Sasha Stiles is an artist who has featured on these pages a number of times, an artist who has figured in our own online exhibitions, an artist who has regularly challenged us with her London shows, particularly that show at Annka Kultys Gallery as well as that Central London Outernet takeover back in late Spring 2024 (by far the best thing to happen at Outernet thus far).
Right now Sasha Stiles is doing something that, well is it unexpected? Or is it just what we expect? This time Sasha Stiles is closer to home in New York at Sapar Contemporary who say;
“Our current exhibit, This Place Was Home Before I Lived Here: Poems After Jangar features artist Sasha Stiles who is of Kalmyk-Mongolian descent. Stiles brings to life the history of migration and displacement the Kalmyk people have faced throughout the centuries, and still to this day. She combines scrolls, traditional imagery, and Kalmyk-Mongolian culture with emerging technologies. Stiles is not only a visual artist, but a poet too, combining her poetry with her tangible work to bridge emotion and algorithm, intuition and logic, flesh and code. Stiles traces a through-line from ancient traditions of orality and inscription to the technocultural landscape of the twenty-first century. Stiles’ work offers new ways to think, feel, and make meaning in a rapidly changing, technological world…”
And as the gallery said, Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American artist and poet of Oirat-Mongol descent which if you didn’t know that and you do know her work, does explain rather a lot as well as adding even more to the intrigue. In this exhibition she returns to Jangar, the centuries-old Kalmyk – Mongolian epic that has survived migration, persecution and diaspora and asks how language, memory and culture are carried forward, or fall silent. Which is of course is what is so fascinating about the work and the challenge of Sasha Styles, about where she is taking her work, where’s she’s taking us with her work, her words, her scripts, her use of that green, of colour, the shapes, the debates about where art is, what art is, where her art is, her codes…
“Working across voice, script, print, code, generative systems, cyanotypes, 3D-printed forms and encoded beadwork, she treats poetry as a living technology of inheritance: portable, adaptive and embodied.In her essay for the show, Cecilia Alemani situates Stiles’ practice in the lineage of mid-20th-century Concrete and Visual poetry and later Kinetic and Programmed Art. Stiles, she writes, “is demonstrating that the digital was a craft from the very start, that the bit and the code were born in the hand and never truly left it. The digital returns to the digit [finger], and what she fashions from it is a form of poetic intelligence, a meaning that never sheds its body, sustained by the belief that whatever we take the trouble to touch is, in the end, what we manage to keep”
This Place Was Home Before I Lived Here: Poems After Jangar is happening at the New York’s Sapar Contemporary Gallery right now and well, what are we telling you about something happening in New York from over here in our East London basement for? Well we are always interested in Sasha Stiles (and her styles) and as we have said a number of times in recent months, we do have as many readers in North America as we do in the UK these days. We’re not going to start covering art shows in other places regularly, we are (East) London based, overseas to us is a day out in Peckham….
The Sasha Stiles show in New York at Sapar Contemporary has now been extended until November 6th, you can find all the details via the Gallery website, you can go to the online viewing room via the gallery website where you can explore the expected and maybe more importantly you can explore the rather unexpected from Sasha Stiles….
Gallery website / Gallery Linktree / Sasha Stiles website / Sasha Stiles on instagram
Previously on these pages…
