Maya Gurantz: The Plague Archives
Maya Gurantz’s interdisciplinary research-based practice incorporates dance, video, performance, text, and installation, which she deploys to examine constructions of race, gender, and class in relation to shared myths, public rituals, and private desires. At the de Saisset Museum, these ideas are manifested in The Plague Archives, a site-specific installation comprising multiple video projections; a dense collection of archival material on the social, cultural, and political histories of epidemics and outbreaks; and an interactive Tracing Board encouraging viewers to map images from the Plague Archives onto the surface. Ephemeral in nature, these tracings dissolve in the process of being drawn, underscoring our historical tendency for collective amnesia—as witnessed by the AIDS crisis, and more recently, our post COVID condition. Predominantly spanning the tenth through the twenty-first century, The Plague Archives presents a multi-layered transhistorical and intercultural discourse on the shifting attitudes and definitions of disease.
Defined by Gurantz as experimental “lecture-performances,” the videos weave connections between disparate narratives associated with plague histories. In Great Men and Sheep, French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, renowned for his breakthrough discoveries on vaccines and pasteurization, is examined in relation to his experiments on sheep. Incorporating visual and textual information spanning a century, the video links various elements in connection with Pasteur: a conspiracy theory conflating vaccine fears with sex; patriarchy and the fiction of male genius; shifting notions of appropriate animal-human relations; and the mythical roots of Jesus as the “good pastor.”
Alternatively, The Plague Roots of Hate maps the relationship between pandemics and racism across multiple locales. These include the bubonic plague of 1901, and the creation of the first South African townships, which later became a model for the apartheid state. Other aspects of the video examine early twentieth-century typhus outbreaks resulting in humiliating and unnecessary disinfections forced upon Mexican workers in El Paso, which triggered the Bath House Riots of 1919. These mass decontaminations served as inspiration for Nazi doctors in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
The third video Germs and Cinema, maps the time period in which Germ Theory of Disease emerged alongside the birth of film at the dawn of the 20th century. Early representations of germs and disease on film have produced our understanding of what germs look like. These images continue to influence how we visualize and comprehend disease transmission, the inside of our bodies, medical authority, as well as public health. By linking these narratives, Gurantz underscores how recent this history is and how fragile our understanding is of disease.
The materials referenced in Gurantz’s expansive video works form part of her on-going archive of ephemera exploring disease through multiple intersecting lenses—scientific, cultural, social, and political. Organized into thematic sections (including maps, pustules, the breast, public service announcements, historical amnesia, and charms and magic), each segment combines image and text from a plethora of sources including filmic, scientific, religious, and museological databases, which are connected through massive wall drawings made by the artist. Installed across the gallery in an associative manner, both the archive of images and its method of display encourage a non-linear reading of the subject of disease and its (mis)representation across different historical eras.
The Plague Archives is curated by Ciara Ennis, Director, de Saisset Museum. The exhibition originated at Pitzer College Art Galleries, Pitzer College (January 28 – March 25, 2023) and has been expanded at the de Saisset.