unite complicated colonial truths? Adjacently, the energetically charged, fantastically illustrative place-time studies of Anna Boghiguian roam widely through scenes of the French revolution, tales of fleeing Nazi’s, the Hatian Revolution, and beyond, giving me the sense of chaotic, emotionally colorful pages of a picture book to be read and poured over. 

Above: One wall of Anna Boghiguian’s work Time of Change, 2022, mixed media on paper

In “Fiction and Fact,” modes of research mix and mingle as notions of relation through and with time emerge. Included here – but perhaps, as these works all do, resisting categorization itself – is a work-in-waiting, Cloud Museum and its accompanying schematics Organizing the Un-Organizable. To be performed at the Walker in July with volunteer participants, Eduado Nararro’s interactive performance/manifestation is presented within pink gallery walls as a ritual yet to happen, the ideas are born into the world through concept drawings, costumes, and a letter from the artist, in care of the curator, to Cloud Museum itself. Navarro is birthing an entire conceptual entity de novo and communicating lovingly, even encouragingly with it. 

This cloud mentality persisted and connected to my encounter with Petrit Halilaj’s intimate, floating, felted memory-space, a jungle of vividly personal interior experience. Brightly plumed birds, trees, and fanciful skies greeted me as I initially passed through the three-dimensional environment, only to be met with darker, traumatic realities of life as a child in a time of war nestled into the view from the backside of the suspended installation. Lingering here are dredged up uncomfortable truths: that children, too, live through the full range of human experience and that these experiences fill vast spaces of the psyche. Halilaj’s memory-scape embraces the mutable, shifting nature of recollection and processing. 

With little effort, dialogues between works begin to shape my comprehension of this collection. Iosu Aramburu’s printer-paper aesthetic echo annotated photocopies of historical accounts of the life of Antonio de Erauso, the focus of Cabello/Carceller’s cross-temporal dialogue boldly broaching the impossible complexity of queer ancestry. I also find tenuous but interesting threads through Cabello/Carceller’s Una Voz para Erauso series and Sammy Baloji’s work, Tales of the Copper Cross Garden, Part 1, both works rejecting the simplicity of a static or simple path from past to present. Both projects enmesh voices of the past with structures of the present, voices that prove urgently alive in the now, voices that underwrite the present and future.

Detail of Iosu Arambu’s Atlas of Andean Modernism, 2022-ongoing

In Sky Hopinka’s Visions of an Island, Gala Porras-Kim’s National Treasures, and Rose Salane’s Confessions (1-12) series, an aura of care links detailed, open investigations of what is cherished, sometimes whole, sometimes divided or displaced, leaving me contemplating what is made visible through attention, what is elevated or diminished of the worlds, stories, and heritages we move within. 

Through the testing of categorization and of knowing itself in these collected works, Rosario Güiraldes fosters a rich ecosystem, a controlled maze of engagement. Voices and silences intermingling despite disparate modes and localities of research and execution. Space and time are both acknowledged as the barriers that they are, and then surpassed regardless of these accepted physics. A cultural ancestor chants their defiance of our expectations and projections. Re-appropriated childhood drawings of a life with war – colorful, larger-than-life and yet mutable and two-sided – affirm the changeable nature and powerful force of memory. By pushing material and temporal boundaries, embracing unknowns and gaps, and re-configuring relationships, Ways of Knowing entices the viewer into worlds of minute and expansive creation, archives of translation in earth, paper, and sky, and invites diverse conversations through and with time which continue to multiply within me.