The Great Game of Power

Photography by Jacob Holler/Zhi Wei Hiu

SALMA SARRIEDINE welcomes you to The Great Game of Power, a two-person show featuring artists: Miguel Colón and Savannah Knoop.

There are interstices in the world, in the humdrum of ordinary life, places where fingers of possibility multiply and flex, reach out and inhabit new architecture. Strings are plucked, bodies in space become synoptic nerves sending signals that echo out into the world. The show The Great Game of Power is one such a place, in which two artists Miguel Colón and Savannah Knoop interlace observation and action amid spatial structures of power.

In Augusto Boal’s radical theatre exercise The Great Game of Power, chairs and a bottle of water are arranged and rearranged to explore hierarchies of power and perception. THIS IS A GAME. Boal believeda game is a call to action, in which “all must act, all must be protagonists in the necessary transformations of society.” Here is a way to oscillate between high stakes while being low-risk. In play, finite bodies exist,search for mediated answers or solace, exercise a deep subjectivity. There is still a place for the heartfelt and for the hand-made.

A portrait is a PERSON. Colón’s paintings of figures and self-portraits seek incarnation, to prove their flesh, their very existence, despite the labyrinthine slate grey walls of an anonymous institution within the surveillance state. Eerie lavenders and pinks seep from the corners. The otherworldly glow of the cell phone has been gritted with sand. In these cages, sinew is compressed and taut, mid-torque. The figure is burdened like Atlas but the labour is that of a Sibyl, speaking truths and prophecies. We must find apath out of these places. A CHAIR AWAITS.

A sculpture is a BODY. Created out of newspapers reconstituted into “threads,” Knoop’s durational process TOUCHES EVERYTHING: the news of the world as the days pass, one after another. The deluge of news and facts of the WORLD are handled piecemeal. Trails of text and logic are pulped into neural nets then twisted into furniture-forms. History is present: the bedrock of thingness of Knoop’s work grabs you in a choke hold, familiar yet alarming. But it isn’t just human history that Knoop grapples with. Glide up to the massive wooden tails in the front room, where an imprint of a human ass invites you to sit atop a bulbous and mottled hybrid form. A CHAIR AWAITS.

A POEM by Ikkyu in the 13th century:

We live in amazing cages

Cages of light

Animals animals without end.

Both Colón and Knoop make the living their subjects. We EXIST in our messy and tattered glory. There are still places where safety nets will catch you, where you can struggle and practice emancipatory thrashing. CLASP and RELEASE. The works in THE GREAT GAME OF POWER induce meditation, a scramble and then a fingering to find the holes in the net, to find PLACES OF ESCAPE. THE LIVING are ritual holders. Open the locked DOOR. Change the CHAIR of power. See what happens.

- Naropa Sabine

March 2nd - April 12th, 2025

Curated by Aviva Silverman