The Graham Foundation is pleased to announce artist Cally Spooner as a 2024 Graham Foundation Fellow. As a part of the fellowship, Spooner will present a large-scale exhibition at the Foundation's Madlener House galleries featuring a repertoire of works from Deadtime, a multi-year research project started in 2018.

Deadtime stages an anatomy study of how performance quantifies the social body. In Deadtime, living and mediated bodies, not always human, appear and reoccur, both vital and corpse-like. At the Graham Foundation, the installation unfolds across media, spills through the Foundation’s architecture, and throws open the frame to ask: how does the present neoliberal condition deaden the social fabric, making it increasingly hard to tell the difference between what is alive and what is dead? Deadtime is formed from twenty works, including sound works and sonic scenographies, films, commissioned paintings, sculptural propositions, and anatomical-architectural interventions.

Opening to the public on February 17, 2024, Deadtime begins with “A Thesis on Spillage, A Symposium-like Gathering”— featuring performances, choreographies, conversations, and lectures by Nuar Alsadir, Marquis Bey, Wendy Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tony Cokes, Hendrik Folkerts, Melody Giron, Irena Haiduk, Sarah Herda, Darrell Jones, Ralph Lemon, Maggie Segale, and Cally Spooner, among others.

At the Graham, Deadtime is cocurated by Graham Foundation director, Sarah Herda and Hendrik Folkerts, curator of international contemporary art and head of exhibitions, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Registration is required for “A Thesis on Spillage, A Symposium-like Gathering”, click here to learn more.

Cally Spooner is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at Cukrarna, Ljubljana; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her live performances been staged at, amongst others, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; Performa 13, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum M, Leuven; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. Spooner is the author of recent and forthcoming monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2023); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slimvolume/Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella, Collapsing in Parts, was published by Mousse in 2012. Spooner is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Paul Hamlyn Award and the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Mads Øvlisen PhD Scholarship for practice-based art. She was born in the United Kingdom, is British Italian, and lives and works between London and Turin.

ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIP

Synthesizing the Foundation’s grantmaking and exhibition programs, the program acknowledges the investment and resources required to produce an exhibition and invites an artist to create new work that engages the mission of the Graham Foundation—to explore ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. Providing space, support, and financial resources for the production of new work, the Fellowship enables the Fellow to experiment with production techniques and, often, to create work at a new scale. The Fellowship culminates with an exhibition at the Foundation’s Madlener House galleries in Chicago.

The Fellowship program extends the legacy of the Foundation’s first awards, made in 1957, and continues the tradition of support to individuals to explore innovative perspectives on spatial practices in design culture. These initial fellowships provided a diverse group of practitioners a platform to pursue innovative ideas in the field, and they included alumni such as experimental architect Frederick J. Kiesler, painter Wilfredo Lam, Pritzker Prize winning architects Balkrishna V. Doshi and Fumihiko Maki, designer Harry Bertoia, photographer Harry M. Callahan, and sculptor Eduardo Chillida, among others.

Artist David Hartt piloted the contemporary Fellow program with his new body of work in the forest, which premiered at the Graham in the fall of 2017. Later Fellows include Katherine Simóne Reynolds (2023), Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (2022–23), Anna Martine Whitehead (2020–21), Sergio Prego (2020), Tatiana Bilbao (2019–20), Nelly Agassi (2019), Martine Syms (2018–19), Torkwase Dyson (2018), and Brendan Fernandes (2018).