This is the audio guide for the exhibition "Hope is a discipline" (July 27 - September 29, 2024) at The Arts Center on Governors Island.

"Hope is a discipline" features an ensemble of artists foregrounding memory and political inheritance, who work with collectively held archives—physical and intangible—from documentary record to oral history, ancestral memory to intergenerational learning. The exhibition inhabits the words of Mariame Kaba, who proposes that hope is something we do together, using the resources we already have. Transmitted through textile, installation, video, theater props, artist books and ephemera, this project relays the question: how do we find, remember, and share in the struggles of ancestors?

Artists: Adama Delphine Fawundu, Kyuri Jeon, Suneil Sanzgiri, Bread and Puppet Theater, & Maggie Wong

Curators: Meghana Karnik, Eugene Hannah Park, Marina Christodoulidou, & Billy Fowo

Special Thanks: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York) & De Appel (Amsterdam)

Audio Guide: Hope is a discipline

Marina Christodoulidou and Meghana Karnik discuss Bread and Puppet's performance ephemera from "The Hope Principle Show: Citizen's Shame and Hope in a time of Genocide" (2024).

Bread and Puppet Theater is an internationally celebrated company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art filled with music, dance and slapstick. Believing that theater is a basic necessity like bread, the company frequently brings its work to the streets for those who may not otherwise go to the theater. Its shows are political and spectacular, with puppets often on stilts, wearing huge masks with expressive faces, singing, dancing and playing music. Bread and Puppet is constantly active, performing at its farm in Glover, VT, and in local churches, schools and parades. It regularly tours Europe, Canada, and the United States and has recently visited El Salvador, Haiti, Russia, and Korea. Founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side, the theater has been based in the North East Kingdom of Vermont since the early 1970s and is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the United States.

Bread and Puppet Theater | Marina Christodoulidou & Meghana Karnik

Billy Fowo and Meghana Karnik discuss Adama Delphine Fawundu’s textile installation, "When the Spirits Dance, an ode to the Africans that built this place" (2024).

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a photographer and visual artist of Mende, Krim, Bamileke and Bubi descent. Her distinct visual language centered around themes of indigenization, and ancestral memory, enriches and expands the visual art canon. Fawundu co-published the critically acclaimed book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Columbia University. (https://www.delphinefawundu.com)

Adama Delphine Fawundu | Billy Fowo & Meghana Karnik

Eugene Hannah Park and Meghana Karnik discuss Kyuri Jeon's experimental documentary, "The Flesh Witness" (2021), and corresponding installation, "Island to Island (Geojedo ↔ Governors Island)" (2024).

Kyuri Jeon is a South Korean artist and filmmaker based in New York. Jeon works with video, essay, drawing, and installation to explore time, vision, and its implications for the future. Through the lens of intersectionality, she questions ongoing transnational discussions about identity, feminism, decolonization, and cultural translation. Jeon’s work has been featured internationally at MassArt Art Museum, Boston; Mimosa House, London; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Glasgow; Festival Film Dokumenter, Yogyakarta; Women Make Waves, Taipei; and DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Seoul. She is a recipient of a Contemporary Visual Art Award at AHL-T&W Foundation and an award winner at the Asian Shorts Competition at Seoul International Women’s Film Festival. Jeon holds BFA from Korea National University of Arts and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and Seoul National University. (https://kyurijeon.com)

Kyuri Jeon | Eugene Hannah Park & Meghana Karnik

Meghana Karnik and Marina Christodoulidou discuss Suneil Sanzgiri's trilogy of films, titled "Barobar Jagtana" (2019-2021).

Suneil Sanzgiri is an Indian American artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. Sanzgiri’s films offer sonic and visual journeys through family history, local mythology, and colonial legacies of extraction in Goa, India—where his family originates. His first institutional solo exhibition "Here the Earth Grows Gold" opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. His films have circulate widely at film festivals and art institutions across the world including International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doclisboa, Viennale, BlackStar Film Festival, Open City Docs, REDCAT, Menil Collection, Block Museum, MASS MoCA, moCa Cleveland, Le Cinéma Club, Criterion Collection, and many more.(https://www.suneilsanzgiri.com)

Suneil Sanzgiri | Meghana Karnik & Marina Christodoulidou

Meghana Karnik and Eugene Hannah Park discuss Maggie Wong's art in Hope is a discipline, titled "The Red what reading did re-adding" (2024).

Maggie Wong is a visual artist and educator who uses research and multidisciplinary art practice to explore political inheritance, memory, and play. Their work builds meaning like a stack of toy blocks, assembling and falling into a relational history rather than fixed narratives in media that include printmaking, sculpture, and installation. This approach acknowledges the impossibility of articulating an entire cultural or political inheritance, embracing Angela Davis's idea that "legacies of past struggles are not static."She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Her work has been shown at the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Comfort Station, Annas Projects, take care (LA), Temple Contemporary, YBCA, and 99cent Plus, and has been written about in ArtForum and Sixty Inches from Center. Her writing has been published by Yale University Press, Viral Ecologies, The Seen, and the Journal of Art Practice. (https://www.maggiewong.info)

Maggie Wong | Meghana Karnik & Eugene Hannah Park

Meghana Karnik introduces the exhibition, Hope is a discipline, co-curated with Eugene Hannah Park, Marina Christodoulidou, and Billy Fowo.

Meghana Karnik explores paradoxes between art and social change, spirituality and economy, lived experience and institutional process. Her research plays out across modalities as a curator, arts administrator, artist, and writer. She is based between New York City and Brussels. (www.storefrontpsychic.com)


Eugene Hannah Park explores the possibility of learning by collective minds. She curates and produces tools and platforms as an ingredient to share questions and translate worlds. She is currently based between Seoul, New York, and Europe.


Marina Christodoulidou is a researcher and curator. Traversing curatorial formats, her work emerges from socially engaged practice and self-organized initiatives, often taking the form of discursive exhibitions, writing, film and architecture. She is currently based between Amsterdam and Limassol.

Billy Fowo is a curator and writer. With points of interest in various fields and disciplines such as the sonic, linguistics and literature, Fowo questions what is considered to be knowledge and endeavours to rethink the spaces in which it is disseminated. He is currently based between Berlin and Yaoundé.

Intro to Hope is a discipline | Meghana Karnik

A traveling curatorial project asking: Can friendship create structural change? How do we find, remember, and share in the struggles of ancestors? 


2023 — Amsterdam
2024 — New York