MULTIPLICATION (AGAIN)
2017 — MoMA PS1
A famous early photo of the collective Bernadette Corporation features six people, all seemingly Asian, working in the studio. While their collections have been keenly observed as playing with and interpreting an urban (i.e. raced) style, what is often not questioned is their motivations behind it. Could it be that by looking to other raced bodies, Bernadette Corporation was using the only imaginable language at that time to talk about their own Asian American identity? Picking up on this forgotten trajectory, CFGNY restaged one of the collective's earliest performances, multiplication. The performance consisted of a group of friends dressed in white, who were instructed to roam a party together while, mimicking and copying each other's moves. While the original performance might be a critique of herd mentality, we chose, in the performance's recreation, to misread their intentions to speak to the beauty of kinship and conviviality.