Untitled (Melancholy as Medium)

Conceived, written, and performed by Jill Casid and realized by Jack Kellogg

2020-2021, Color video with sound, RT 9:38

What to do with the ways we’re being undone? Casid's short film, Untitled (Melancholy as Medium) calls up an activist wake that refuses to move on. Unfolding a ritual of mediumship, the film conduces our outraged grief as catalytic for the uprising and care work of living with more than one virus, amidst more than one pandemic, carrying our as yet unaddressed losses into the battles we’re still waging in the name of supports for the thriving of Black, Brown, Indigenous, crip, queer and trans vitalities. Centered on a set of fragile Polaroids, the film conjures with the material fragility of analogue photography to commune with the incalculable but still powerful presence of unredressed loss. In reversing the primacy of showing over telling, the film incorporates disability access as aesthetic gain by making closed captioning integral and image description its primary vehicle.

Film debuted in Chapter V, Melancholy as Medium, conceived by Jill Casid for Indisposable: Structures of Support after the Americans with Disabilities Act, Ford Foundation Gallery, curated by Jessica A. Cooley and Ann M. Fox, NYC, June 2021. Featuring Jill Casid, Pamela Sneed, Abdul Aliy Muhammad and Pato Hebert from the What Would an HIV Doula Do collective, fierce pussy (with core founding members Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Zoe Leonard and Carrie Yamaoka), Pamela Sneed, and Heather Lynn Johnson.

Watch the event here.

Editors’ Pick of the Week (June 7, 2021).

Exhibited in artists + allies iv, group exhibition curated by Mitra Korasheh, Signs and Symbols Gallery, NYC, August 1-September 25, 2021.

Exhibited in Documenta 15, Kassel, Germany, as part of Terracotta Friendship (July 27-Sept. 25, 2022), a collaboration between Jatiwangi Art Factory’s Terracotta Embassy and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea. Virtual exhibition space designed by Kang Seung Lee.

Exhibited in Visualizing the Virus, a digital arts and humanities project led by Sria Chatterjee, head of research for the Paul Mellon Centre, London and supported by a DARIAH-EU grant and additional support from the Institute of Experimental Design and Media, FHNW and Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities.

Exhibited in Insurgent Flows, curated by Anita Hofer and Eva Ursprung, Kultur in Graz (KiG) in collaboration with steirischerherbst ’23, Graz, Austria, September 20-October 15, 2023.