Gather Your Bodies: Exploring Memory, Ancestry, and Isolation in a Digital Era

Gather your bodies is a collaboration between digital media artists Ana Shuleva and Mingze Gao, and filmmaker Kai Hartman. The exhibit immerses viewers in a technological cornucopia of memory, technological alienation, influencer culture, and the delicate bond between nature and humanity as it explores Blackness in America. 

This multimedia installation is a reflection on what we inherit and how it shapes our understanding of connection in an increasingly fragmented world. What are the limits we go to feel seen, how does technology disconnect us from our bodies, and what can we do to reclaim our bodies and our histories? 

Inspired by Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory”, the film is divided into three distinct chapters: the void, rememory, and communion. Each section tells a distinct story, and implores the viewer to reconcile their own feelings of disconnection and overwhelm at the hands of technology. 

At its heart lies the "Communion Room," a pseudo-sanctuary that houses a single, unplugged vintage television. Viewers are free to wander into the space, which is cloaked with semi-sheer fabric. Here, they can momentarily retreat from the chaos of the images flooding the screens, if only to view it through a veneer. 

Crafted using a combination of analog and digital media, Gather Your Bodies asks us to confront our complicated relationship with technology, the organic world, and Blackness. 

Through this piece, viewers are invited to reflect: What did I just bear witness to? Does technology enact violence or connect us? What have we liberated ourselves from, and what still needs liberating?