Artists Space is pleased to present the first major New York exhibition of New Red Order entitled Feel at Home Here. A public secret society of rotating membership, including core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, New Red Order (NRO) collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performance works that question and re-channel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. Orienting their work through the paradoxical conditions of Indigenous experience, NRO explores the contradictions and missteps that embody, in their own words, "the desire for indigeneity in the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called Americas."
Through museological display, modes of entertainment and corporate address, re-appropriation, and a multiplicity of swerving artistic strategies, they collectively advance understandings of how identity is conveyed and configured within contemporary art practices in order to create a site of acknowledgment that can promote solidarity and shift obstructions to Indigenous growth. For their upcoming exhibition at Artists Space, their most comprehensive to date, NRO will further explore the desire for indigeneity via a wide multiplicity of communicative and display strategies spanning advertising and marketing, branding, recruitment and belonging, and other means to "promote Indigenous futures."
In Give it Back, a street-facing window installation, New Red Order engages with moves toward 'Land Back', which involve calls to restore stolen Indigenous territories to Indigenous people. The project reveals instances where the repatriation of land, from settlers to Indigenous individuals or groups, has been promised or perhaps enacted. Give it Back unfolds in the form of a real-estate office, underscoring the thread of speculative future history that pervades NRO's work. Beyond the necessary disruption of settler colonialism with the need to take back land, Give it Back investigates, presents, and promotes another mode of return: through actualized gestures of land being "voluntarily" released to Indigenous people.
Retail experience and lifestyle aspiration further refract across multiple related sites including a complex environment populated by a new line of NRO beach and travel projects. Nearby, Never Settle is an ambitious, multi-part endeavor that includes a public recruitment campaign and a participatory installation that invites prospective recruits to undergo initiation. Playing with the notion of headhunting, a recruitment station seeks to enlist candidates to promote Indigenous futures. The ongoing video work Never Settle explicates NRO's primary tactics and principals, charting the path for recruits to examine their urge to merge, and become actual accomplices in reconfiguring colonial structures, which may demand crimes against reality. Paraphernalia from the still-extant Improved Order of the Red Men, an organization founded for white members to "play Indian," populates a timeline that reflects the emergence of NRO's expanding society.
In CULTURE CAPTURE: CRIMES AGAINST REALITY, New Red Order continues their program of "culture capture," invoking the ghosts of two haunted sites within the settler imaginary: the archive and the monument. Extending this examination into desires for monumentality and its dissolution, the video pursues fantasies of removal by morphing monuments into metastasizing flesh via ritualized photogrammetric capture and virtual manipulation, performing a sort of sympathetic magic. The piece literalizes the violence of settler-colonial propaganda and features high-profile monuments such as the equestrian Theodore Roosevelt statue that stands in front of American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and End of the Trail, both created by American sculptor James Earle Fraser.
This exhibition is the culmination of a multi-year collaboration between New Red Order and Artists Space that began with our 2017 group show Unholding.
About NRO
A public secret society of rotating membership, including core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, New Red Order (NRO) collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and re-channel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. Orienting their work through the paradoxical conditions of Indigenous experience, NRO explores the contradictions and missteps that embody, in their own words, “the desire for indigeneity in the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called Americas.”
Through modes of entertainment and corporate address, museological display, re-appropriation, and a multiplicity of swerving artistic strategies, they collectively advance understandings of how identity is conveyed and configured within contemporary art practices in order to create a site of acknowledgment that can promote solidarity and shift obstructions to Indigenous growth. For their exhibition at Artists Space, their most comprehensive to date, NRO will further explore the desire for indigeneity via a wide multiplicity of communicative and display strategies spanning advertising and marketing, branding, recruitment and belonging, and other means to “promote Indigenous futures.”
Zack and Adam Khalil are both Ojibway, from northern Michigan, and Jackson Polys, who is Tlingit, is from Alaska. NRO’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada (2021) and MOCAD Detroit, MI (2020), Obsidian Coast, Bradford-on-Avon, UK (2020), and the Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, Canada (2019). Group exhibitions include Speculations on the Infrared, EFA Project Space Program, NY (2021) and Unholding, Artists Space, NY (2017). Screenings and Performances include Indigenous Lens: Our Reality, Walker Art Center, MN (2020), Informants Get Paid!, Artists Space, NY (2020) Culture Capture: Terminal Addition, Light Work, NY (2019), Culture Capture: Terminal Addition, 57th New York Film Festival, NY (2019) The Savage Philosophy of Endless Acknowledgement, Whitney Museum, NY (2018), and THE INFORMANTS, Artists Space, NY (2017).
