Fridman Gallery is honored to welcome Regine Basha’s curatorial exploration All at Once, an exhibition featuring images, sound, video, and performance from artists such as Julie Mehretu, McArthur Binion, Milford Graves, Cauleen Smith, Nate Lewis, Aura Satz, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Public Assembly. The gallery’s first online-only exhibition comes on the unusual occasion of new social distancing practices amidst a global pandemic.

What has become most evident given the current Covid-19 crisis, is that we, as a human race, are undeniably all connected. Of course, the advent of the internet first excited this awareness of connectivity and we have been enjoying all kinds of points of contact, through shared interests and desires, as well as through consumer-driven synergy (albeit the connectivity still remains class- and race-based to some extent). More recently, greater awareness of the climate crisis has triggered another wave of global awakening about our species’ shared responsibility to the planet’s well-being. 

But most effective, so far, is this new level of climate emergency – this very ‘visceral’ connection we are experiencing through invisible ‘respiratory droplets’ that float between us, person-to-person, throughout the planet. People are now aware, more than ever, that touching one person means touching billions. This phenomena is a blunt reminder that there is such a thing as collective sickness and collective fear, but also, as we have seen, collective hope and collective resilience. 

Is collective psychic healing likely to follow? 

If bodies can be connected so instantly, could our consciousness be connected as well?

A plethora of philosophers, artists, scientists, psychoanalysts, astrophysicists, shamans, writers, poets and mystics have been, over the past several decades, proposing and debating the recognition of  ‘consciousness’. Guru-like pop figures have emerged in recent years in the West, like Eckhart Tolle, David Lynch, Russell Brand, Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra, who speak of ‘Consciousness’ as a vast singular source we are all able to tap into. In Carl Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ we are connected through a shared taxonomy of archetypes. Could we, as they suggest, be facing the very beginning of our final stage of evolution?

Consider the works selected below as a curated ‘image bank’ bringing images, video and sound relating to this meandering rumination about consciousness, collective consciousness, shared psychic trauma and speculative healing.

If there might not be another idea of human order other than repression, another notion of human virtue than self control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed another human essence than self. –Anne Carson

Featured Artists: