Stephanie Misa on Connecting Dots and Minding the Gaps

Stephanie Misa – our NYC artist-in-residence for the blazing hot summer months of July and August – is a visual artist, researcher, and writer. Currently living in Vienna with her family, she has completed degrees at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts. Stephanie is a doctoral candidate at the University of Arts Helsinki Doctoral Program, and teaches at the Artistic Strategies department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Stephanie’s residency was organized in collaboration with Residency Unlimited.

Stephanie works with a variety of mediums – ranging from installations, sculptures, and videos to printmaking and writing. Her interests lie in topics like hybridity and embodiment, and her current artistic research looks at the persistence of languages relegated to their oral form, alongside assorted forms of linguistic evolution, cannibalism, and appropriation.

To document her time in residency, the institute’s Helmi Korhonen sat down with Stephanie for a virtual discussion about her time in the city that never sleeps.

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“You’ve lived in New York in the past – how does it feel to be back?” Helmi begins.

I lived in New York in the early 2000’s. The America I knew then, and what it is here now are completely different animals. The New York I knew is definitely gone.

“Any favorite spots or traditions you’ve tried to revisit, despite the city’s development?”

I sometimes find myself looking for old haunts, only to find them replaced by cooler, hipper things – like a little hole in the wall called Lahore on Crosby and Houston which served the best (and cheapest) warm chai and samosas. You could spot it from the long line of taxis parked right outside the place. So a routine would be to go to Housing Works (next door), scout for second-hand books and then eat at Lahore. I think they’ve completely gutted where it used to be and it is now an empty store front. Housing Works is thankfully still there! Another favorite spot that seems to have survived both the pandemic and New York gentrification in general is Cafe Habana on Elizabeth and Prince St. It’s been there since I’ve lived here, and still makes elotes (mexican grilled corn) like I remember.

”Speaking of routines, what has a typical day in residency looked like for you?”

I’ve tried really really hard to have a typical day in New York City, but the city keeps resisting. I find myself always pleasantly off-course with the way I thought my day would go. The typical ‘plan’ would be to spend the mornings in response mode (emails, zoom calls, follow-ups), the afternoons at the studio in the Elizabeth Arts Foundation, and having the evenings open for events (openings, dinners, shows) etc. But so far– it has been a lot of me running around in the city from one point to the next, exploring, spontaneous meetings and getting lost. It’s been fantastic.

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All this running around Manhattan definitely paid off for Stephanie, as she was able to squeeze in a collaborative exhibition with feminist zine-making duo Multiple Spirits (Mai Endo and Mika Maruyama) towards the end of her residency. The collaboration, titled ‘The Snake & The Archive’, took over the KODA house on Governors Island in late August, and was on view until early September – after which it synchronized its departure from the North American continent along with Stephanie to Europe. Currently, it is being exhibited at the Pengerkatu 7 - Työhuone in Helsinki’s Kallio neighborhood.

Stephanie describes the beginning phases of the collaboration: “We set out to investigate a couple of questions with regards to archiving and collaboration as a feminist practice, mainly: how does one connect fragmented archival histories and memories to explore their potential? And, how does one deal with gaps and archival silences? They are very big questions and we’ve only just started. We’re looking at the Franklin Furnace archive & Tari Ito’s work, as a starting point (and for inspiration) and going from there.”

In the end, The Snake & The Archive came to fruition as an installation piece which “approached and encountered the archive — whether as subject, source or concept, and the intersections between them — through embodied and situated knowledge and culturally distinct perspectives.” (Exhibition text, 2022.) Stephanie also gave an artist talk about her work surrounding the project at the FCINY office towards the end of her residency.

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Stephanie’s commitment to working with intersectional social issues and against various forms of oppression is not only apparent in what she was able to conjure up together with Multiple Spirits in New York, but also in much of her previous work. Her recent project MAGA meets Marie, which she describes as “a reaction to the growing identitarian movements all across the globe”, weaved together complex notions of race, politics, and fanaticism (especially in the US) through a healthy amount of wit and humor.

”Has being back in the US affected how you view your past project – one that specifically references the American political landscape?”

The work MAGA meets Marie was a reaction to the growing identitarian movements all across the globe.  I was mostly fascinated with the “Trumpist” version of it – not only because I was personally affected (as some of my family lives in the US), but I was amazed by how many people I knew (of immigrant backgrounds) were Pro-Trump. The work was of course informed by my time in the US too, but mostly by the people I knew who still lived there.

It was an opinion column in the Washington Post, in the aftermath of Capitol riots that led me to the term “Multiracial Whiteness”. The author, Cristina Beltran, in her column insinuates that race, politics and fanaticism are not longer exclusively “white” projects– that “whiteness” is no longer a racialized positionality, but one defined mostly by its privilege, access, and exclusion. Meaning, you can be a person-of-color and still have values that align with “whiteness”. Her column led me to think about how the mechanisms behind every revolution – freedom against tyranny and oppression – are not new (look at the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille) but it has morphed. The same colonial system has produced different effects of the “disenfranchised”. The Capitol rioters took on the role of “revolutionaries”, but in this case were fighting to reinstate their “King” and to retain power, a power that gave their right-wing movements legitimacy. In the end what happened was frightening cosplay.

MAGA meets Marie is a séance of two historical events. It is a work made to contrast revolutions, not only in terms of aesthetics, but also their “premise”, with a huge dose of cheek and humor that one needs to work with such visceral themes. 

“Speaking of immigration – you’re also a doctoral candidate at the University of Arts Helsinki Doctoral Program. What compelled you towards a doctorate education in the arts, specifically in Finland?”

The doctoral programme at KUVA came at a point in my practice where I knew I wanted to undertake a much larger project that required time and space for research. There aren't many avenues for bigger and more in-depth proposals in visual arts and what I found was the best solution to also help myself navigate through the amount of work and research involved was to align myself with an institution that could support this type of thinking and practice.

“How does studying at KUVA differ from your experience elsewhere?”

I was very lucky to get into the Doctoral Programme at KUVA. I had looked at other schools but I wanted one that was specifically rooted in Fine Arts but had an interdisciplinary alignment. With the Uniarts Doctoral Programme, a lot of the seminars are held with the Theater Academy Doctoral Students, and with Sibelius Doctoral Students too, and it is this overlap of ‘competencies’ and differences in perspectives that I find really interesting.

“Finally, what are some of the most exciting projects you are working on currently, and what do you have in store for the future?”

Currently, I'm working on a Tuesday Session at the Secession Vienna with Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski. It’s an evening hosted by new members of the Association, and Belinda and I are hosting the last one for the summer. We're screening video works and ending the night with infamous DJ-duo Bicha Boo (Pedra Costa & Mzamo Nondlwana). It should be a fun night of music visuals and hopefully a lot of dancing .

And for next year, I'll be away again for a research residency with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in connection with my doctoral work, and have been invited to do a solo show at the Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt, Austria in October 2023.

It's a lot of new exciting things brewing, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it all pushes through.

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Find out more about Stephanie, her work, and her future endeavors on her website, instagram, and on the FCINY socials.