At MoMA February 17-18, 2023

“The gallery Just Above Midtown was a hub for performance across disciplines. JAM was also a performance unto itself: a 12-year durational artwork and living installation where people could gather, find refuge from a racist art world, and make work together. Which is just what we did in the final weeks of the retrospective exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces. Performances that began at JAM were reactivated at MoMA during the three-week JAM Performance Festival. Each week a new ensemble took the stage, passing along what they knew about JAM as an incubator for collaboration. Traces of this time together now manifest as the spirit of JAM, re-enlivened—and with a blueprint for how it might continue“.
Thomas Jean Lax, Lilia Rocio Taboada

Tying & Un-Tying, a collaboration between Senga Nengudi Fittz and Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees, is an ode to their years of shared conversation, inspiration, and citizenship in the virtual country of Bulemia. Founded in 1988, Bulemia was conceptualized by artist Charles Abramson and a community of creatives as “not a disease but a state of mind used as a metaphor for exploring the nature of creativity.”

Tying & Un-Tying opened with Nengudi Fittz’s film Bulemia Doublethink, documenting the citizens of the imaginary country and was followed by the live streamed performance-collaboration across continents by TwoTrees from Mumbai and Nengudi Fittz from New York. Culminating in TwoTrees’ film Falling into Language with a soundtrack by Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy and multiple voices bring the audience to a state “bigger than the transformation, more than even the light-a state of Oneness, charged with energy…” as evoked by Nengudi Fittz and TwoTrees during the performance.