Backyard Ghost

"A person presents himself at the departure gate of an airport, or else at a border, at a hotel desk, at the counter for a car rental agency… He shows his passport and the flight attendant, the employee, the receptionist, the manager or the customs officer looks at this document, then looks at the body standing in front of him, and declares, “This is not you!” A systematic fault line…” Paul B Preciado, Identity in Transit.

 

Here we meet. Liz Ahn gives us a world to enter, as foreign as it is familiar. What happens to creatures whose mere embodied existence tickles the norm. It’s not the story of confrontation, It is the moment before, the long pause that comes after. It’s the tale of survival that only these creatures know. A roach, a rat, a fly, an ancestor turning their back to us, fading in the memory of a YMCA. It’s their racialized body, their non-binary existence. We have been here before. Has there ever been another place? 

 

“It’s a joke for you, a memory for us” It’s what we used to yell at each other, imagining that one day we will talk to a people, a generation, a place that hasn’t lived through our trauma. It was hilarious because it was bitter. It was true cause it was none-sensical. The punch line of a joke we all had forgotten.

 

We keep searching, Liz Ahn is a scavenger full of curiosity, searching for nothing. We have all the time in the world. Here painterly concerns meet sculptural curiosity; written words comingle with drawing, story lines fall apart, we live in fragments and echoes, it’s a memory, it’s just a joke.  

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- Yasi Alipour

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