Mike R. Curran
A Melody of Kinship
The first exhibition in the Midwest to feature Markele Cullins︎︎︎, whose practice combines traditional and new media to ask questions about human connection to nature, spirituality, and time. They see their work as an offering deeply influenced by Black intimacy, mysticism, love, and family history.
A Melody of Kinship featured a new body of work exploring what Carrie Mae Weems referred to in conversation with bell hooks as “undocumented emotional realms”—the capacity of Black photographic subjects to represent both intimate and universal truths. Of particular concern to Cullins is the value of platonic friendship and Queer forms of relationship not commonly represented in popular media.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Cullins embarked on a photo project where they invited pairs of best friends to interact with one another in spaces considered intimate to them, and write and read letters to one another. The project has taken on new relevance since the pandemic, raising questions about the impact of isolation while allowing viewers to imagine a future where we are drawn closer together. A number of the works from this project were on view at Mirror Lab︎︎︎, alongside a sound piece that wove together select recordings from these letter readings. The exhibition also contained a reading area, with titles on loan from the collection of Midway Contemporary Art︎︎︎.
A Melody of Kinship featured a new body of work exploring what Carrie Mae Weems referred to in conversation with bell hooks as “undocumented emotional realms”—the capacity of Black photographic subjects to represent both intimate and universal truths. Of particular concern to Cullins is the value of platonic friendship and Queer forms of relationship not commonly represented in popular media.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Cullins embarked on a photo project where they invited pairs of best friends to interact with one another in spaces considered intimate to them, and write and read letters to one another. The project has taken on new relevance since the pandemic, raising questions about the impact of isolation while allowing viewers to imagine a future where we are drawn closer together. A number of the works from this project were on view at Mirror Lab︎︎︎, alongside a sound piece that wove together select recordings from these letter readings. The exhibition also contained a reading area, with titles on loan from the collection of Midway Contemporary Art︎︎︎.
Installation images by Bade Turgut.
Tara Kaushik In Conversation with Markele Cullins
It became apparent as I entered the world after college, a 9 to 5 and employment-based visa tenuously in hand, that if I did not actively resist, my friendships were going to be slotted at the bottom of the hierarchy of my burgeoning adult life. Work would take precedence, because it demanded most of my day, removed me from everyone I cared about and sequestered me in an office cubicle with a very loud printer for company. Then came my partner, with whom I shared an apartment, and then there was the boring business of looking after myself, trying to get enough sleep and make dentist appointments and the rest.
In the ten years I’ve now lived in this country, my family oceans away, I have found care and play and sustenance in friendship. I have carved, from the confines of a dehumanizing immigration system, these small, shared sites of liberation.
And now they were being encroached upon, suddenly defined by scarcity—the scheduling of far-off plans to meet, cutting things short to get an early start the next day, filling each other in when we could on the details of our lives—and physical separation, as jobs and expiring visas carried people elsewhere.
I have balked at this widening distance for years now in a way that continues to feel childish and naive. I struggle with the experience of inquiring into the happenings of my friend’s lives and filling them in on mine. I want to not have to ask or tell, because we were there for all of it. I want to be involved.
I worry that I am too invested. Too needy. That I want too much.
In A Melody of Kinship, Markele Cullins attends carefully to kinship, offering tribute, recognizing the boundless potential contained within this most subversive of relations. Their work moves me in the way that all art about companionship does—because I am intimately familiar with what time spent in these expansive realms can do to a person. How it can transform and enliven, heal and harvest new possibilities.
I keep reaching for my friends. I want to be the person I am around them all the time—peaceful, settled, held, holding. Left on my own I am frayed, coming apart at the seams, all questions and concerns. With them, it’s just:
Here you are. Enough. Loved. Simple.
︎
Markele Cullins’ multidisciplinary practice combines traditional and new media to ask questions about human connection to nature, spirituality, and time. They are interested in the worlds that emerge when we inquire into our relationships, hold them up to the light, examine them from different angles.
They tell me how this collection of works originated in an earlier show focused on their family.
I interviewed my mother, my grandmother, and my father, and I asked them very simple questions that I've never asked them before. I asked them, what does a day in your life involve? What does it feel like to be you on a day-to-day basis? What does the idea of perseverance mean to you? What does the idea of movement mean to you? And it was interesting because I was definitely in the midst of a transformation of my understanding of their own individual identities, and of me as a person. It was really important for me because it laid the groundwork for the work that I'm making now.
Home was also the place where they learned to “do” kinship.
My first model of kinship was my parents. I feel like they were really good to their friends. Their friends felt like family to me.
Me, and all my siblings that grew up in the house, we all have had really long-term friends, people we've been friends with since elementary and middle school, because our mom taught us how to be really good friends and how to show up for people.
And also what not to tolerate from people, either.
I ask what kinship has meant to them, where it’s featured in the way they structure their life.
Growing up, I knew that kinship was really important to me, and as I got older, I've had more intense relationships that I'd say felt like family. It's hard to say “friendship” because I feel like it’s too severely static of a term. A lot of times these relationships feel like more than just that. To the point where I've made previous partners and family upset! They would be like, “Why are you putting this person over me?” And I'm just like, this relationship means a lot to me. I don't take these things lightly. Like as much as we are taught to do so, I don't take these things lightly.
I have this one friend in particular, my longest, what I think of as my life-shifting friend. I went through a lot of shit growing up, and I often felt like I wasn't worthy of companionship and love and care. And I think, as a person who was still loved well, but was also going through some shit internally, I tell this friend all the time—well I don't, but I should—you really helped me realize that I am worthy of care and support.
The photos at the center of A Melody of Kinship capture pairs of friends who were invited to write letters to each other that they then shared in conversation—select recordings of which are woven into a sound piece accompanying the images.
I’m curious what Markele was hoping to uncover and make legible with the letter writing practice. They engage here, I believe, with something artist Jenny Odell recognizes about her favorite public art pieces—the use of context as medium, where “the artist creates a structure that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it.”
I wanted to create space for folks to be able to ponder their relationship and explore it in real time, in an unconfined way. I try my best to be a fly on the wall in that exercise.
The thing that really jumped out to me was the synchronicity in the telling of these relationships. There were a lot of moments where they would talk about their favorite memory, and they would have the same memory. And so it would be like, “Ohh, I'm pondering on this time,” and the other person would hop in and be like, “Oh my god, I said the same thing! That was one of my favorite days we had together!”
There’s the two individual people and then the third thing, the relationship itself. I think this project creates a moment that caters to that third entity—the relationship itself.
We’ve been circling the limiting nature of the word “friendship” throughout this conversation, nowhere more evident than when we talk about the passing of artist and mixologist Maja Griffin, Markele’s beloved friend of fourteen years. This recent loss has shaped their use of the exhibition space, now a site for processing their grief.
My friend is an artist, so I'm thinking a lot about their practice. They had a really beautiful, rich practice, so I'm thinking a lot about their work and what it means to me, how it's influenced me. We’ve been making work and dreaming about art since we were teenagers.
I need to honor this thing that's happened. I wanted to keep doing the show [after their passing] because I really love this person and I need to put as much as I can into letting everyone know that I fucking love them and I care about them.
︎
I’m reminded here of a line in All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews’ luminous novel, that stayed with me—stuck somewhere in my throat:
“What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into a tempered love, bright and daily as steel.”
Tara Kaushik is a writer and printmaker. She grew up in different cities around India and currently lives in Minneapolis.
Markele would like to acknowledge the many individuals who participated in A Melody of Kinship. They include Nay and Yaya, Ama and Silan, Justin and Brandon, Thomas and Joe, and Skye and Channing.
In the ten years I’ve now lived in this country, my family oceans away, I have found care and play and sustenance in friendship. I have carved, from the confines of a dehumanizing immigration system, these small, shared sites of liberation.
And now they were being encroached upon, suddenly defined by scarcity—the scheduling of far-off plans to meet, cutting things short to get an early start the next day, filling each other in when we could on the details of our lives—and physical separation, as jobs and expiring visas carried people elsewhere.
I have balked at this widening distance for years now in a way that continues to feel childish and naive. I struggle with the experience of inquiring into the happenings of my friend’s lives and filling them in on mine. I want to not have to ask or tell, because we were there for all of it. I want to be involved.
I worry that I am too invested. Too needy. That I want too much.
In A Melody of Kinship, Markele Cullins attends carefully to kinship, offering tribute, recognizing the boundless potential contained within this most subversive of relations. Their work moves me in the way that all art about companionship does—because I am intimately familiar with what time spent in these expansive realms can do to a person. How it can transform and enliven, heal and harvest new possibilities.
I keep reaching for my friends. I want to be the person I am around them all the time—peaceful, settled, held, holding. Left on my own I am frayed, coming apart at the seams, all questions and concerns. With them, it’s just:
Here you are. Enough. Loved. Simple.
︎
Markele Cullins’ multidisciplinary practice combines traditional and new media to ask questions about human connection to nature, spirituality, and time. They are interested in the worlds that emerge when we inquire into our relationships, hold them up to the light, examine them from different angles.
They tell me how this collection of works originated in an earlier show focused on their family.
I interviewed my mother, my grandmother, and my father, and I asked them very simple questions that I've never asked them before. I asked them, what does a day in your life involve? What does it feel like to be you on a day-to-day basis? What does the idea of perseverance mean to you? What does the idea of movement mean to you? And it was interesting because I was definitely in the midst of a transformation of my understanding of their own individual identities, and of me as a person. It was really important for me because it laid the groundwork for the work that I'm making now.
Home was also the place where they learned to “do” kinship.
My first model of kinship was my parents. I feel like they were really good to their friends. Their friends felt like family to me.
Me, and all my siblings that grew up in the house, we all have had really long-term friends, people we've been friends with since elementary and middle school, because our mom taught us how to be really good friends and how to show up for people.
And also what not to tolerate from people, either.
I ask what kinship has meant to them, where it’s featured in the way they structure their life.
Growing up, I knew that kinship was really important to me, and as I got older, I've had more intense relationships that I'd say felt like family. It's hard to say “friendship” because I feel like it’s too severely static of a term. A lot of times these relationships feel like more than just that. To the point where I've made previous partners and family upset! They would be like, “Why are you putting this person over me?” And I'm just like, this relationship means a lot to me. I don't take these things lightly. Like as much as we are taught to do so, I don't take these things lightly.
I have this one friend in particular, my longest, what I think of as my life-shifting friend. I went through a lot of shit growing up, and I often felt like I wasn't worthy of companionship and love and care. And I think, as a person who was still loved well, but was also going through some shit internally, I tell this friend all the time—well I don't, but I should—you really helped me realize that I am worthy of care and support.
The photos at the center of A Melody of Kinship capture pairs of friends who were invited to write letters to each other that they then shared in conversation—select recordings of which are woven into a sound piece accompanying the images.
I’m curious what Markele was hoping to uncover and make legible with the letter writing practice. They engage here, I believe, with something artist Jenny Odell recognizes about her favorite public art pieces—the use of context as medium, where “the artist creates a structure that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit, familiarity, and distraction that constantly threaten to close it.”
I wanted to create space for folks to be able to ponder their relationship and explore it in real time, in an unconfined way. I try my best to be a fly on the wall in that exercise.
The thing that really jumped out to me was the synchronicity in the telling of these relationships. There were a lot of moments where they would talk about their favorite memory, and they would have the same memory. And so it would be like, “Ohh, I'm pondering on this time,” and the other person would hop in and be like, “Oh my god, I said the same thing! That was one of my favorite days we had together!”
There’s the two individual people and then the third thing, the relationship itself. I think this project creates a moment that caters to that third entity—the relationship itself.
We’ve been circling the limiting nature of the word “friendship” throughout this conversation, nowhere more evident than when we talk about the passing of artist and mixologist Maja Griffin, Markele’s beloved friend of fourteen years. This recent loss has shaped their use of the exhibition space, now a site for processing their grief.
My friend is an artist, so I'm thinking a lot about their practice. They had a really beautiful, rich practice, so I'm thinking a lot about their work and what it means to me, how it's influenced me. We’ve been making work and dreaming about art since we were teenagers.
I need to honor this thing that's happened. I wanted to keep doing the show [after their passing] because I really love this person and I need to put as much as I can into letting everyone know that I fucking love them and I care about them.
︎
I’m reminded here of a line in All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews’ luminous novel, that stayed with me—stuck somewhere in my throat:
“What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into a tempered love, bright and daily as steel.”
Tara Kaushik is a writer and printmaker. She grew up in different cities around India and currently lives in Minneapolis.
Markele would like to acknowledge the many individuals who participated in A Melody of Kinship. They include Nay and Yaya, Ama and Silan, Justin and Brandon, Thomas and Joe, and Skye and Channing.