Curator’s Statement
In this strange, unsettling, and painful year, time has often felt like an accordion, extending and
compressing again and again; fast, slow, and now fast once more as we suddenly mark a year of
pandemic time.
Stations of the Cross
, like so many other exhibitions, festivals, and other cultural
institutions, has had to adapt in fundamental ways.
In previous years, the central experience of
Stations of the Cross
involved walking through host
cities, inviting visitors to experience the incidental insights and revelations that come from
navigating urban spaces in search of sacred experiences. This year, as we continue to keep
distant from one another out of self-protection and lovingkindness towards our neighbors—
especially the most vulnerable—such processions are not possible. Indeed, one might consider
refraining from touch as its own act of Lenten devotion, a fast from the nourishing company of
friends and loved ones for the sake of a greater good.
With proximity inadvisable, we imagined an exhibition which dwells on distance, and the
latitudinous connections made possible by technology. This year’s Stations take viewers on a
virtual journey through Russia, Pakistan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and various regions in
between. A sojourn that would take years on foot, or days by airplane, collapses into less than an
hour for visitors who listen to the recordings by artists in this year’s project. You might even
feel a touch of jetlag as you find yourself transported between disparate locations, contexts, and
cultures on this virtual journey. We encourage you to pause and reflect along the way as you
follow these Stations, and to pray if that is part of your practice.
Each station in this journey responds to a monument or memorial, reflecting a tumultuous year in
which fresh memorials sprung up to grieve the dead and historic monuments to prejudice were
toppled and dismantled. We invited artists to keep these connotations in mind, but ultimately we
left the terms ‘monument’ and ‘memorial’ open to interpretation, for artists to construct as they
saw fit. Some, like Todd Forsgren, turned familiar images, like the Washington Monument, on
their head—evoking the disorienting, disturbing politics of the past four years, and especially the
recent insurrection at the nation’s capital. G. Roland Biermann photographed the Millennium
Wheel in London, a tourist attraction that now sits sedentary as a stone, lit by an eerie blue light
in honor of National Health Service workers. Others chose sites which are legible as memorials
only to an intimate circle, who know the tragedy which transpired there. This is the case for
Antonio McAfee’s work, which honors his cousin, murdered at a Baltimore metro stop. Another
artist, S. Billie Mandle, reminds us that the natural world can, within moments, turn into a
